Seramount is the result of a consolidation of three businesses: Diversity Best Practices, Culture@Work, and the events and research divisions of Working Mother Media. Since they also focus on research and consulting, they were looking for an improved membership experience with their gated content and membership portal. They also needed an improved search functionality and tagging system as well as improved ways to track site metrics. 

Our Approach

Seramount engaged Last Call Media to deliver a more focused and compelling narrative to tie the products, tools, and services from those three disparate lines of business together into an end-to-end solution for purpose-driven leaders and teams at Fortune 1000 organizations. 

Our work began with an assessment of the three lines of business through interviews with Seramount leadership and employees who support the delivery of Seramount’s products and services. We then completed a series of structured customer interviews to learn more about how Seramount meets the needs of its customers. We then used that data to build a product roadmap to gain alignment on the customer opportunity and product vision with Seramount leadership. 

We approached building the new Seramount iteratively. Once we had a working prototype, we met with customers again to show them work in progress, to test our vision and to refine it based on their feedback. 

Challenges

Some of the challenges addressed involved building an easy-to-use online portal for Seramount customers and employees to access and update gated content only available with a Seramount membership. We solved one of the major customer challenges by eliminating the need to use passwords to access gated content. On the new Seramount, customers enter their work email and if their employer is a customer, they get an email inviting them to login to Seramount. By requiring employees to use their own accounts, Seramount now has additional data to demonstrate the value of their membership to existing customers. 

We provided an easy-to-use interface to minimize the barrier of entry for users. Maximized by a Mobile First approach, we condensed how much information was presented to allow users to quickly access the main features of the program, which included entering exercise activity. While also accessible through desktop and laptop computers, the primary use case for the app was on the go, from a mobile device, for a user to track their progress. LCM went further, implementing QR Code functionality, allowing CDH to post flyers notifying staff of special activities. Scanning the QR Codes on those notices would transition the user’s experience to the relevant area of the app.

Knowing that a simple page with paragraphs wouldn’t suffice, we built a map that allows the Rainforest Alliance to display data from a specific region. The user can then zoom in on those regions or look at specific data points to learn more. The map takes a large spreadsheet of geodata, created based on information from the Rainforest Alliance’s CRM, and creates an interactive map powered by CartoDB that allows users to see RA-certified organizations, and what they do.

We wanted to ensure the data was exciting to work with. Far too often, data is presented as merely tables and numbers. From the start we wanted to tell a story about the data, so together with Verité, LCM crafted a question-and-answer-based approach to displaying the data with creative charting and mapping elements built to place emphasis on the results of the data.

Census data is extremely important for the Higher Ed community, but the information is only as good as it is accessible. Working closely with the Swarthmore staff, LCM pinpointed what information was the most critical and sought after by administrators and researchers viewing the data. Graphs were designed to optimally visualize survey question responses and search functionality created to easily explore by survey question, institution type and related filters.

We joined the project to get it across the finish line. We refined the existing agile approach for a better-organized project backlog and a more deliberate iteration strategy.

Our solution included working with in-house developers to migrate and upgrade numerous features and systems to work with the most current major Drupal version. Tailored reporting capabilities were developed, giving real-time statistical and sales figures for their support team and company executives.

In the discovery phase, we reviewed the marketplace to find the most appropriate CDN for the State’s use case, balancing security, performance, and cost considerations. Ultimately, Cloudflare was selected as the best fit because of its extensive firewall and DDOS protections, and granular cache control using “Cache Tags,” which have the potential to boost performance for the constituents and reduce the risk of site instability.  

The first, and perhaps most critical concern we addressed in the course of this project was that the CDN needed to be resilient, serving pages even if the site itself was not functioning properly. For example, the development team does code releases periodically that take the backend of the site completely offline, but constituents still need to be able to access content during this time. To meet this requirement, we adjusted the site’s caching headers to include directives to serve cached responses in the event of an error response received from the origin.  As a result, constituents are able to access the majority of Mass.gov, even if a catastrophic event takes the web servers completely offline.

As a government website, Mass.gov is always at risk of attack from malicious actors. To mitigate this risk, Last Call Media undertook extensive configuration and testing of Cloudflare’s various security features, including the Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDOS protections, and custom firewall rules. We had a few hiccups along the way with configuring the security features (at one point, content authors were receiving CAPTCHA verifications when submitting their changes), but were ultimately able to work through these issues to dial in the right balance of security and ease-of-use.

Next, we implemented Cloudflare’s brand new “Workers” feature, which gives granular control over CDN functionality using a javascript “service worker.” The Worker we wrote for this project handles more than 6 million requests a day, and gives the Commonwealth the ability to test and deploy CDN level changes to development, staging, and production environments independently, making it much faster and safer to verify and release changes. The worker implementation benefits the Commonwealth giving them flexibility for the future, while also reducing cost over the previous CDN.

These workers were also integral to the success of this migration beyond what we had initially imagined. During the testing and release phases of the project, they gave us a mechanism for fixing changes that was reviewable and testable. Having a well-defined review and deployment process improved the team’s visibility into what changes were being made, and let us avoid silly mistakes. Overall, we felt the development team’s velocity was greatly improved by using this workflow.

A key component of the web presence for Columbia Medical School is their faculty profiles. In keeping with their tripartite mission of teaching, research, and clinical work, the University displays two distinctly different types of profiles. Department web site profiles focus on the individual’s scholarly work and administrative positions. The ColumbiaDoctors website displays information about the physician’s clinical work including specialties, practice locations, and insurance. It is also just as important for new medical professionals to store and access their profile information in one place as it is for the departments and practices they are a part of. 

Maintaining a complex system with many data feeds and manual verification of information was becoming a burden for the University’s support staff, and the complexity of the process to create or update a profile was vexing to faculty and their support staff. Columbia University Medical Center looked to LCM to help them find a new solution. There was a preference for moving to an existing solution available in the marketplace rather than building a new custom solution. 

We embarked on an intensive information gathering phase, to better understand the existing technology, data inputs and outputs, and nature of the support queue. Through preparing user stories, we worked with the University to identify stakeholders groups, and we conducted detailed interviews with individuals in each group to understand their pain points within the existing system.

Finally, we conducted extensive research to identify potential solutions. We identified a number of peer institutions and investigated the faculty and physician profiles, and - to the extent possible - the technologies and workflows employed to create them. We contacted a number of vendors to gather more detailed information and winnowed the list of candidates to those that presented the best possible fit. We summarized our findings recommendations in our final meeting with the team.

By working closely with the team and developing a strong rapport with them, as well as the stakeholders, we were able to gain a clear understanding of their goals and deliver actionable recommendations