Lessons Learned from the CDC Learning Connection Website Relaunch Campaign

Background:  For decades, health professionals in both public health and health care have looked to CDC for quality, up-to-date public health education and training. The launch of the CDC Learning Connection in 2010 was a first step toward ensuring health professionals had access to these types of professional development opportunities. During this time, the CDC Learning Connection has evolved to become more than a website, keeping health professionals worldwide informed of training opportunities developed by CDC, CDC partners, and other federal agencies through social media and e-newsletters.

Program background:  On April 1, 2016, in conjunction with National Public Health Week, the CDC Learning Connection will have launched a newly designed website with specific improvements, including responsive design and modernized layout. Although the CDC Learning Connection already has a substantial number of followers, we are planning to leverage this relaunch to increase website traffic and e-newsletter subscribers. To support this goal, we are developing and implementing a comprehensive promotional campaign that includes an array of marketing tactics.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  To evaluate success of the CDC Learning Connection website relaunch campaign, we will collect primarily quantitative data, including site visits by campaign key, e-newsletter subscriptions, social media metrics, and responses received from the CDC website survey tool. To estimate whether the campaign was successful, we will determine if a substantial increase in website traffic and e-mail subscriptions was reported, compared with what is typically observed. Additionally, we will compare effectiveness of each campaign tactic by calculating proportion of click-throughs to the CDC Learning Connection website with the total number of views of each campaign piece (e.g., promotional feature article, e-mail newsletter, different social media channels, and print materials).

Conclusions:  We anticipate that the CDC Learning Connection website relaunch campaign will generate increased traffic to the website and e-newsletter subscriptions overall. The number of site visits generated by each communications campaign element will demonstrate the relative effectiveness and contribution of each to the campaign results; therefore, we can improve targeting future promotional efforts. We will also present lessons learned concerning planning, managing, and evaluating a national communication campaign targeted toward a diverse audience of public health and health professionals.

Implications for research and/or practice:  The findings and lessons learned from the CDC Learning Connection website relaunch campaign will have implications for health communication professionals targeting communications for a public health and health professional audience. This includes implications for evaluating communication campaigns to select the best communications strategies to engage and promote behavior change among this group.