Clean Slate: Transforming CDC.gov

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website is the primary gateway through which the agency’s many Centers, Institutes, and Offices (CIOs) get information to the public. The Office of Communication’s effort to improve website user experience and performance resulted in a 21-month effort to optimize content within CDC.gov, called the Clean Slate Initiative. We helped CIOs focus on the pages that matter most to site users and CDC audiences.

Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the challenge of accessing timely and relevant health information on CDC.gov. CDC had to swiftly enhance tens of thousands of web pages covering various topics, yet the existing staff faced constraints in terms of time, expertise, and impartiality to overhaul science-based content within a short timeframe.

As part of Clean Slate, the CDC’s CIOs needed guidance in making decisions about which content would stay or go. For years, there was no standardized protocol for removing older content from the site, which resulted in many pages housing outdated or conflicting information—and, ultimately, user confusion.

CDC also needed help to edit and migrate the remaining content to its new website. As the CIOs varied widely in terms of their level of staffing for content strategy and writing, the CDC required a collaboration partner to develop a standardized content strategy and guidelines for all CIOs to ensure content consistency across the CDC’s website.

Solution

Our ICF Next team worked with the Office of Communication and CIOs to sift through thousands of web pages and provide support and recommendations for decisions about what content to keep and what to remove. We also helped CIOs with change management aspects of the project, such as overcoming resistance to the removal of older content or fear of changes to established processes.

We implemented a Product Oriented Delivery (POD) approach throughout the Clean Slate project. Each POD was headed by an ICF Engagement Lead and served several CIOs throughout the project—adjusting communication and reporting styles to meet the needs of the individual CIOs wherever possible. Breaking down the project in this way enabled us to effectively manage numerous customers with diverse needs.

Building a 1:1 relationship with each CIO was key to the project’s success. We selected each Engagement Lead for both their technical know-how and their relationship management skills. During weekly meetings, the Engagement Lead and CIO contact could catch up on the project’s overall status and discuss emergent challenges unique to the CIO so they could be handled quickly.

ICF’s staffing flexibility was also a major factor in the success of Clean Slate. Originally, we planned for this project to engage a little more than a dozen copywriters. Once we determined the content load was heavier than the initial estimate, we quickly scaled our team to bring on additional content strategists to meet the need.

Our fluency in both the technical domain and health communication science enabled us to meet customers where their need was—and to align with the approach of CDC's web development contractor and internal teams. We helped CDC track every piece of content that was planned for the new website. To do this, we collaborated with the CDC development team to create workflows and dashboards that allowed the Office of Communication to track each CIO, the status of their content, and the scheduled go-live date for their sites.

Results

The new CDC.gov website launched in May 2024 with a coordinated roll out and campaign. While the project was originally seen as a huge burden by CIOs, we stepped in to help them understand the task, make it achievable, and provide the skilled workforce to get the work done.

During the content determination stage of the project, we helped them retire more than 65% of the CDC website’s previous content with 93% of the planned sites on track to launch by the end of 2024. During the content migration, we worked with the CIOs to transform content from complex, out-of-date, and hard-to-find to succinct, accurate, current, and searchable.

In a survey for the new CDC site, 90% of healthcare professionals said that the new version was user-friendly, compared with 75% for the previous site. And 81% of respondents said they were satisfied with the new site, compared with 67% for the previous site.