Social Security Advisory Board
About The Social Security Advisory Board
Founded in 1994 as a bipartisan agency to provide advice to the President and Congress on issues of old-age, survivors, as well as Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs. The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) was getting hundreds of calls and even walk-ins to their office by people looking for the Social Security Administration (SSA), creating confusion for everybody. That’s when Ignition72 was brought in. The new website needed to be clean and professional, not only in assisting policy researchers, but also in providing clarity to everybody that SSAB is not the Social Security Administration!
Social Security is not just another government spending program. It is a promise from generation to generation.
Learning + Planning
The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) was in need of a new website in short order. A big conference was approaching, and they had no way to post all the conference materials on their old site. At the same time, they were looking for a new hosting partner, who won the contract and asked us to manage the website project.
By the time the contract was signed, they had 4 weeks to the conference date. Ignition72 put together a custom-designed temporary WordPress website in two weeks; then began to work on planning a new website from scratch, to be built after the conference. The challenge was understanding their audiences and goals and brand ethos quickly enough to put together a short-term website for them, with an eye toward rebranding SSAB for a new, robust, modern website.
Design + Development
Ignition72 conducted user research and testing, and spent time with SSAB staff as well as SSA staff to understand the role of SSAB and how they wanted to be seen to the public. Their audience group ranged from members of Congress to researchers of Social Security policies to the general public.
The final site was a clean, professional site featuring hundreds of publications, data spreadsheets, announcements, press releases, and conference materials. Some content is pulled into site pages dynamically, while some documents are manually selected for display. The vast audience groups that use the SSAB now get access to hundreds of documents in a clear, concise way.
Results
With a new, clearer, and easier to use website, we have seen growth not only in the volume of traffic since launch, but in site engagement as well. Looking at the site’s analytics, site traffic has grown 75%, repeat sessions are up 25%, new users up 73%, page views up an astounding 268%, and the average time on site is up 51%. Additionally, in that time, the bounce rate has also dropped by 78%.