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How BIO’s Digital Transformation Is Driving COVID-19 Mission Success
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Timing is everything, and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) had completed a year-long digital transformation three months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Using the new platform, the world’s largest biotech trade association rapidly deployed a Coronavirus resource center, launched a new CEO and pivoted a 17,000 person event online — allowing BIO to produce more content in three months than they had in the previous three years.

The Imperative for Change

At the onset of their digital transformation, BIO wanted more technical self-reliance, sought to cut down on consultant involvement, and saw an opportunity to gain staff efficiencies through direct access, enhanced tools, and reusable components. They needed a robust, self-service authoring and publishing platform to help them empower their organization, unify their messaging across channels, and connect more effectively with members.

The Transformative Solution

BIO partnered with Publicis Sapient to:

  1. Empower their organization with a self-service publishing platform capable of handling customer data integrations to support effective decision-making
  2. Unify key web properties (Advocacy, Membership, Events and BIO’s Cost Savings Program – BIO Business Solutions) to deliver consistent multi-channel messages.
  3. Connect with members and strengthen industry relationships through personalized experiences
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After consolidating six web properties onto one unified Drupal CMS platform running on the Acquia Cloud, Publicis Sapient created a reusable web component library to empower BIO staff to create compelling digital content experiences without having to rely on a developer or call on deep technical expertise. With over 70 web components, content creators now simply select the web components they need, easily search, sort, filter and promote content, and add filters and tags to media to promote critical industry projects.

Publicis Sapient’s multi-domain solution is also allowing content authors to create micro-sites with customized categories and tags from a single Drupal instance. All of this gave BIO the ability to expand the model to other landing pages without additional support on a universal platform. With an agile approach, the BIO team started using new tools in less than one day’s time.

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“We now have a super robust platform that’s extremely scalable. It is a clear example of how technology can help us all prepare and respond to our rapidly changing world and offer tremendous efficiency along the way. Making everyone, throughout the organization, content creators.”
Joe Hansen
Joe Hansen, Managing Director, Digital Communications & Engagement, Biotechnology Innovation Organization

This Project:

  1. Helped BIO consolidate six legacy websites and migrate ~15,000 webpages into a single Drupal 8 platform powered by the Acquia Cloud

  2. Has made page building easy and adaptive for non-technical staff using low-code, self-service authoring and publishing Drupal distribution – Atomic Component Toolkit (ACT), created by Publicis Sapient

  3. Leveraged Publicis Sapient’s recommended SEO strategy and BIO’s industry leading position to elevate a critical COVID-19 resource to the top of search engine rankings in less than one week’s time, jumping ahead of millions of other COVID-19 portals, articles, and related content

  4. Enabled BIO staff to develop compelling digital conference sites, video and podcast micro-sites, and a robust COVID-19 collaboration portal in-house – each set up by non-technical staff in a matter of days

Through this effort, Publicis Sapient has helped BIO establish the organization as a trusted and reliable industry resource.

Re-live the live discussion from the Acquia Engage 2020 Conference

During the ‘BIO’s Digital Transformation–Connect. Unify. Empower.’ session, we explored exactly how BIO use their new digital platform. Watch the event recording here to see demos and hear the discussion between the Publicis Sapient team and Joe Hansen, MD of Digital Communications & Branding at BIO.

Johnny Nguyen
Johnny Nguyen
Senior Manager, Technology