A new digital strategy for a brand beloved by audiences of all ages
Sesame Workshop, the global impact nonprofit behind Sesame Street, partnered with us to consolidate their digital ecosystem into a singular destination for adults and kids alike. The new SesameWorkshop.com is an award-winning experience featuring over 2,000 resources in English and Spanish for parents, families, caregivers, and educators.
Primary goals
Develop a future-facing digital strategy
Consolidate six fragmented websites into a single, searchable, scalable experience.
Increase content discovery
Create an intuitive UI and information architecture for Sesame Workshop’s audience of diverse ages and needs.
Deepen audience engagement
Develop a streamlined, responsive interface that constantly guides users towards new content that suits their needs.
A consolidated web experience
After years of digital expansion, Sesame Workshop's ecosystem was fragmented, making it difficult for various audiences - from young learners and parents to funders - to find the right content. Launch by NTT DATA conducted extensive research and created a new strategy and architecture for Sesame Workshop's digital offerings based on user needs and mindsets. The new digital strategy is flexible and scalable, ensuring that Sesame Workshop can continue to expand its footprint for years to come.
Audience-first navigation
A consolidated navigation requires thoughtful content strategy, research, and testing. It must also reflect the priorities of the business. We balanced organizational requirements with audience needs to launch a new navigation that everyone loves.
Built to elevate key integrations
Professional development and philanthropic engagement are key pillars of Sesame Workshop's offerings. The new site integrates with over a dozen third parties, including Mailchimp, Salesforce, Rallybound, Moodle, and more. Custom flows provide a seamless user journey across several functional areas of the site, including Webinar and Course Registration, User Accounts, and Payments.
Editorial ease & flexibility
Sesame Workshop maintains thousands of resources, including articles, interactive games, PDFs, and more, for a broad audience.With a new content structure and design system, Sesame Workshop's content teams can now easily share and cross-link resource pages as cards. Content authors can search for a resource based on title or topic, and once selected, the card auto-populates with the resource's title, description, topic, and audience tag.
This card system continues to save Sesame Workshop's content team time and effort without sacrificing a page's user experience and design. Even better, their audiences now discover more content that matters to them.
Improving the content production process
Sesame Workshop's digital production team has seen an improvement in all areas of their content production process. Pages are built faster than ever — taking 50% less time than their previous system — thanks to the flexibility and ease of use of the modular design system. The team can now quickly mockup pages in the test environment for rapid review sessions. Requests from stakeholders are much easier to handle due to the increased ability to rapidly prototype pages. And the new tagging system helps stakeholders understand how their content will be showcased in future editorial cycles.
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Demystifying CMS selection
Choosing a CMS is a complex, org-wide decision. We made it as easy as possible for SesameWorkshop to make this informed decision by listing the pros and cons of several major CMS choices, specifically tailored to the needs of their content operations.
Quality of life improvements
Our team implemented features to improve the daily lives of Sesame Workshop's content authors. For example: Imagery is a burden for almost every content team. We implemented a set of pictograms that authors can insert when no imagery is available, keeping publishing processes moving without compromising the brand look and feel.
Results and impact
The new SesameWorkshop.org is delighting visitors and internal users alike. With content personalization, faceted search, and brand-new UI and UX, SesameWorkshop’s engaging educational resources are easier than ever to discover and share. The architecture helps diverse audiences find what they need, and the modular design system powered by a new CMS has eased content production for the Sesame Workshop team.
Within the first six months, the new site generated twice as many sessions as the combined total of the six previous sites during the same period the year prior. Organic search traffic increased 48%, direct traffic increased 8%, and email lead generation more than tripled because of the changes. The new SesameWorkshop.org was also recognized by the Anthem Awards in the category of Education, Arts & Culture.
