Case Study: Regenerative Medicine Minnesota
Working together to position Minnesota at the forefront of regenerative medicine breakthroughs.
Regenerative Medicine Minnesota (RMM) is an organization created by the State of Minnesota to fund revolutionary advances in scientific research, bio-business and education relating to regenerative medicine. The RMM Board of Directors, whose co-chairs include leadership from the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic, chose Nighthawk Marketing to design and engineer their digital web platform so all Minnesotans could be informed of the organization's work.
RMM needed a team to connect with key audience stakeholders to develop a shared vision of how RMM could track content assets, educate the community, promote funding opportunities, and publicize the funded projects and their outcomes. They desired a digital design and development team who could engage stakeholders contributions and buy-in in order to create RMM’s website visual design and architecture. RMM content must be easily digested and the publically-funded grant projects prominent. Based on an analysis of their user goals, we created a brand, content strategy, and Drupal website.
- Promote RMM-funded projects for research, education, industries, and care delivery to patients.
- Promote the State of Minnesota as the forefront of regenerative medicine science and practice.
About the project
Project Highlights
Website Design, Development & Support
Our approach included a vibrant color palette to promote energy, content development, and a unique web design that promoted user engagement and exploration of content. The responsive design, based on a responsive foundation, quickly adapts to each user’s screen size. In addition, we used Drupal for the CMS. This allows easy updating of content and an infrastructure for adding additional content and functionality into the future. After the site was launched, we continued to work with RMM to provide maintenance and technical support services.
User Experience & Information Architecture
The audience for RMM content is diverse, in essence, defined as any Minnesotan interested in regenerative medicine advances or in the RMM organization. Our process began with building the content strategy through a series of user experience need finding exercises, key stakeholder interviews, observations and secondary industry research. This allowed us to build out the information architecture for the website and begin the sitemap.
Wireframe & Rapid Prototype
Wireframes and low-fidelity, rapid prototypes were then developed and in order to represent the structure of information on the website and to visualize the content and demonstrate the basic functionalities.
Palette and Visual Design
The main color scheme of the site is designed to be vibrant and bold, indicative of the organization's innovative leadership in science, research, bio business and education. A secondary color palette provides contrast with tints of primary colors, and shapes in varirous shades of grey. Using highly legible and open source sans serif fonts and basic shapes stripped of decorations, the visual design conveys simplicity, accessibility and modernity.
Video Production
Each year RMM awards research grants to doctors across the state. These research grants support amazing work being performed that address many complicated health issues. We created a series of short, interview videos to document and explain these truly amazing research projects. At the end of each year, RMM hosts a celebration event to recognize and honor the researchers. For this event, we produced a video montage highlighting the work of all the researcher.
Why Drupal was chosen
By developing a Drupal CMS website from a Bootstrap foundation, we were able to achieve a modular and responsive design that would display optimally regardless of screen size or device used. This allowed RMM to organize, display, and map its voluminous content in multiple ways so that users can find the information they needed quickly and easily.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Our project team conducted user experience research and need finding studies in order to provide insights into their web platform and market positioning. Together, we used all of this information to collectively decide on the right theme to go forward with.
