Case Study
Cardiovascular Research Foundation
A Breakthrough in Medical Nonprofit Education Website Design
Project Summary
Website Design & Support for the World’s Leading Destination for Cardiologists
The Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) is a leading medical research and educational nonprofit dedicated to improving the survival and quality of life for people suffering from heart and vascular disease. Produced by CRF, TCTMD.com is the leading destination for cardiologists around the world looking for the latest news, research, and perspectives from across the field.
Constructive has worked closely alongside the TCTMD team at CRF for over a decade. The first website redesign was completed back in 2016, and we have continued to maintain and substantially grow the website in the decade since.
Focus Areas
At a Glance
Modernizing the Website: The redesigned TCTMD.com lives up to its role as the leading online destination for cardiologists worldwide, with a modern design and streamlined user experience.
Bespoke Artwork: Through our ongoing partnership with TCTMD, we created custom art for the Heart Failure sub-brand that strengthens its brand architecture and aligns with its visual identity.
Discovery & Strategy
Taking a Measured, Strategic Approach to Discovery
TCTMD is an encyclopedic website with tens of thousands of articles, videos, slide presentations, and more. And with 16 years of organic sprawl, the difference between where CRF’s website was and where we needed to take it was enormous. With an eye on our 6-month deadline, we led rapid research and discovery to understand the site from multiple perspectives—starting with stakeholder interviews that surfaced goals, pain points, and priorities.
We conducted a content audit to quantify TCTMD’s content, decipher how it was structured, and assess its quality. Focus groups and user surveys clarified what was important to audiences. A technology analysis detailed the existing infrastructure and identified opportunities. Peer analysis positioned TCTMD in relation to its peers. And our resulting Strategy Brief summarized our findings—creating a roadmap for our teams to unite brand, content, design, and technology to deliver high-value brand experiences for TCTMD’s expert audiences.
Development
Building a Robust System That Supports TCTMD & its Members Over Time
We built TCTMD.com in Drupal with complex features to support its paid members, including Single-Sign-On, tiered member accounts, member-only content, centralized user management, external video content, automated presentation publication, SOLR search, and custom application APIs.
Constructive worked closely with the TCTMD team and technology partners to architect an AWS cloud-based system to handle the load and evolve with their needs—creating a highly available, scalable infrastructure with automated deployments, elastic scaling, healing, notification, and more.
UX Design
Building the Blueprint for High-Value, Content-Rich Experiences
In designing the user experience for TCTMD.com, our number one priority was to deepen content engagement for a specialized, sophisticated audience. The range of content needed to inform clinicians working in cardiovascular surgery and medicine is diverse. We worked with the Cardiovascular Research Foundation’s team to design pathways for exploration—starting by making it incredibly easy for medical professionals to find what they need; then expanding their perspective by exposing visitors to related content from across TCTMD’s departments—strengthening the site’s critical ad revenue in the process.
In addition to pathways, we created a taxonomy that displays a breadth of relevant options in every view. Wireframes map out page templates that manage TCTMD’s content density—not over-stuffing pages and bombarding users to ensure a great reading experience. And site search ensures content accessibility, with powerful faceted filtering tools that would be powered by SOLR.
UX Design
Meeting Audiences’ Needs No Matter Their Specialty
The range of content needed to inform clinicians working in cardiovascular surgery and medicine is diverse. To meet the needs of audiences across specialties and sectors, we also designed the TCTMD website to break down content by specialty. With the option to filter through nine different specialties ranging from COVID-19 to cardiovascular policies, each section provides specialty-specific information, news coverage, conference opportunities, and event slides and videos. The specialty silos activated a core part of TCTMD’s development strategy to quickly steer visitors to the topics and information they needed, improving the user experience, driving subscriptions, and increasing ad revenue.
“Constructive completely understood the challenges we were facing in our space. Instead of just having one person who was familiar with our project, their entire team was fully invested from day one. What makes them such a great partner is that they are committed to making our success theirs, and vice-versa. They remain fully available to us, often going above-and-beyond to make sure we succeed. We don’t feel like we hired a company to perform a website redesign, but rather found a partner to work with us and bring our vision to life.”
Stephanie Gutch
Director of Digital, TCTMD/CRF
Website Design
Designing for Density and Engagement
With TCTMD’s new visual identity as our starting point, we transformed wireframes and technical specifications into a crisp, clean, and contemporary brand experience. In keeping with the site’s status as a leading destination for news and education, TCTMD.com leverages trends in news and media website design to present a premium brand.
A clear visual hierarchy indicating content departments, topics, and formats guides users through content-heavy pages. Videos and presentations, two of the site’s most valuable content, are elevated, with calls-to-action that focus attention on member-only content to help drive subscriptions.
Content Hubs
Building an Editorial Outlet to Inform, Engage, and Activate
As one of the leading contributors of news and opinion pieces about cardiovascular surgery and medicine, TCTMD had a robust editorial content hub. With feature news pieces, conference and events coverage, and opinion editorials, the organization has elevated the voices of journalists and clinicians to drive deeper engagement with the field for years.
Working with TCTMD to bring their design and engagement goals to life, a critical part of our engagement involved designing the space for migrated and new content to flow harmoniously. Given the volume of traffic on their editorial content, we also worked with the organization to ensure that their news would serve as a driver of ad revenue and equipped them with the tools and technical infrastructure to sustain their critical cardiovascular reporting.
Content Hubs
Creating a Digital Ecosystem to Connect TCTMD’s Many Audiences
For years, TCTMD has provided several avenues for engagement to meet its audience’s needs. One of its most meaningful avenues involves bringing researchers, clinicians, and reporters together at conferences and cardiovascular events. To ensure that TCTMD could serve as not only the authority on reporting for these events—a key pillar of its editorial coverage—we worked closely with TCTMD to develop a conference and events hub so that the organization could directly connect people to those cardiovascular events and share the slides for those who couldn’t attend.
We worked closely with the team to develop the conference hub and help TCTMD serve as the industry’s go-to source on learning about and signing up for cardiovascular events.
Website Optimization
A Years-Long Partnership Founded on Growth
Once we completed our website redesign with TCTMD, the organization saw increases in subscriptions, engagement, audience reach, organic traffic, ad revenue, and sponsorships. More critically, the clinicians, researchers, and journalists in the field of cardiovascular medicine and surgery had a new digital hub for news, information, events, and connections.
To build on this growth and accelerated impact, TCTMD has continued its engagement with Constructive to explore how we can best meet audiences’ needs and achieve TCTMD’s organizational goals on an ongoing basis. This has included monthly reporting on website performance and targeted website improvements since 2024. Together, we continue to iterate and push our thinking on expanding the reach of TCTMD, driving revenue, and improving the field at large.
