Novavax

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The Client

Novavax is a biotechnology company that promotes improved health globally through the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative vaccines to prevent serious infectious diseases. The company's proprietary recombinant technology platform harnesses the power and speed of genetic engineering to efficiently produce highly immunogenic nanoparticles designed to address urgent global health needs. The Novavax COVID-19 vaccine has received authorization from multiple regulatory authorities globally, including the U.S., European Commission, and World Health Organization.

The Situation

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Novavax was a small biotech company with a similarly small digital footprint. However, the pandemic and the organization’s vaccine candidate propelled the company onto the world stage. Novavax.com, the organization's flagship property, needed to be prepared to scale globally.

The Challenge

Novavax needed to create a future-proof solution. With the company growing quickly, it was important that the new solution didn’t box in the company’s digital team. The previous site contained a tremendous amount of legacy content to migrate, allowing the team to save time and resources in the migration – if they built the new digital infrastructure correctly. 

The other challenge was that Novavax wanted to launch multiple websites simultaneously. Besides Novavax.com, the company wanted to launch NovavaxCovidVaccine.com, NovavaxMedInfo.com, WeDoVaccines.com, and KnowOurVax.com. 

The Solution

Working with digital consultancy Publicis Sapient, the teams redesigned and rebuilt Novavax.com on the Drupal CMS to provide relevant information to stakeholders globally. The team began with stakeholder research of key audiences, then mapped the ideal customer journey for each persona. These findings then filtered into design and development, as well as a content strategy that mapped content to each persona. 

Using a low-code Atomic Design framework to allow for rapid page building and deployment, what used to take months can now be deployed in days. The system is so efficient that most pages are no longer designed within Figma or Sketch – they're designed within the development environment, refined, and submitted for review and approval. This creates a super agile process and allows the company to meet business objectives quickly. Using Drupal, Acquia Cloud Platform and Acquia Cloud Edge gave the team the scalability it needed to design, build, and deploy sites while also ensuring they were protected from attacks.

In addition, the team leveraged translation modules to better serve the site’s global audience, ensuring a frictionless exchange of translated copy between the website and translation vendors. The team also localized critical information for launch, specifically the Global Vaccines Authorization and Approval map. This one-stop shop for global authorization and approval information was provided in-language for most markets, a first for Novavax.com. 

The Results

From the start of the research to launch was less than 10 months, with the design and build portion consuming about half of that time frame. In December 2021, Novavax had just two English-only websites; today, it has 172 websites live in 40+ countries and in 35+ languages on Drupal.

One of the new global site’s key objectives was to better explain Novavax’s science and technology, so the teams decided to focus on improving view depth. Within three months of launch, Novavax content depth viewership increased 83%, time spent on site increased 200%, and traffic from social media channels rose 198%.