Mike Lee – AARP: Designing a Strategy for Organizational Transformations

UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

AARP has been around over 53 years.

AARP has 38 million members.

AARP.org 6 million UVs per month. Over 1 billion page views per year.

Betty White is the new spokesperson for AARP.

Focus all traffic in to AARP.org, but then syndicate content to partner sites, blogs, social networks and mobile devices and platforms.

AARP is mostly printed based. AARP magazine goes to 54 million subscribers. 300 versions of the magazine sent out 6 times a year.

TV+Radio syndicated television and radio shows

Web – Major Web Site

Mobile – not quite there yet

Print group creates xml feed to export to web.

AARP Mobile Web Adoption Rate

Since 2009, mobile traffic to the site has increased 2050%. Apple devices 66%, Android 23% and growing.

Even though feature phone usage is declining, they still have to design for those phones, as well.

Were relying on third-parties to create mobile apps on different platforms to view the magazine.

Considered Web Content adaptation, but decided against it.

With a Get Out the Vote SMS campaign, AARP collected about 43,000 phone numbers from their 38 million members (.01% conversion)

Global Business Network’s Innovation Modes.

Used bottle rocket as their app developer.

Parts of a Flagship App

• Web site components:
  • Feed of latest WCMS articles (JSON)
  • Popular articles
  • Member login and card
• Onboard the app:
  • Site channels in topic button
  • save clippings
  • dial call center
  • flurry tracking code
• APIs:
  • Latest videos from Brightcove CMS
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Bit.ly

Arriving at a Content Strategy

more than 50% of the traffic to aarp.org participates in casual games on the site.

Displays member card