PAN Foundation: Clinical Trial Microsite
The PAN Foundation is a leading non-profit advocate for health equity, working to ensure everyone has affordable access to the healthcare they need.
For its latest initiative, PAN focused on promoting inclusion and diversity in clinical trials. For far too long, trial participation was restricted to white men, creating a gender and racial gap in medical knowledge that continues to have real-world consequences today. Complicating this legacy of exclusion is the U.S.’s shameful history of medical abuse targeting black men and other minorities. So the content strategy challenge became:
How do we build trust with an audience
that is rightfully suspicious and skeptical?
To understand the psychology and subsequently empathize with the microsite’s future users, our team conducted a dozen interviews with current and potential clinical trial participants. Through their anecdotes and raw emotion, the content strategy came into focus: the site would need to be rigorously transparent to establish credibility rebuild trust.
The site’s copy is direct, simple, and free of medical jargon. This plainspoken approach embodied the mandate for transparency, while ensuring the language would be accessible for those with reading limitations and non-native speakers.
The tone of the copy is supportive and encouraging, but never pushy. And while the tone is warm and gentle, it isn’t soft, either. It confronts the skepticism many users will bring to the experience and acknowledges the American history of medical abuse. This approach has helped PAN strengthen its ties with communities historically excluded from clinical trials.
The navigation and page structure also embody transparency with clear labeling and CTAs that make finding the right resource or action intuitive. Key tasks—such as enrolling in trials and reaching out to PAN—are elevated in designs, while navigational help appears at the bottom of select pages.
SKILLS: STAKEHOLDER AND USER INTERVIEWS, WORKSHOP FACILITATION, SITE MAP AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, CONTENT STRATEGY, WEB COPY