Case study · Member engagement
A small newsletter test showed how better video discovery could improve engagement, then Steward turned the successful approach into a repeatable workflow for the client’s team.
The challenge
An educational website client came to Steward with a growing problem: members weren’t watching newly developed video content.
The content team kept producing new videos, but a large backlog of unwatched material was accumulating. The issue wasn’t the quality of the content. Members simply weren’t aware the new videos existed.
Instead of assuming the answer was another major website project, Steward first looked at how members were already moving through the organization’s digital ecosystem.
What we did
Google Analytics showed that most members reached the site from links in daily or weekly newsletters. That existing behavior created a natural place to introduce new videos.
Steward updated two upcoming newsletters to include linked images of recent videos. Speaker profile pictures were used in the links, then the emails’ click-through rates were compared with historical averages.
One newsletter improved click-through by 30%. The other improved by 50%. The test established that surfacing videos inside an existing member habit could materially improve engagement.
The client relied on numerous contractors working on different schedules to create newsletters and videos. A manual process would have been difficult to maintain, so Steward proposed a custom plugin that connected the website’s video content to the client’s Acy newsletter system.
The workflow lets the client select videos from its Brightcove library, match them to scheduled newsletters in Acy, and insert them with the correct newsletter formatting. Administrators are also alerted if an email is scheduled without any assigned videos.
The result was more than a one-time lift in newsletter performance. Steward turned a proven engagement tactic into a repeatable publishing workflow the client could use consistently across teams and schedules.
The results
Within 30 days, video content views increased by 15%. Email forwards doubled and sometimes tripled as members shared videos within their networks, while read-through rates improved across the board.
By 90 days, newsletter click-through rates had doubled and 450 videos had been exposed to readers, putting the program on pace to surface roughly 1,350 videos annually.
The backlog of unwatched video content began to shrink quickly. The client described the work as one of its most successful projects of the year because it solved the immediate discovery problem while also improving member engagement through an existing communication channel.
Have useful content members aren’t finding?
Steward can help identify where member behavior, content strategy, and custom development can work together to create a better experience.
