Unmind builds workplace wellness platform with Contentful

Introduction

Whether we're heading into the office, jumping on a Zoom call, or relaxing at home with family and friends, we’d like to show up as our best selves. But, the trials and tribulations of daily life and the unexpected — like a global pandemic — complicate things. In the professional setting, it’s tempting to bury any negative thoughts and emotions that arise. 

Unmind is working to change that. The company and its enterprise-ready platform is focused on removing stigmas surrounding mental health and encouraging companies to embrace and support their employees on a holistic level.

When companies purchase a subscription, users who log on get access to a range of tools and resources focused on improving their mental health. For the individual employee, these include therapy and coaching, various quizzes, learning tracks, and other resources. Those in leadership roles have access to more specialized tracks to sharpen their support and advocacy skills.

With mental health concerns becoming increasingly prevalent, Umind’s growing list of well-known clients, including Disney, Uber, and the NHS, expect platform resources to be fresh, reliable, and routinely expanded. This was manageable during the company’s early years but, come 2021, its content had scaled disproportionately to employee headcount and its CMS lacked features to offset this.

The COVID-19 pandemic was an inflection point. As the demands for resources on isolation, stress, and grief filtered in, Unmind struggled to deliver. 

“It took about 18 steps to update a piece of content as so much was hard coded. Creating and publishing net-new resources — that was a whole different story,” George Stokes, Content Operations Lead at Unmind, shared. 

It was time for the company to invest in a content tool that would streamline content management and speed up content creation to better support what it valued most: the well-being of platform users and its employees. That came in the form of Contentful Composable Content Platform. 

Composable content: The right amount of structure and support

Unmind didn’t happen upon Contentful by chance, another leader in the mental wellness space made the recommendation. The company wanted something headless and Contentful took this one step further with its composable approach to content. Plus, it seemed capable of delivering on Unmind’s key re-platforming goals: transform its content library into a content ecosystem with options for reuse, templatize content for easier net-new creation, and eliminate hard-coded content to enable updates free of developer support. 

Engineers began to experiment with the Contentful free plan to discover just how much of this would be possible. Impressed, they committed to a full-scale implementation a few days later.

It took Unmind just four months to replatform — which included building out content models, migrating pre-existing content, and integrating essential tools (for Unmind, these included Cloudinary for storing and managing multimedia assets, and XTM Cloud for localization). Once the setup was complete and team members got into the platform, impact was immediate.

The platform effectively unified Unmind’s content in one place. Its custom-built content models provided a balance of structure and flexibility that has enabled team members to quickly create new courses and individual modules. The Engineering team even customized the editorial interface to help content creators easily identify what content is required for a given asset to be published (for example, a video might need a title and two-sentence description before it can be added to a course), and instances where there’s flexibility to add more than the bare minimum.

Reuse and references: More efficient and accurate content, less burnout

The impact of Contentful extends into how pre-existing content is managed. “With composable content, we can use references to take components from one course and add them to another — or anywhere else on our platform, really. And, if we edit that content in the future, the changes populate universally. With our old platform, that wasn’t possible,” Stokes elaborated. 

This is extremely useful for two reasons. First, the information and exercises that apply to one mental well-being concern are often shared with others. Second, data, medical findings, and recommendations are always changing. References eliminate redundancies and inaccuracies tied to manual copy and past efforts and subsequent updates, better ensuring that content is up-to-date and accurate. This has alleviated some of the pressure Stokes and his peers previously felt when managing content.

A renewal of resources: Enhanced creativity and greater agility

With ease of use and an absence of hard-coded elements, Stokes and other members of the Content team have a newfound confidence — and greater bandwidth — to be more creative with their builds. Since adoption, Stokes and his team have been able to launch new resources including the “Daily quote,” which offers users words of inspiration that change every 24 hours, and the “Daily boost,” which follows a similar idea but takes on a short video format. With scheduled publishing, the team is able to upload and program these assets to post on a given day weeks, and even months, in advance, keeping them well ahead of production timelines and nimble should any unexpected content needs arise.

Perhaps even more impressive, Unmind’s new well-being champion training program busts myths about mental health and provides users with practical advocacy skills.

Content optimization is another area Unmind has recently been able to invest more time and resources. Teams have found time to dig into data and determine what content is performing best and where to place certain content on certain pages to enhance visibility and engagement. 

Ease of use: Empowering autonomy and brand consistency

The Content team isn’t the only one that’s benefiting from the new tool. Others, including the Advertising and Marketing teams, are empowered to go into the platform and utilize existing content in their own projects. This makes for a more cohesive brand experience and supports consistency across the entire user journey — whether a prospect is visiting the home page for the first time or logs onto the platform later as a user.

“As a marketer, I had always been fearful of touching the CMS. I didn’t want to break anything. That’s really melted away with Contentful,” Stokes said of his experience and that of others. “When I give members of our Marketing, Product, and Engineering teams a walkthrough of how to find and use content within Contentful, they pick it up straightaway,” he added.

Unmind’s Localization team has also taken to Contentful. Since integrating it with XTM Cloud, they’ve been able to expand the languages available on Unmind’s platform to include English (American, British, and Australian), French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese. 

“We’re able to easily edit content for each locale without having to log in and make those changes within different platforms as we did before,” Stokes said.

An optimistic look at the future of content

Despite an already dense library of resources, Stokes and other members of the Unmind team see their platform and its content as a constant work in progress. In fact, their next big project is already underway, with teams working on a neurodiversity course to clarify the far-reaching and increasingly used term. 

“What mental health topic will be front and center after that? We aren’t sure. What we do know is that we’ll have the tools to create content and quickly share it with users. That speed to market is important in an industry as sensitive as ours,” Stokes said. “Contentful is helping us improve not just workplaces but individual lives.”