Flo Health syncs up reliable delivery and personalization with Contentful

Our bodies send us signals but sometimes, we need a little help interpreting them — especially when it comes to something as important as female health. With over 350 million downloads and 60 million active users, Flo Health is the most popular female health app available. Users can do everything from tracking their ovulation cycles and periods to tracking their fertility and pregnancies. The app also features health insights, quizzes, and related, expert-authored articles to inform their health journeys.

Because of its large audience and important yet sensitive subject matter, it’s imperative that the content Flo Health provides is medically accurate and always up to date. When the company launched in 2015, it kept things simple, using Google Docs and Python to create and manage content. But, as its number of users, articles, and contributors grew, Flo Health realized it needed a more sophisticated tool — one capable of streamlining content management and enabling reusability to support personalization and enhance consistency across the app’s various domains. These requirements led Flo Health to adopt Contentful.

Tracking down the right content management tool

Rather than jumping into a full-scale implementation at the start, Flo Health started with a proof of concept (POC), migrating just one domain (library) in one language (English) to the new platform.

Its Engineering and Product teams wanted a composable content platform that could alleviate the shortcomings of its previous tools and processes — which had included content delivery issues, slow production, and siloed content, the latter of which prohibited personalization and made content difficult to update universally. They hoped this POC would also prove Contentful to be user-friendly, so nontechnical team members could not only own content creation, as they had with the old tool, but lead production as well.

“We didn’t want our technical teams to use their skillset for content management when they could be rerouted to projects offering us a competitive advantage. We looked for a solution that could take care of that management out of the box and then allow us to personalize content based on our knowledge of users, which Contentful took care of perfectly,” Max Koutun, Director of Engineering at Flo Health, shared.

Syncing up with a new platform

It took the company roughly one year to build out its content models and migrate the remaining content to the new platform (except for content tied to its chatbot. This migration included nearly 21 versions translated into various languages).

Today, Contentful has become the base of Flo’s powerful microservice tech stack made up of several market-leading tools — including but not limited to Amazon S3 for hosting, Cloudflare for delivery, Phrase TMS for localization, and a handful of custom solutions to aid with personalization and translation built with the App Framework.

“We like that we aren’t limited by the platform’s baseline functionalities — we can extend them with as many other applications as we’d like,” Alex Karzhenka, Product Manager at Flo Health, pointed out.

Even with the added tools, getting new team members up to speed on Contentful is straightforward — it takes just a few days. Flo Health assigns a selection of courses from the Contentful Learning Center followed by a workshop where internal team members share specifics on Flo Health’s own implementation and Contentful model.

Celebrating more reliable content and a smoother flow of it

After adopting the tool, Flo Health experienced immediate changes in the reliability and speed of content delivery, leading to a better internal user experience.

“Being able to automate things has saved us thousands of hours of manual work. We can do things like bulk publishing, editing, validating, and delivery, all powered by Contentful’s various APIs,” Karzhenka said.

Contentful’s user-friendly interface and granular text fields — which also account for metadata — enhance speed, allowing team members to easily stage content and understand exactly what is needed for various assets in order for them to be fully validated. Governance features, which have enabled Flo Health to build custom permissions for different team members, such as translators and release managers, offer an added layer of security, ensuring medical-reviewed content is not accidentally changed during publication.

Pursuing personalization for a more straightforward user journey

Because of Contentful’s composable content approach, app users are enjoying more accurate and personalized content.

All of Flo Health’s content is broken into reusable components that can be referenced (or reused) rather than recreated to build different versions of an asset or something entirely new. This structure is ideal for helping Flo Health keep medical findings up to date. When there is an error or a new medical finding or recommendation emerges, team members only have to make the change once, and it will populate everywhere that content is referenced — whether it be in an article, a story, or a campaign.

These content types also enable Flo Health to develop personalized content for specific audience segments, like women who are expecting or those who have miscarried. By leveraging user data and creating targeted versions of the same content, Flo Health offers more tailored resources and advice with less work for the user to find. Flo Health uses Contentful tags to keep content for different topics and segments well-organized on the back end.

Moving toward a single source of truth

Today, roughly 80% of the company’s content is stored in Contentful. The remaining 20% is content tied to Flo Health’s chatbot, which is powered by another platform. The company plans to eventually move this content to Contentful, along with its web copy.

With these initiatives already on its product roadmap, Flo Health is well on its way to removing content silos for good, ensuring its users get the most accurate, up-to-date content to inform their reproductive health journey.