IIAM Website Wins Award of Excellence
IIAM’s (International Institute for the Advancement of Medicine) website received the 2008 Aesculapius Award of Excellence in communication of health information to the public. As one of 10 awardees, IIAM will be mentioned on the Health Improvement Institute’s website (www.hii.org) along with IIAM’s URL address. IIAM will also be permitted to display the Aesculapius Award logo on its website and in print materials.
“We are proud to have received this award demonstrating our commitment to raising awareness, and serving the organ donation and scientific research communities. We will continue to provide options for donor families and enable medical breakthroughs due to access to these vital gifts,” stated Gina Dunne Smith, Director, IIAM.
There were a total of 23 websites that were evaluated for this year’s award. The websites were evaluated according to the following criteria: specific and measurable educational objectives, well-defined audience, accuracy and usefulness of the content, user-friendliness, and visual design. This year’s panel of judges represented the health- care, web-publishing, and multimedia fields.
Dolores Baldasare, Marketing Specialist for IIAM was in charge of updating the website to make it more informative and user-friendly. She worked with Mike McLaughlin and Rebecca Franz from Halibut Blue, LLC. “Since the website went live the overall web search-ability of IIAM and its services has dramatically improved resulting in a 200% increase of hits to the website. Since that time, the website has received over 11,000 unique visitors,” stated Dolores Baldasare. “Given IIAM’s highly-specialized and small-niche audience, this number is significant. In addition, several web-links of IIAM’s partners and affiliates have also been added thereby providing information about related organizations, and increasing traffic to the website.”
The Aesculapius Awards have been in existence for 17 years. The award is named for the ancient Greek god of healing, Aesculapius. This award was established by the Health Improvement Institute, HII, a non-profit organization to promote informed consumer lifestyle choices and health care decisions.
Dr. Peter Goldschmidt, president of HII noted, “This year’s winners continued the very high standard of creativity and quality that we have seen since the awards began. We are delighted by the wide variety of organizations that choose to submit entries this year. We congratulate the winners of awards of excellence.”