DKMS

DKMS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the lives of patients with blood cancer and blood disorders. To achieve this, the organization's seven donor centers in Germany, Poland, Chile, South Africa, the UK, India, and the US register potential stem cell donors for patients in need of a stem cell transplant. Since its founding in 1991, DKMS has registered millions of donors and facilitated thousands of lifesaving transplants globally. Their work involves simplifying a complex medical process and making it as easy as possible for people to register and potentially save a life.

DKMS is also heavily involved in the fields of medicine and science, focused on continually improving the survival and recovery rate of patients. With its international support programs, the organization improves the access to transplantation for patients in low- and middle-income countries.

Turning complex medical processes into simple digital experiences

For an organization like DKMS, their website serves as the critical endpoint for all donor recruitment activities. Whether potential donors discover DKMS through social media, TV ads, PR, or in-person events, they ultimately complete their registration online.

DKMS’s mission to help blood cancer patients find lifesaving stem cell matches requires simplifying a highly complex medical process into a user-friendly experience—one where potential donors understand both the profound impact of their registration and exactly what steps they’ll need to take to help save someone’s life.

The registration process involves requesting a swab kit online, receiving it by mail, swabbing the inside of your cheek, returning the kit, and having your data analyzed and entered into an international database accessible to search coordinators worldwide. When there’s a match, DKMS contacts the donor and facilitates the donation process—all managed through their digital ecosystem.

“Our big task is to make this complex topic as easy to understand as possible,” shared Kay Beutling, International Digital Project Manager at DKMS. “The impact you can have with just registration as a potential donor can be a second chance at life for someone.”

Growing pains with traditional CMS

As DKMS expanded internationally, they needed a digital infrastructure that could scale with them. “We grew and expanded a lot. We started other entities, like DKMS India and Chile. And we simply came to the point where our old website, tech stack, design, and CMS were no longer meeting our requirements,” Kay recalled.

At the time, their digital infrastructure relied on a Drupal-based CMS, which worked adequately for a single website but became unwieldy when scaled to seven different regional sites.

The inability to reuse content was one of the most significant pain points in their old system. Before Kontent.ai, managing global content was a manual and time-consuming process. When key information needed updating—like the number of registered donors worldwide or important medical statistics—content creators had to manually make the exact same edit multiple times for each of the websites. This process posed challenges in both efficiency and consistency, increasing the likelihood that some platforms could display outdated information if updates weren’t applied uniformly across all sites.

Maintaining consistency across their sites wasn’t just limited to content, though. The styling options of their previous CMS also proved to be a double-edged sword: “You can make direct changes to HTML and JavaScript, but then all of a sudden, the website breaks, and nothing looks like it should look like anymore.” This also made it a bit tricky to maintain a unified design and branding across regions.

“We needed a solution that would ensure a consistent brand experience while still giving each region the flexibility they needed,” Kay added.

Empowering DKMS with the Create Once, Publish Everywhere principle

After gathering feedback from departments and team members who worked directly with their CMS at the time, DKMS began evaluating potential replacements together with their web agency Adunique. Kontent.ai quickly rose to the top of their shortlist.

“We looked for a new solution and Kontent.ai provided us with a very interesting approach—the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) principle,” Kay explained. “Now, all our websites can share content items, giving us the flexibility we need, while also ensuring a unified brand experience.”

For example, on their homepage, they display KPIs like the number of registered users worldwide, which change frequently. “Previously, I needed to update each of our seven websites separately. Now, I can update the KPI once in our global project, and it gets updated across all the websites where it’s used. It saves me a lot of time and simplifies the workflow.”

Another aspect that impressed the DKMS team was Kontent.ai’s intuitive content modeling. “Setting up the content model, content types, and taxonomies felt very logical when we looked at it. It ticked another box that would save us time and resources in the whole project,” said Kay.

The platform’s extensibility was also a key factor in their decision. “We had a big roadmap with ideas where we wanted to go, and we tried to find a technical solution that we can always build upon,” Kay explained. “It was quite clear that we could use Kontent.ai for more than just creating a website, like integrating with self-service, and also using it for an app. The potential that the tool has was very quickly clear to us, and it was a big part in the end of making the decision to go with Kontent.ai.”

Implementing a future-proof digital architecture

By choosing Kontent.ai, DKMS was also able to rethink their entire technical architecture to align with their long-term vision. The technical stack now includes Gatsby JS for the front-end framework and Netlify for hosting and previewing. This combination provides significant performance improvements through incremental builds and optimized delivery.

Mobile website optimization was another priority for DKMS: “We wanted to provide a very good user experience, especially on mobile.” This focus was particularly important for their operations in regions where data connectivity can be a challenge. “For example, in South Africa and Chile, mobile data is used very differently. So, we wanted to reduce the data usage of our website a lot,” Kay explained.

Streamlining content management across borders

After solidifying their technical framework, DKMS turned their attention to optimizing content management and ensuring a seamless transition across their global presence. The implementation process involved migrating content from seven websites while also preparing the training for nearly 100 users on the new platform.

DKMS organized their Kontent.ai subscription with separate projects for each country, and they recently began using collections to manage specialized content, such as their self-service portal. Collections help streamline content organization by dividing the project’s content into manageable parts, allowing DKMS to efficiently structure and maintain their content.

“The first task was to collect all the content and decide which content we needed and which content we didn’t need anymore. And then after that was done, the next big task was to train users how to work with Kontent.ai.”

The training focused on helping users transition from the page-centric model of traditional CMSs like Drupal to Kontent.ai’s structured content approach. While the learning curve required some adjustment, it ultimately led to much more efficient content operations across all seven regional teams.

Leveraging AI for better content

Communicating complex medical information clearly and concisely is crucial for DKMS, as it ensures their messages are accessible and easily understood by a wide audience. To support that goal, DKMS has embraced Kontent.ai’s AI accelerators, which help improve the clarity of their content.

Kay highlights how Kontent.ai’s AI functionality helps optimize their content in two key ways:

• Streamlining content: “We cover complex topics, and these can often lead to long texts or copy. When I see a page that is extremely long, I guide editors on how you can use Kontent.ai’s AI functionality to shorten it.” Kay also emphasized that certain medical content must remain unchanged due to its critical nature, while other types of content can be shortened or even adjusted for tone and voice.
• Generating (sub)headlines: Using the AI to generate clear and compelling headlines not only improves readability but also enhances SEO performance.

These content improvements are especially valuable for mobile optimization. Clear, concise headlines and text are essential when screen space is limited. As Kay recalls from his past experiences: “...you look at it on a mobile phone and you think, ‘I really don’t want to scroll through all that!’”

Now, instead of users facing an intimidating wall of text on their phones, they encounter well-structured content with clear headlines guiding them through critical medical information.

Improving the team efficiency and user experience

Since implementing Kontent.ai, DKMS has seen substantial improvements in their content operations. “We’re saving a lot of time on both content creation and maintenance of content,” said Kay.

The platform’s scheduling capabilities also provide additional efficiency: “The ability to schedule content helps us when we need to publish content on weekends or bank holidays. Since no one has to log in after hours anymore, we’re also saving time and resources.”

Asset management in Kontent.ai has been another source of time savings: “I don’t have to upload an image 100 times. I just go into the asset library and basically drag it to where I need it and then it’s done.”

Along with their strategic campaigns to increase donor registrations and donations, the improved digital experience for users plays a key role: “It’s a very holistic approach. And we can see that our traffic is up. ‘Time on page’ too. ‘Hit requests’, or how many people are actually registering with us, is our biggest KPI—and that’s not going down at all either. On our new site, we’re actually doing better thanks to an improved user experience and a faster, easier-to-use website.”

DKMS’ path forward with the self-service portal

Building on this success, DKMS is now focused on further expanding their use of Kontent.ai, with plans to roll out their self-service portal across multiple countries. Germany has already gone live, with Poland set to follow, and further expansions are in progress.

Through their partnership with Kontent.ai, DKMS has built a digital foundation that supports their life-saving mission today while providing the flexibility to grow and adapt in the years ahead.