Global Health NOW
Giving global health reporting a home that matches the newsletter readers rely on
Global Health NOW (GHN) is a weekday newsletter and news website from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It delivers essential news, exclusive commentaries, and original reporting on US and global public health to more than 50,000 subscribers in 170 countries. Its mission is to inform the global health conversation, elevate underreported stories, and highlight underrepresented voices.
GHN wanted its website and newsletter to work as one product. The site needed to become the home for GHN's original reporting and commentary, with a clear path for visitors to subscribe, and the newsletter needed to look and feel like the site. Zivtech was already designing and building the flagship website for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and GHN selected Zivtech to redesign both products.
Serving a global audience with a small editorial team
GHN's readers range from public health faculty, students, and health ministry workers to journalists and a curious general public. Some read only the newsletter, some only the website, and many use both. The redesign had to serve each group in the channel they prefer, while making it obvious which content was GHN's own and which was curated from other outlets.
Coverage had also shifted toward US news during the pandemic, and GHN wanted global stories to regain their place. The homepage gave space to features the team could no longer keep current. Every design decision had to hold up for a small editorial team publishing every weekday, so long-term maintainability was a requirement from the start.
Designing the newsletter and website together on a shared component library
Zivtech started with a content inventory, a business analysis and stakeholder survey, and a workshop with the GHN team. That work produced audience personas, a page-level design strategy, a new content model, and an experience strategy brief. The brief set clear priorities: keep GHN free with no paywall and no interruptive donation asks, bring original reporting and emerging voices forward, and show the balance of global and US coverage.
Zivtech designed the website and the Mailchimp newsletter template side by side, presenting each concept across both so GHN could judge the full reader journey from inbox to article. The homepage leads with a featured story, followed by a grid of original reporting and commentary and a prominent subscribe call to action, with topic pages that encourage browsing. Zivtech also redesigned the GHN logo and documented a design system that follows the same Storybook structure as the flagship site.
For the build, Zivtech extracted reusable components from the school's flagship Drupal site into a shared library, and GHN became the first site to use it. Editors gained flexible layouts that stay within GHN's brand, and new features gave GHN's signature series a proper home: a filterable gallery for 100 Objects, a searchable question-and-answer component for the Expert Reality Check, and contributor profiles for GHN's writers. Readers can search by topic and date, and share stories directly to social media. Zivtech migrated GHN's article archive along with its media, contributors, topics, tags, users, and objects, so every story kept its connections without manual retagging. The site and newsletter template were built and tested to WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Testimonial from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
It’s truly hard to express how grateful we are for all of your partnership, smarts, hard work, and support getting us to this moment. You were the partner we needed to get this done and you’ve been wonderful to work with all along the way.
- Lymari Morales, Associate Dean for Communications and Marketing, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
One connected experience, built to last
GHN now runs a website and newsletter that share one design language and put original reporting first. Readers move between the inbox and the site through a consistent experience, with a clear path to subscribe on every visit. Because the site is built on the same component library as the flagship site, GHN's small editorial team can publish in varied layouts without adding maintenance.
Call to action
Looking to bring your newsletter and website together into one connected experience? Zivtech can help. Contact us at sales@zivtech.com to start your transformation journey.
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