Building a Content System for Wellness & Rewards Programs

THE BACKGROUND

Highmark offers a Wellness & Rewards platform that incentivizes healthy behavior through activities, challenges, coaching programs, screenings, and educational content.

THE PROBLEM

As the platform grew, content accumulated the way it usually does: piece by piece, team by team, with no one owning the whole picture. Internal teams were spending more and more time reviewing content, but without a shared framework for what "good" looked like, every review was its own negotiation.

This inconsistency was also a problem for members. They needed to be able to read activity content and quickly identify what the task was, why they should care about it, and what they needed to do to earn credit. This information was often hard to find and understand. Descriptions varied wildly in length, structure, and reading level, identical concepts were described differently from program to program, and members often had to work through complicated completion requirements just to understand how to earn a reward.

COMPLICATIONS

Content built by many hands.Every program had its own history and its own author. There was no single source of truth for how an activity should be described, so consistency had to be built from scratch, not enforced from an existing standard.

A writing problem that wasn't really a writing problem. It would have been easy to start rewriting descriptions one at a time. But the real issue was structural: instructions buried in marketing copy, inconsistent naming, duplicative content, and unclear completion requirements kept showing up across programs that had never worked together. Fixing individual pages wouldn't have fixed the pattern.

Accessibility and consistency debt. Some of the oldest content predated any accessibility review at all, which meant the audit had to catch not just tone and clarity issues but also legal compliance gaps.

THE PROCESS

Step 1: Content audit. I reviewed activity content across all of our reward programs to identify recurring patterns, rather than treating each piece as a one-off fix.

Step 2: Content architecture. I built a repeatable structure based on the job each piece of content needed to do: Value (why it matters), Action (what to do), and Qualification (how credit is earned). This became the foundation for all future activity content.

Step 3: Governance. I documented naming conventions, sentence-case standards, structural expectations, accessibility requirements, and review criteria, so the framework could hold up without a writer touching every future update.

THE IMPACT

The result was a shared content framework that improved consistency across programs, made stakeholder reviews faster and more efficient, and reduced the amount of time spent debating wording. It also gave the platform a governance foundation built to scale as new programs were added.