Summary
NAFA is the world’s largest association for individuals managing vehicular fleets and mobility responsibilities for their employers. NAFA focuses on providing world-class certifications, education, and peer-networking programs throughout the year. The association has more than 2,000 individual members who come from all corners of the business world. NAFA’s focus on the success of its members and other individuals involved in the profession is central to its mission as an organization. A major part of this is serving as an online resource for the member community and others looking for information on the association or the profession as a whole.
In 2019, NAFA went through a major shift in the organization, with a change at CEO and other leadership positions. NAFA partnered with Achurch Consulting, who led the effort to identify problem areas with the website and source the right technology partner. Ultimately, Knucklepuck was selected due to our ability to deliver a clear, integrated CMS solution to advance NAFA’s mission.
The Challenge
NAFA recognized that their original site was outdated, time-consuming to update, and expensive to maintain. Not only did they believe they had to redesign it, but they also saw an opportunity to refine the content footprint and present a more organized set of resources for their members.
The previous site leveraged a member database and an events calendar that were not integrated with the AMS. As a result, NAFA was required to manually input all relevant information in multiple places, which often led to incorrect, incomplete, or conflicting content being published to the site.
The complexity significantly hindered content management for NAFA staff as well as its members.
The Solution
Knucklepuck started with an in-depth Discovery process to capture technical requirements and business objectives and establish consensus from NAFA stakeholders regarding the look, feel, and function of the site. Knucklepuck provided demos of key functionality to illustrate how our solution will accomplish NAFA’s goals and fulfill Knucklepuck’s commitment to making content management easy.
As part of Discovery, Knucklepuck’s SEO team led the effort to restructure the Information Architecture (IA) based on an assessment of the desired content footprint and member experience.
Knucklepuck developed a custom WordPress theme, complete with a page builder using blocks specifically designed for the content and features specific to NAFA’s needs.
The page builder was especially helpful in simplifying site content and utilizing rich layouts, which helped improve the member experience and ease of use by the NAFA team. The clean and customizable page builder also allowed NAFA to highlight offerings and events based on what was occurring at the time, rather than showing members outdated or irrelevant information.
Another core component that Knucklepuck created for NAFA was a custom MemberSuite integration for their Members and Events data. Before this, NAFA struggled to use the data due to the lack of integration with the website, and NAFA needed to reduce the errors and inconsistencies that users could potentially find throughout their site.
Knucklepuck’s web development team built an interactive events calendar using information from the now-integrated database with views by list, month, or day. Knucklepuck also included an interactive date range so members can find and plan chapter events well in advance. More importantly, past events are now automatically removed, eliminating the need to manually remove the events from the site.
New Events Calendar page with the MemberSuite database integration
Integrating the database made the new site easier for NAFA to update, while also elevating the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization by providing the most accurate and relevant information available.
The Results
After the new site launched, NAFA finally had a digital resource available for its 2,000+ members and staff to easily access relevant content from the organization.
It was easy to find accurate membership information, educational resources, and upcoming events. Using the Page Builder tool, the site is easy to manage and update and NAFA can easily now spin up new landing pages to promote specific initiatives. The custom MemberSuite integration allows NAFA to keep event and member information manageable and up-to-date.
The best part? NAFA’s members immediately noticed a difference in their user experience on the site. They loved the simplicity and restructuring, and many said it felt more streamlined.
Before
After
