Every year, Oregon Independent College Foundation (OICF) raises and distributes well over $1.4 million dollars to students at Oregon’s top ten private colleges and universities. However, as donations dip and costs for “luxuries” such as printed catalogs rise, OICF recognized a need to develop a stronger web presence.
These printed catalogs posed two problems for OICF: Print costs were close to $20,000 each year, and they quickly became inaccurate as colleges changed information, statistics, and news (often times just after they went to print). With the new website, they can make these changes in real-time with a website that can be updated anytime through a content management system.
The Old OICF Website:
The previous website went through the hands of multiple interns who helped keep the website up-to-date as best as possible. OICF used Dreamweaver to manage the site’s content, but doing so presented some challenges.
See, Dreamweaver is intended to help businesses design and publish websites – not necessarily update content. As such, the OICF website’s navigation and look was inconsistent from page to page. This makes it difficult for the website visitor to find the information they want.
Keeping the OICF website up-to-date is critical to their mission and success, so we made it easy for them to do so.
The New OICF Website:
There were three key elements OICF desired from their new website:
- The ability to communicate effectively to three groups of people:
- Students
- Donors
- Board Members
- Maintain a consistent and professional website with updated content.
- Make use of social media
1. Effective Communication
At the heart of any website is the ability to communicate a message clearly and effectively so that people can make decisions. After all, the website is where people mentally make the decision to buy the product or service. Recognizing this fact, OICF moved forward to create a site that:
- Gave students up-to-date access to the information they need about the participating schools.
- Showed donors and potential donors the value OICF provides to Oregon’s future business and civic leaders.
- Enabled board members to communicate with one another through a private (password protected) intranet website.
2. Maintain a Professional Website
The website was designed by Cindy Classen (of Classen Design) who designs most of the print material for OICF. The homepage of her design brings with it the large beautiful photographs of the ten schools OICF works with. Internally though, the website focuses on delivering valuable content.
And this is really the heart of this project – to make it easy to maintain the vast amount of information, easily; and without worrying about creating inconsistent pages. The content management system (CMS) separates the content from the design – so OICF staff can log in and make changes as needed to the content and not have to worry about ruining the look of the site.
3. Make Use of Social Media
Businesses and organizations that make use of social media are seeing many benefits. OICF knew their target audience was online and wanted to take advantage of using these tools to raise awareness. We did this through adding a blog to the website and highlighting the pre-existing Facebook Fan Page. Now, anytime a new blog post is added to the OICF website, it is automatically added to the OICF Facebook Fan Page as well.
Why add the same content to two locations? Simple, visitors aren’t just using the “corporate website” as the go to place for information – they use many other “hubs” such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. By cross-posting this information, the visitor can find and connect with the business how they want.