Hot Off the Press

Project CURE Website Muscles Through Bad Economy

Brent Weaver - Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The economy is on everyone's mind. Companies and nonprofits alike are worried, marketing dollars are shrinking, businesses are going under, grants and donations are disappearing, and sales are declining.

My opinion is that you can let this attitude and climate affect you or you can put your horse-blinders on and focus on your business or organization and step it up a notch, actually a few notches. Become more innovative, find new partners, and use new, cutting-edge tools to leverage your competitive advantage in a harder market.

PROJECT C.U.R.E., a Denver-based nonprofit organization, did just this. 

PROJECT C.U.R.E. contacted us last fall looking to step up their web presence and organize their internal system of handling inquiries, customers, and reporting. The initial requests were pretty simple and in common with what most nonprofits are looking for, but few find:

  • Professional design
  • Better usability
  • Clearer content
  • More search engine visibility
  • Easier way of updating content
  • Website metrics and reporting

We were happy to oblige.

Initial conversations, with Doug Jackson, PROJECT C.U.R.E.'s President, along with staff and Leanna Clark of Schenkein, revolved around wanting more traffic from search engines. However, when viewing their current website and after installing Google Analytics - it was clear to us that more traffic wouldn't cut it.

We needed to restructure their content in order to make it easier to understand what PROJECT C.U.R.E. was about and maximize ROI for traffic they were already getting. SEO would come later.

The before...

The website used marketing related terms to identify programs like "Procure", "Corps", and "Clinics". We found from traffic analysis that these main navigation areas were not getting any traffic. Visitors were hitting other areas on the left hand navigation that were suppose to be sub-pages and were less important to the organization educating visitors.

A key complaint was how much time employees were spending on the phone talking to and directing customers to the right place.

The website should have been taking care of much of this education.

During our discover phase we were able to completely restructure content, navigation, and the overall website sitemap to better direct visitors into their appropriate "buckets" before they ever filled out a form or dialed a number. This way we could maximize on traffic already pouring into the website and make operations more efficient.

After...

As you can see, the resulting design, besides being much more professional, is a lot more clear and asks less energy of the visitor and gives them more concise options of what to do next.

The great part about how we build websites too is that not only is content easier to see for visitors, but for search engines too. The design is 100% CSS driven and each page can have its own title along with any META data that is relevant. Additionally, during our discovery phase, we did a Keyword Analysis Report to see what keywords PROJECT C.U.R.E. should be naturally using throughout their website to improve SEO.

Never judge a book by its cover though . . . what makes the website really move is what is under the hood.

Wrapping it up

After two months, we have noticed that...

  • Increased time per visit by 35%
  • Increased pageviews by 25%
  • Decreased bounce rate by 20%
  • CURE Clinics previously did not get any web inquiries, now are averaging 70 per month
  • Increased newsletter subscriptions
  • Made employees happier (feel free to call them and ask how they like their new website)
  • Exceeded expectations with organization President Doug Jackson

So by investing in new innovative ways to market and operate their organization, PROJECT C.U.R.E. is pushing harder and getting results that will plow through any tough times.

Visit the new website at www.projectcure.org.

Scholarship for Athletes Gets a More Powerful Website

Brent Weaver - Saturday, April 18, 2009

Long time client, Scholarship for Athletes (SFA), recently made the upgrade to our HotPress Platform business management system. SFA is the only consulting firm for student athletes and their familes. Essentially they act as a sports agent for high school students looking to pursue collegiate athletics for scholarships.

Ross Greenstein, SFA's President & CEO, is a strong believer that technology, specifically web-technology, is a key ingredient to his company being successful. We have consistently provided services to streamline his business operations including:

  • Content Management System (CMS)
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Email Marketing

Prior to the Platform being available, all of these services were separate applications, each requiring their own login, training, and support. The applications did not "talk" to each other seamlessly. Now that we have upgraded the SFA website to the Platform, everything is integrated and in one central management system.

Now, some of this might start to sound like tech talk, so lets take a step back and talk in some business terms as to what we accomplished here.

First, you need to be able to keep the content on your site fresh.

Content is how you tell people what you do and what you are all about. It might be a page with text, images, and video. Content's goal is to inform your potential customer about what you do. In Ross' case, inform high school athletes and their families about the challenges that lie ahead and what SFA does to alleviate these challenges and get their students the best scholarships possible.

In order to make sure his customer's have the best information, Ross needs to update his site often to keep his content fresh and interesting. Great quality content with service information, testimonials, and industry leading partners, begins to establish credibility with his customer.

This is how easy it is for Ross to update pages on his site:

Second, capture information from your customer to contact them.

Once a visitor has filled out a form on the website, an email gets generated and sent to a member of SFA's staff. They need to have basic contact information along with anything else that is relevant for new potential customers. Our system automatically grows your database, so anytime a customer interacts with the website, we add that to their record.

This part is the Customer Relationship Management portion of the Platform:

Third, follow-up with your customer with email marketing.

Like I said in the previous section, Ross' customer database grows automatically, so when it comes time to send emails to his customers, he can do that in the Platform as well. He can send out general blasts, or he can segment his customers based on information that they have disclosed through one of his forms or a staff member has notated in their customer record.

Here is an example of how the email system works:

In conclusion . . .

Upgrading SFA to our HotPress Platform has streamlined their website updates, customer data gathering, and email marketing into one system that is easy to use. The possibilities are endless on how you can use the tool set to benefit your business.

 

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