Founded by Preston Manning, the mission of the Manning Center for Building Democracy is to strengthen conservative democratic infrastructure by developing knowledge, providing education and training, improving communications and networking, and encouraging financial investment to serve the best interests of Canadian citizens.
Overview
JOI Media was approached by the Manning Center to re-design, develop and implement a new website that is interactive, informative and easy to use. Specifically, the site needed to allow for interaction between visitors to the site and the Manning Center, as well as accommodate and stimulate web-savvy visitors who are already actively involved in political discourse through campaign participation, blogs and various social networking outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Flickr.
The Challenge
By becoming an interactive hub and resource for conservatives in Canada, the Manning Center needed to balance a broad range of functionality capabilities (including online donations, RSS feeds, email updates, course registration, conference & event registration, information collection, web 2.0 integrations) with a user-friendly, aesthetic design. Manning Center staff also required a Content Management System (CMS) solution that would make the update process simple, including the addition/removal of new pages and large-file uploading. Due to the Manning Center’s bilingual target audience, the website CMS needed to allow users to switch between English/French content on any page within the site – a very unique challenge to this project.
The Solution
JOI started this project by determining all of the website capabilities, and then standardized the navigation, design consistency, and selecting an appropriate CMS to act as the backbone of the website. We used a number of third party applications that were tailored to each of the Manning Center’s functionality requests including:
- A client relationship management system that will allow the Manning Center to track and organize its contact with its customers. This system was integrated with a direct email marketing tool that collects information from website visitors so that the Manning Center could begin to build a database.
- An event management, planning, and registration software used to create individual event registration pages, hosted under a separate URL.
- Third party social networking application integrations as content sharing via popular social networks were considered part of the overall content distribution strategy for the site.
- A web traffic analytics solution that gives the Manning Center rich insights into its website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
JOI also used its knowledge in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to aid in increasing the visibility of the Manning Center’s website, the services it has to offer, and generating a greater volume of interested traffic to its website.
Results
JOI Media developed an interactive, cost-effective, user-friendly, dynamic and architecturally sound website that will support the Manning Center’s website needs for the next 3 to 5 years. Using our knowledge regarding information architecture coupled with its premier website design talents, JOI Media created an aesthetically superior website that has great navigation, and a wide range of functional capabilities.
By developing the website with a quality CMS, the Manning Center staff will be able to update and monitor the website on an ongoing basis.
Post-Launch Statistics
Within 30 days of launching Manning’s new website, the organization had 327 new members sign up to receive free email updates on the latest news, research publications and upcoming events from the Manning Centre. The new members contributed to a 12% increase to its member base.
Over this same period the website received:
- 4,632 website visitors, an increase of +345%
- 1,200 returning visitors, an increase of +235%
- An average daily traffic increase of +700%
- +25,700 webpage views
- An average viewing time of 13.2 minutes, an increase of +375%
- Direct traffic accounted for +48% of visitors
- Search engine queries accounted for +39% of visitors
- Referred website accounted for +13% of visitors
Over a one month period since launching its website, the Manning Center has experienced a significant increase across all interactive features within the website including member sign-ups, event registration, donations, and its social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter.
