Their problem

Through discussions we uncovered that members of the organization were seeking more opportunities for public exposure of their business through their membership and that the organization itself was dealing with an old unwieldy website built on a dated platform that not only caused problems for the organization but left their digital presence barely functional. 

Their website had two core issues:

1. Chamber members didn’t see and realize a tangible value in being listed on the membership directory found on their website.

2. Chamber staff were unable to maintain the website which became a source of pain for the organization to communicate their value proposition online. 

Ultimately my personal challenge was to create a digital presence that left people expecting more from their local Chamber of Commerce while arming them with the tools required to consistently exceed expectations.

The Design Solution

With an upcoming public announcement surrounding upcoming changes to the standards of the organization I lead a team at EvenVision to overhaul their digital presence and provide the Chamber with a product that was not only easier to handle on the backend, but a front-end user experience gave them a distinctively powerful and refined visual presence. 

The websites backend was synced up to robust analytics tooling which provided the organization a unique method for validating the members experience with a front-end. This meant that the organization could now highlight top performing members on their platform and use it as a selling point of membership within the organization with concrete proof of the exposure members were acquired from being a paid member. 

One core component of the website overhaul was to provide more value for the members of the Chamber who were primarily seeking to be listed on the membership directory. I designed a system that provided a more expansive member profile page and went further by differentiating between a Premiere Member profile and that of the standard members. Premiere members are now offered an opportunity to significantly more customizable membership pages to not only help them stand out from the crowd, but to help them convert visitors on the Chamber to customers.

The Results

The new design of the website was met with much applause by the Chamber members when I presented the final product at their annual board of directors meeting. Upon launch the website had improved the user experience on the website in our key categories:

• Return Users + 45%

• Session Duration + 124%

• Click-through (membership pages) +570% 

Future Direction

Prior to my departure from EvenVision I worked to line out a key future improvements for the website which would be designed to ease the Chamber staff’s time on the backend, as well as work to improve the overall membership experience.

1. Rich Webform Submissions - Automatic Populated Member Page - Compared to the manual system currently this would allow new applicants to submit information and follow up with a payment that would automatically trigger the population and launch of their membership profile. Currently this requires a Staff member to copy/paste content from a webform submission into a content type. 

2. Automated Membership Reminders - With hundreds of members in the Chamber, the current process is for a staff member to check excel sheets at the beginning of the week to send out reminders that their membership dues are coming up. The strategy I designed was to leverage known information about a member from the website and send out automatic reminder notices and subsequently send out automatic “would you like to rejoin” notices for members who didn’t renew their membership in the Chamber.