Transforming the association’s existing digital presence into a dynamic platform

Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan)

Colleges and Institutes Canada’s new website now presents a seamless user experience that showcases and supports their members, and is a more cohesive representation of their brand.

Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) – formerly The Association of Canadian Community Colleges (ACCC) – is the national and international voice of Canada’s publicly supported colleges, institutes and polytechnics. Its members work with industry and social sectors to train 1.5 million learners of all ages and backgrounds at campuses serving over 3,000 urban, rural and remote communities in Canada. CICan is a not-for-profit association headquartered in Ottawa that also operates in 29 countries via 12 offices around the world.

CICan required a website redesign to move from an inflexible CMS (Joomla) to a more dynamic platform that allowed them the ability to integrate with future ERP and CRM systems. They wanted a seamless user experience to showcase and support their members while at the same time create a more cohesive representation of their brand. Their vision was to be a one-stop shop for their members.

They also wished to transition from a largely text and downloadable reports based website, to one that was more dynamic and responsive to better support their communication and education for employment sections. This involved the integration of Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook; embedding videos, forms, Google maps, email blast (i.e., MailChimp), calendar and events, and Moneris.

When CICan approached bv02 for their website redesign project, their digital footprint consisted of four (4) externally facing multilingual websites, two (2) internally facing websites, and two (2) third-party hosted outpost web services. CICan’s focus was to merge all their sites to one WordPress platform.

bv02‘s greatest challenge was to strategize, design, develop, test and launch the new website within a very tight deadline, to align with their annual conference, while taking into consideration the complexities of the CICan digital footprint, their initial mandate as well as their long term requirements.

bv02 proposed a strategic roadmap solution for CICan that allowed them to accomplish all of their requirements. The first phase of this project involved research and discovery to determine the business requirements of the entire organization and ensure the various pieces of the roadmap plan were at the very least in alignment and, when appropriate, converge and coalesce. This provided much more visibility and reduced the total cost of ownership of the digital ecosystem.

The first phase of the new CICan website launch prioritized over all else to meet their deadline. bv02 designed a new brand for CICan that incorporated their new name and logo, and transformed the site into a more modern, engaging look that reflects the content of their 132 members. The design was approved and rolled out over the course of two weeks. Development in WordPress began shortly after and, in conjunction, over 600 bilingual pages of content were migrated over. The new logo and website is scheduled for reveal on May 27, 2014.

Phase 1 of this project also involved the planning and redesign of the Job Board. While we fully expected to re-launch the job board into the WordPress framework, we wanted to allow for adequate investigation and planning into CRM, ERP systems.

A second phase of the project was introduced that included in-depth requirements gathering, content strategy investigation and development along with member feedback from the launch of the redesigned CICan website and Job Board at their Annual Member Conference. Intranet and CRM research, recommendation and planning is scheduled to take place in this second phase in order to gain a deeper understanding of requirements, priorities, workflow and integrations, resulting in an implementation plan.

Phase 2 also includes the redesign and development of the www.newcomersuccess.ca using the existing framework as a base as well as the design and development of a registration form.

Solutions Provided

www.collegesinstitutes.ca