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Background & Goals

One of the oldest and most prestigious bar associations wanted to know, what does it take to be a global digital leader? A proven education and member services provider serving in 100+ markets did not prioritize digital capabilities.

As a result, the mindset, vision, and execution of member services varied widely across functions and regions of this association. Therefore, this organization sought out a partner to implement a new AMS to improve customer experience and staff efficiency across the entire organization.

Challenges

The Legacy AMS that this association used was highly customized, and any system error could lead to a loss of time and money. Furthermore, the legacy platform would not force updates, leading users to fall more than one or two system releases behind. The bar association had pre-selected Fonteva as the desired AMS for its innovation, appealing user interface, and regular release schedule, but needed an implementation partner that not only understood their business but had a great deal of experience serving the association industry.

This association was looking for a new AMS vendor and implementation partner that would provide:

A universal look and feel across all organization tools (i.e., website, LMS)
Integrations with new and existing organizational tools such as Hubspot and WordPress
Ease of access for new and existing members to view and pay invoices and dues
A platform with more robust reporting metrics and membership data
Personalized training for the internal team

Solution

fusionSpan and the association worked together to conduct a full review of the Legacy AMS platform and processes, then complete a full discovery of a successful AMS implementation strategy. fusionSpan led the Fonteva implementation and system configuration to build a system that met the association’s needs.

Additionally, fusionConnect helped lead to integration between Fonteva, the Learning Management System (CE21), and their website hosting platform, WordPress.

Solution Highlights

fusionSpan used custom fusionConnect for seamless integrations
Unified look and feel for members across all platforms
Increased payment functionality and reporting for members and staff
A more accessible platform for staff to learn and manage internally

Results

The association’s Fonteva implementation allowed them to deliver an improved member experience. The team can now provide a seamless experience between their AMS (Fonteva), Website (WordPress), and LMS (CE21).

Additionally, the AMS Fonteva has been much more staff-friendly and allows them to provide robust metrics and data regarding their internal team’s payments and invoices. Thanks to fusionSpan, the association has offered their members an improved UI/UX experience that seamlessly integrates with all platforms, all while providing secure platforms and excellent support!

Background & Goals

The American Conference on Governmental Industrial Hygiene, or ACGIH®, is a 501(c)(3) charitable scientific organization that advances occupational and environmental health. For over 80 years, ACGIH® has been respected for its dedication to the industrial hygiene and occupational and environmental health and safety communities.

As an organization that is on a journey of growth and innovation, ACGIH sought a partner to collaborate with its team to build a website that would meet modern website standards, provide web accessibility, and most importantly, easily disseminate educational content to its members.

Challenges:

ACGIH was looking for a new website that would provide:

Upgraded architecture, improved functionality, and an improved visual design that spoke to its members
Accessible web content to support those with disabilities and make a social impact
An easier way for members to retrieve educational content
Easy integration with their pending Fonteva AMS implementation

Solution:

fusionSpan and ACGIH worked together to conduct a full discovery process to formulate a successful website and content strategy, which fully addressed ACGIH’s educational, visual requirements, and user expectations. The collective team decided that the WordPress content management system (CMS) would be the best fit for the project as it met ACGIH’s requirements and was particularly intuitive for ACGIH’s staff to update and maintain. Additionally, fusionSpan’s custom and easily configurable modules would give the ACGIH team the freedom to provide content to members more effectively.

Solution Highlights

fusionSpan Custom Developed Theme and Modules
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
wpBakery
aXe Accessibility Checker

Results:

The web redesign project brought ACGIH:

Clear and legible navigation
Increased functionality for our users
A visually-appealing and user-centric website with improved user profiles
A user-friendly CMS that gives ACGIH staff the freedom to create and update content efficiently.

“fusionSpan provided us the technical and creative support we needed throughout our website project. I was thoroughly impressed with their customer service and timeliness throughout the course of the project. As a result, we have a website that is attractive, easy to navigate, and can serve as the core for all of the knowledge we disseminate to our members and customers.”

Jessica Dominguez
Director of Membership & Communications

Summary

Boarding schools in North America have experienced a continuous, 15-year decline in their primary enrollment categories. To combat that trend, The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) launched the North American Boarding Initiative’s “Ready for More?” campaign on July 1, 2016. The initiative’s purpose is to answer a strategic imperative from heads of school to address the decline in domestic enrollment for high- and full-paying families.

The North American Boarding Initiative (NABI) focused communication based on the content pillars of world-class academics, a 360-degree network of adult support, and the opportunity to try everything. Using Pardot, integrated with Salesforce, they were able to achieve their goals 6 months ahead of schedule.

About

The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) serves college-preparatory boarding schools in the United States, Canada, and around the globe. The Association leads a domestic and international effort to promote awareness and understanding of boarding schools and to expand the applicant pool for member institutions. TABS is the comprehensive, indispensable resource for educators seeking training, research, guidance, and support on all issues pertaining to the residential school experience. TABS is the voice for independent boarding schools, their historical contribution to our world, and the current and compelling benefits of living and learning in an academic community.

Challenged TABS Faced

The decline in boarding enrollment amounted to a $15 million net tuition revenue decline for boarding schools who were members of TABS. The decline centered around international enrollment, resulting in the initiative designed to increase domestic enrollment. Even after the campaign was launched, TABS faced the general perception that boarding schools are reform school alternatives for students. Premium news outlets repeatedly refused to publish positive stories about boarding schools and the outcomes of their students. Additionally, while boarding schools had a fair amount of brand awareness, consideration of and intent to send a child to boarding school was lower than 2% within the target audience. TABS needed to convincingly advertise the value proposition of boarding schools to families who could afford it but never considered boarding as an education option for their children.

How fusionSpan Helped

Sheila Mitchell, VP for Market Growth and Deputy Managing Director of NABI, previously used Pardot, HubSpot, and Marketo, but preferred Pardot and chose fusionSpan as her implementation partner.

Sheila wanted to use Pardot:

To use logic to build a nurture sequence
To segment audiences
To review analytics at a granular level

On a daily basis, Sheila receives emails from Pardot highlighting which prospects have most recently interacted with the website or completed a form. Due to the success of the campaign, she has limited time to get into the granular details of email sends. Instead, she utilizes fusionSpan to help create, test, and send emails to prospects. The Digital Strategy team at fusionSpan recently helped redesign how email preferences are managed and capture why prospects unsubscribe from emails. fusionSpan also created landing pages for historical emails that are part of an email series so that prospects can easily go back and review what they may have missed. Overall, Pardot allows for personalized communications, which enabled TABS to maintain high engagement rates among its target audience.

Results

NABI launched a new website, ReadyForMore.com, and simultaneously launched Salesforce and Pardot to capture and nurture leads.

Looking at the data, the North American Boarding saw:

A 2% overall increase in enrollment of the target audience from open day 2016 to present
An 8% increase in enrollment of 9th-grade domestic boarders, a critical entry point for the majority of boarding schools
Stemmed the 15-year decline in domestic enrollment. Without TABS, based on previous attrition, there would have been a 3% decrease in enrollment.

As a bonus, by having Pardot and Salesforce integrated, major data governance issues were covered and she had high confidence in the reliability of the data. She views Pardot and Salesforce as “sustainable platforms that are robust and stand the test of time.”

Client Testimonial

Sheila recommends that associations spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of implementation to thoroughly develop nurture engagement programs based on segmented lists.

Sheila welcomes the strategic guidance that fusionSpan provides and the Digital Strategy team is truly appreciative of how she pushes the boundaries with her ideas and desire to use the full capabilities of Pardot.

“fusionSpan listens, understands my needs, responds quickly, and gives me more than what I ask for. They are a true partner and I value their capabilities.” – Sheila Mitchell

Summary

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) made the strategic decision in 2016 to funnel all customer interactions, including event registrations, through their customer system of record in order to compile a 360 view of their individual customers. With 75 regional offices hosting hundreds of events a year, the existing manual process of onsite paper registrations that were collected and entered by staff after the event was a cumbersome lift for staff. After exploring multiple options, ULI enlisted fusionSPAN to create an elegant onsite payment solution that is intuitive, supported by existing hardware, and mobilized ULI to move away from the paper registration forms and into the digital age.

About ULI

The Urban Land Institute was originally incorporated on December 14, 1936, as an independent, nonprofit, research and education organization under the name of the National Real Estate Foundation for Practical Research and Education. Currently, ULI is the oldest and largest network of cross-disciplinary real estate and land use experts in the world. ULI’s mission is to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating and sustaining thriving communities worldwide, and is led by both a professional staff and committed member volunteers.

Challenges ULI Faced

ULI’s existing registration process was fully manual, involving a distributed paper form for members to write in the required information. The staff collected the form for manual entry in their data system at a later date, causing delays in data entry and payment processing. Furthermore, the ULI organization did not have the ability to process international and multi-currency payments. Overall, this process inhibited the professional appeal ULI wanted to portray to its attendees.

How fusionSPAN Helped

It was important to ULI that the new automated process was integrated with their existing systems, customer facing in terms of styling, and created new efficiencies for their staff and event attendees. In order to accomplish these requirements, fusionSPAN recommended an onsite registration process that was designed and built on top of ULI’s existing AMS (NetForum).

The goal was to improve customer engagement, data entry and process payment within a timeframe of three months. From the project start, key players included fusionSPAN Staff, ULI’s IT staff, the Customer Success team at ULI, and multiple district councils.

Tasks critical to this project’s success included:

- Business Objectives and IT Requirements were documented and measured
- A phased implementation to ensure user satisfaction and equipment durability
- Addressed “the person problem” – making sure registrants and staff were able to follow the process with ease and gather the required information
- fusionSPAN created documentation and SOPs for staff

fusionSPAN and ULI opted for a phased implementation approach in order to iterate based on user feedback. The new onsite registration process would be rolled out to a small group of users, and then feedback would be collected and implemented as necessary.

Results

The onsite registration was rolled out successfully and met with approval from both ULI staff and event attendees. ULI stated that the new process has made the registration process more efficient, easier for customers, and given the staff time back with the removal of a manual data entry process.

The registration process is now solely done on computers with a clean, easy to understand interface without a delay in the processing of credit card payments. Additionally, ULI has the new capability to process international and multi-currency payments. Despite the push to postpone or move events to a virtual interface due to COVID-19, ULI has seen hundreds of users access this interface throughout the year with great success.

Client Testimonial

Adam Smolyar, Chief Marketing & Membership Officer of ULI on fusionSPAN:

“fusionSPAN has been an invaluable partner to ULI. They brought the technical expertise to address our NetForum Enterprise development and integration needs, while their business knowledge of associations has ensured we are taking a strategic approach to technology. fusionSPAN seamlessly integrated with our team and ultimately enabled us to meet our aggressive timelines. We would highly recommend fusionSPAN and we look forward to continuing partnership with their organization.”

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