The Association of Municipalities of Ontario reduce maintenance costs by leveraging their Minicom portal.

Background

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario is a non-profit organization with member municipalities representing 95% of Ontario's population. Its mandate is to support and enhance strong and effective municipal government in Ontario.

The Challenge

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario needed to refresh and enhance their Municom presence (www.municom.com), which acts as an informational portal for members interested in issues affecting Ontario municipalities. From the beginning, the Association had administered the site using internal resources. During initial planning for a site update, we discovered that membership payment was a manual process requiring members to mail cheques through the post. Furthermore, site content management was difficult and time consuming because it required programming to be completed through the use of development tools. As the volume of information on the site continued to grow, updating was becoming increasingly difficult to manage with the limited internal resources available.

It was clear that the cost in upkeeping became unmanageable and in parallel the portal wasn't meeting the Association's communication objectives. Municom required improvements to facilitate member ease of use, the addition of new community features, and most important, the simplification of site administration and membership.

The Solution

The orchestrated solution achieved the stated objectives for the Association's online presence while leveraging as much of their initial investment as possible. We determined that the underlying infrastructure needed to change, in order to provide a scalable and flexible platform for future growth. Key to the transition would be to ensure it was completed without inconveniencing current members. To address the content management requirements of a non-profit organization with a limited budget, the customization of site-specific, web-based content management tools were planned. The tools would provide a cost effective solution which was advanced enough to handle the multiple content formats on the site, yet simple enough for a non-technical user to publish content using a web browser, source documents and cut-and-paste techniques.

Working with their web administration team, we developed a number of innovative solutions that addressed the key objectives of the redesign:

• Streamlined Web site content updating through adoption of a customized version of Web Front's simple Web-based content management tools
• Online credit card payment for membership payment and renewals
• Migration to a new Web infrastructure with no inconvenience to members
• Enhanced site navigation and access to information
• Added site community features allowing visitors to gauge the reaction of others on important Municipal government issues through online polling
  

Important to the project was whether the updates to Web site maintenance approach could deliver measurable business value. For the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Web Front demonstrated Return on Investment (ROI) through:

• Increased membership retention
• Lower site maintenance costs (using existing resources to maintain the site, doing more in less time and taking on additional responsibilities)
• Lower membership payment administration costs
• Improved customer service