Best Associations Website

America’s leading advocate for quality rental housing, The National Apartment Association (NAA) is a federation of 170 state and local affiliates, comprised of more than 63,000 members representing more than 6.8 million apartment homes throughout the United States and Canada. Its mission is to serve the interests of multifamily housing owners, managers, developers, and suppliers, in order to better serve the rental housing needs of the public. NAA wanted to transition from a clunky backend CMS and an outdated design to a powerful, userfriendly CMS and a worldclass look. We met with stakeholders from every department in the organization to hear all parties and formulate consensus to the new website direction. Based on these meetings, we made strategic recommendations from brand design and technology to better manage and support the site. One of the biggest decisions the team made, at our recommendation, was to switch from SharePoint to Drupal 7 leveraging Drupal Commons 3 to manage the collaboration aspects for the NAA's member base of 65 thousand people. The new NAA site was launched in May 2013 without exceeding budget or timeline. We moved the NAA from using SharePoint as a CMS and transitioned them onto Drupal. We also configured Drupal so the NAA website, affiliate sites, and conference sites are managed from a single Drupal installation. The NAA website was the first site with Acquia Drupal Commons 3 to launch allowing for robust collaboration between members. Qualitatively, the NAA team has received a lot of complimentary feedback. Members have commented that it’s now much easier to find information and are thrilled the Connect site is incorporated into the main website. Quantitatively, the NAA has increased overall website traffic by 11.5% over last year. Lastly, unique visitors is up 34%, page views up 12% this year and trends upwards.

Contributors:

Director of Client Services:	Darrin Samaha
Director of Technology:	Jason Schaffer
Web Manager:	Julie Barden
Online Resource Manager:	Mary Scott

BLUE CODA

Location: United States