We have all read our share of articles that speak of Digital Transformation as a concept. Today we look at a real world example of digital transformation in action using iMIS EMS.
The National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys (NAELA) is an industry leading member-based academy with the very noble purpose of protecting elders and those with special needs. With a commitment to excellence, ambitious designs in hand and an eagerness to leverage the extensibility of native iMIS EMS, we completed delivery of the NAELA website in May 2023. After the launch, the feedback from NAELA’s constituents was extremely positive with all expectations met or exceeded. CEO C. Grace Whiting, JD provided us with a testimonial reflecting her perspective:
“We needed a website refresh to help our more than 4,000 members quickly navigate to relevant information while still building trust with consumers looking for lawyers with elder law or special needs law expertise. John Consulting was able to help us find a happy middle ground. The effort included a thorough business review of the usability of the site, improvements to how it worked and its visual presentation. We incorporated insights from our Board of Directors, members, and website users. When the final effort was revealed at our May Board of Directors meeting, I was met with a round of applause. This group isn't easy to please, and they were overjoyed to have a new site that represents the professionalism they bring to their work every day.”
C. Grace Whiting, JD
Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys
We have all read our share of articles that speak of Digital Transformation as a concept. Today we provide a real world example of digital transformation in action using iMIS EMS. You can read more about the NAELA website design component of this project here. In this article, I will describe how we implemented NAELA’s vision in iMIS EMS.
Advanced Design
Mega Menu with Content - The designed mega menu contains a link to every key topic home page. This is achieved by adding a content area to the website and attaching it to the menu with simple jQuery on page load.
Designed Content - Over 12 distinct designed pages each with many designed content components were constructed with new bootstrap 5 HTML & CSS. Taking the time to create reusable design HTML content adds a much richer user experience as you can see on these pages: Who We Are , Strategic Plan, and Resources.
Integrated Topics - Extended product definition to include topics and categories using stand-alone panels. Then we mapped those to RiSE content tags. The resulting topic home pages include both tagged lists of content and store products related to the same topic.
Mobile Friendly - As part of the design process, extra mobile screens were delivered ensuring a rich & functional mobile experience.
Advertiser Friendly - Special attention was paid to professional advertisement delivery. Design features include ad image aspect ratio image enforcement so no cropping, advertising header included and dual advertising boxes for each placement to make ads mobile friendly.
Sticky Navigation - Notice on scroll the “sticky navigation bar” which is on trend these days. Incorporating some basic jQuery in the website template dynamically adds CSS classes to page components to make this happen.
The Law Library
Professional societies like NAELA realize that content is King but only if people can find it! Together we partnered with FUSE Search to create the NAELA Law Library as a key feature of this new website roll out. Using state of the art external search collection technology, NAELA indexed for search extensive data from iMIS including events, products, committees, members and more. This iMIS data was mapped and integrated with selected website content in RiSE as well as their Higher Logic Community website and marketing platform.
During our collaboration with FUSE Search, John Consulting aided in expanding the capabilities of the iMIS integration to include the option to filter RiSE content for search based on a content tag "searchable". This provides total control over what is searchable from RiSE. Additionally, we provided user defined content data which is used in both search filters and additional output detail. NAELA has been extremely pleased with this product and the feedback they are receiving from constituents for this new Law Library has been stellar.
Find a Lawyer
NAELA’s Find A Lawyer has always been an important public service for the elderly and disabled plus a very important member benefit. This care and focus over the years has elevated it to a top 10 “Find a Lawyer” keyword ranking in the English speaking world. Pretty remarkable indeed!
Radius Search - Radius searches can be complicated and often require maintaining zip code data that is always changing. After reviewing available options, NAELA purchased the ISG Radius Search product. This product integrates directly into iMIS as business objects which can be pulled into IQA (iMIS Query Tool).
Designed IQA - The rest of this search is a highly styled out of the box IQA we designed and implemented. A prime example of how configurable RiSE can be out of the box.
Improved Performance - On the first iteration, we noticed poor performance due to the complicated nature of conditional logic needed to blend members and associated additional locations. To address this issue, a new stand-alone panel was created in iMIS to hold the needed data with hourly, incremental updates using the CSI Data Management Suite. Now the performance is very good both making constituents very happy and improving SEO scores.
Search Engine Optimization
Hiring a firm with expertise to conduct a SEO full audit & analysis is the best way to measure the success of your digital transformation program. The iMIS EMS system has many major improvements to help improve SEO. All organizations today should invest in measuring their web presence. Analyzing NAELA.org in conjunction with 5 competitors & industry authorities, the final SWOT analysis revealed many key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It also outlined an action plan for continuous improvement. SEO analysis includes research and deliverables in 4 major areas.
Keyword Research - Using information gathered by Google Analytics and used in conjunction with executive client input on high valued keywords, we compare and contrast keyword rankings along with identified competitors or industry authorities in an iterative process.
On-Page Research - Enterprise SEO packages provide detailed scans of websites to measure how well they perform. Deliverables highlight specific pages and assets where performance is not optimal and includes competitor performance.
Off-Page Research - This provides a complete picture of who is referencing your website and what is your authority as compared to others. This includes link backs, mentions and social media mentions. We also advise and support client management of negative associations that potentially hurt rankings or tarnish the brand.
Technical Research - These site-wide scans reveal all errors and warnings including crawlability and indexing, linking problems, image tags, titles and meta descriptions, performance issues, duplicated content and more. A detailed action plan is delivered with page level details.
Quick and easy quarterly rescans with deliverables are provided to measure on-going progress and identify new opportunities or threats. Continuous improvement is the name of the game.
Membership Improvements
Just like many organizations with individual based membership, it has been traditionally challenging to implement additional associated contacts.
With iMIS EMS, the flexibility existed to make a paradigm shift by allowing individual members to add their own agency record and manage their team with iMIS roster management. Individual attorney members can now add and manage both locations and paralegals in iMIS out of the box. The attorneys are fully in charge with all related contact billing going to them as the agency administrator. Experience listings were added to a new multi-instance contact panel with the registration fee as an optional section subscription. The Advanced iMIS Forms module provided the added flexibility, when needed, to ensure interfaces work well, look professional and obey all business rules. Data driven hidden IQAs also provided an added measure of control over the data integrity, flow and process.
Attaining complete digital transformation is a goal organizations achieve in incremental steps over longer periods of time. The exciting part is now with iMIS EMS, nearly all desired transformations can be implemented out of the box.
To learn more about how you can digitally transform your organization using iMIS or to get samples of techniques used in this article, please Contact Us for a free consultation.
