Did you know that standard iMIS licensing permits you to create as many new websites as you like? Were you aware each additional website added to your iMIS system can use all of the tools and configurations you already have in your main website?
If your organization uses iMIS chances are very good that you are using the RiSE CMS (Content Management System) for your website or at the very least for your membership portal. Did you know that standard iMIS licensing permits you to create as many new websites as you like? Were you aware each additional website added to your iMIS system can use all of the tools and configurations you already have in your main website? This article explores some of these possibilities and provides a real world example for the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys Wisconsin Chapter website.
One of the key ways to maximize the value of the RiSE platform is to create additional websites for each of your subsidiaries, major events or key business units. Examples of additional websites include: 1) Your Foundation, 2) Chapters, 4) PACs, 5) Annual Conference and 6) Key Committees or Sections. This recent example we implemented at John Consulting for the NAELA WI Chapter you can see here: https://www.naela.org/WINAELA
Branding & Design
This chapter website has its own unique website template designed by our Phil Gosier and implemented by me Joseph John. It is based on the “Great Barrier Reef” out of the box template but as you can see we essentially reworked it from top to bottom. Since the national association has a strong identity and well defined style guide, the amount of effort to design and implement this template was about 1/3rd the effort of a typical website template. Subsidiaries like chapters also tend to have less content and thus the amount of stylized content is reduced requiring significantly less effort to implement. Now that NAELA has a beautiful new designed website template they can offer it to a dozen other chapters for very little effort swapping out logos and get a huge scalability from the initial modest investment.
Leveraging National Assets
NAELA like many iMIS customers of a national brand has many implemented features they can offer to all subsidiaries that are using the RiSE platform with very little effort. For example their highly designed Member Directory featuring a radius search plug-in from ISG can be added to the WI Chapter website by simply copying the national pages and updating the IQA to limit to WI chapter members. You can see it here: Find a Lawyer – Location (naela.org). Another example is the leadership directory that dynamically pulls the current chapter leadership from iMIS: Wisconsin Chapter Board (naela.org). In addition to these all chapter events, and even chapter store products can be offered to chapters by filtering the products & events that pertain to the chapter. Also, we created a new copy of the individual and corporate profiles used on the national level for the WI chapter so they have their own set of pages that can be configurable to their own needs. In a nutshell, all of the effort creating enhanced features as well as standard out of the box RiSE features at the national level are available to chapters or other subsidiaries with very little effort if you build those sites in iMIS.
Content Libraries
Additional websites added to a national organization RiSE system for subsidiaries can of course use the inherent content tagging and search capabilities to create online libraries of content. The national organization can make this content relevant on their website with a relevance of 0 – 100%. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement since combining the websites into one platform at the desired relevance levels will boost both entities SEO scores. This is the starting point/prototype of the NAELA WI Chapter “Fair Hearing” library: ALL Fair Hearing Decisions – List (naela.org). This prototype only has 4 articles so far but you can get the sense of how it would work with hundreds or thousands of articles from potentially several libraries. Also you can configure these so the underlying articles requires chapter membership thus increasing the value of national members joining this chapter. A win-win all around.
Other Considerations
As mentioned before this website is still in a prototype phase but once it is live, we plan to migrate their own custom domain name www.winaela.org to their website. The RiSE platform will support different website domain names in the same iMIS system. With any product in the system, you can setup a new entity for the subsidiary in iMIS with corresponding GL Accounts meant to record revenue and expenses for those entities. With staff licenses at a premium in iMIS, it is important to note that you can allow designated public users the ability to edit designated content using “surf-to-edit” capabilities to modify RiSE content. Also the iMIS Communities platform does allow for designating non-staff users as community administrators. The Community platform is a useful collaboration tool that can be fully managed by non-staff account you designate from within the leadership of your subsidiary organizations.
If you are a national entity that uses the iMIS RiSE platform, there are many benefits of offering subsidiaries a website on your platform. The latest EMS version is optimized for high levels of scalability allowing for up to hundreds of websites and all of the features you have available on the platform can be readily shared. Creating multiple websites on your platform not only elevates the SEO of your subsidiaries but it also increases the visibility of the national brand through the website relevance settings you can control. Content created within any website on the platform can be shared across websites via content tagging. To learn more about how your organization can maximize the benefits of your RiSE platform email me directly at: joe@johnconsulting.net for a free consultation.
