The Client 

NAA is a nonprofit organization representing nearly 2,000 newspapers and their multiplatform businesses in the U.S. and Canada. NAA members include daily and non-daily newspapers, other print publications and online products. Headquartered near Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Va., the Association focuses on the major issues that affect today's newspaper industry: public policy/legal matters, advertising revenue growth and audience development across the medium's broad portfolio of products and digital platforms.

The Challenges 

The association had changed quite a bit since the last time Roundedcube assisted NAA with a redesign and development. This time around, it was time freshen up the image, turn the focus on its members, and also streamline and consolidate the operations side of things. To top it off, NAA was ready to implement a brand new AMS (Avectra) and that required close integration with the website's CMS (Sitecore) and its blog engine (Telligent Community).

The Solutions

This complete overhaul started with a focus on strategy. Resulting in several discovery sessions with many stakeholders to iron out a best-fit goals and requirements by which to measure success of the project. We also re-architected the content structure through several card sorting exercises resulting in a more member-focused, intuitive, consolidated navigation structure. While the creative team was busy working on the association's new brand and the user experience, the technology team was determining the content model as well as the integration points with Avectra, Telligent Community as well as the hierarchy necessary for a multi-site management platform. Our online marketing team then consulted NAA on the best way to leverage web analytics to monitor usage and make smart adjustments; and best practices in SEO to continually drive more traffic to the most valuable content the association has to offer.

The Results

NAA.org now offers a fresher image, provides member-centric content and has positioned themselves for future success with a management platform that is efficient, extendable, and integrated with their back-end business systems.