Association for Corporate Growth
Website and Content Strategies
ACG turned to .orgSource to identify and prioritize ACG’s needs regarding website content, design and functionality, including user feedback.
Overview
The Association for Corporate Growth is the global community for middle-market M&A deal-makers and business leaders focused on driving growth. Founded in 1954, ACG has 58 chapters across the globe representing 90,000 professionals within the middle market, including 14,500 members who serve as the investors, lenders, owners, executives and advisers to growing middle-market companies.
The challenge
ACG needed a new website to provide a seamless and personalized user experience across global and chapter sites, and a platform that would ease the administrative burden on chapter and global staff. By design, each chapter has a different focus based on their region so one site would not fit all. Therefore, it was critical that the website solution present information from the global organization, yet also provided control for localized content by chapters. With more than 50 chapters and more than 100 administrative users, it was essential that ACG partner with the ideal website developer that would understand the unique challenges facing the organization with this project.
The Solution
ACG turned to .orgSource to identify and prioritize ACG’s needs regarding website content, design and functionality, including user feedback. .orgSource also guided ACG in selecting the correct website developer for the project. Following the selection process, .orgSource seamlessly transferred all of the knowledge collected during stakeholder interviews to the website developer, and assisted with content audits and content organization of the new web platform.
“.orgSource had a clear project plan and timeline to get us to select a website developer,” says Shannon Buenik, ACG’s senior director of strategic planning and governance. “They thought of potential project missteps that we had not considered.”
.orgSource’s system selection process led ACG to choose Sandstorm. Sandstorm worked with ACG to create and develop a scalable web ecosystem, which included not only ACG’s core site but also its 58 chapter sites around the world. Part of Sandstorm’s efforts included a four-part, hands-on training series for chapter administrators, with follow-up homework and tasks, to ensure non-technical administrators could become quickly proficient on the platform.
The Results
Since the site went live in May 2017, traffic has increased by one-third with bounce rates down by one-third. End users now enjoy a familiar, cohesive and personalized experience across all sites as well as a single unified login. Chapter administrators have more flexibility and control to include structured data from global but also local content regarding news, events and other targeted information. This is important as ACG conducts more than 1,200 events each year, with the vast majority executed by chapters. The solution empowers chapters to manage their own content and events, while lessening the support needed of ACG global to those chapters.
