NEA MB Success Story

NEA MB Website Redesign and New CMS

The Challenge

The National Education Association’s Member Benefit Corporation (NEA MB) is a professional employee organization that represents public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers. NEA serves 3.2 million members across the United States.

NEA MB's website was outdated and did not accurately depict the size and power of the largest professional organization in the United States. In addition to the dated branding, the website was limited in its ability to properly deliver personalized content. NEA MB had decided it was particularly important to be able to direct members to services appropriate to their needs, as the organization offers an extensive number of services.

The Solution

NEA turned to Oshyn (an Open Text Web Solutions Partner) to redesign a new website that would be more representative of their brand and better serve their members online. This project required front end design and back end work implementation with Open Text’s RedDot and LiveServer products.

The Oshyn team kicked off the project with a strategic discovery phase with the NEA stakeholders in order to properly understand the current business challenges and goals. Through this discovery phase, the Oshyn team was able to architect the user experience, visual design approach, and technical strategy. A more detailed design phase followed where the intended functional outcome was determined.

To address NEA’s needs for timely and personalized content delivery, the Oshyn team implemented Open Text’s RedDot LiveServer products. This gave the NEA team a fast content management system for their target marketing needs.

The Oshyn team used an agile development methodology, which is an iterative approach to development. An agile approach encourages collaboration throughout the project, allowing the 30 NEA stakeholders visibility and input when changes could still be made. This helped ensure that the Oshyn team would deliver a high quality product that met stakeholder expectations on launch day.

The Results

This project required nine months of planning and development work. The result was a new website with a more personalized online experience for members, more control over content for the NEA team, and a robust backend for the NEA IT team to manage.

The new website showcases a shift from product to content-driven sales. Members can now receive a blend of self-directed content as well as personalized content. The new content management system allows NEA to generate dynamic Flash content to be placed strategically throughout the site. The Oshyn team also implemented an eligibility engine that offers powerful marketing capabilities for the NEA team. This engine grants specific members with access to specific products or content. NEA can now target their product launches across specific segments of members based on more than 20 member types, eight segments, age ranges, and various other profile attributes. This personalized online experience will likely increase sales for NEA through better member relationships and increased return visits.

In addition to the new design and user experience, the Oshyn team also delivered a seamless integration with the mainframe backend (MDS) to allow for secure submission and processing of form and order data. Now centrally managed, MB can readily generate new business cases, implement non-technical CMS solutions and interoperate with MDS without any further mainframe interface development. The NEA team received comprehensive training by Oshyn, so by launch date they were fully capable of handling business user questions on their own.

The Oshyn team delivered a website that met NEA’s business goals and armed their in-house team with the tools and knowledge to leverage their newly branded website.

About NEA MB

For more than half a century, NEA Member Benefits has helped enhance the lives of NEA members and their families through advocacy, service and information. The NEA Member Benefits Corporation is a subsidiary of the NEA, established to develop, implement and administer NEA Member Benefits programs and services.

The Technology