NEA Member Benefits

Sitecore Development for a New Site with Personalization

The Challenge

 

The National Education Association Member Benefits (NEAMB), a subsidiary of the National Education Association (NEA), offers discounts and benefits on travel, insurance, finance, and more for teachers.

NEAMB needed to migrate its legacy website to a modern CMS that aligned with their digital strategy and offered more advanced functionality. After helping NEAMB select a new CMS (Sitecore), Oshyn was selected to lead the redesign and implementation of neamb.com in 2018. With Oshyn's expertise in OpenText and Sitecore, coupled with an understanding of the NEAMB business, solutions were presented that best fit their objectives and provided value for their users.

The Solution

 

For the initial migration, Oshyn built a new website while still considering the existing functionalities from the OpenText website. New modules were created based on client needs and visual designs.

Oshyn devised a plan for website development and included a migration plan for the existing functionalities, connections to external systems, the logic that should be converted to .Net, and updates which were needed to maintain the site ranking on search engines.

Oshyn kept an open communication channel with NEAMB and collaborated with them to determine functionalities and dependencies for the website redesign. The new website was developed using Sitecore Helix and other best practices defined by Sitecore. Regular code reviews ensured smoother development and better communication with stakeholders.

A detailed Functional Specification document was created that will continue to be updated as the documentation for the system.

The Outcome

 

The newly-launched website provided NEAMB with a refreshed—and personalized—experience for their users. Website visits and conversions have increased.

Oshyn helped define and implement custom criteria that pulls data from an external source (CRM) and can be used in Sitecore to personalize the user experience. Custom facets were added on the Experience Profile to store user information which could be used to personalize their experience on the site.

As part of the personalization, visitors coming from an email generated by the organization received a tailored experience.

All sprint information is now visible to all stakeholders in Jira, providing full transparency. The success of the project also led to a new statement of work (SOW) for Oshyn to continue providing website maintenance.