Situation: Established in 1936, the Urban Land Institute is a nonprofit education and research institute with over 30,000 members across the globe—2,000 here in the Greater Bay Area. As the preeminent, multidisciplinary forum, ULI facilitates an open exchange of ideas, information, and experience among local, national, and international industry leaders and policy makers dedicated to creating better places. Lion Associates began working with ULI San Francisco in early 2011 where we assed their situation and began working with their leadership in a collaborative way. ULI knew what they wanted to accomplish, but had not found the right partner previously. After an exhaustive search of Bay Area Website firms, Lion Associates was selected.
Implementation: Lion Associates began by working with the team to organize their input and activate their various boards and committees for the process. Early interactions with the team help us select WordPress as the CMS to drive their site, which needed to be content rich, contextually oriented, event driven, and a strong platform for interaction and SEO. Our WordPress-based event system tied into the backbone of the CMS and has allowed for events to become a driver for the organization. We built custom plug-ins, which allowed their sponsors and people to be treated as objects so that resources could be easily managed and made more friendly to the administrators of the site. Downloadable documents were treated with the same principle and integrated so that they were easy to contextually relate to pages. Finally the home page was built to enable many different aspects to be automatically pulled dynamically so that the administrator would not have to update multiple sections. In fact, we built the home page featured content slider so that any content in the site could be directed there, with a simple check mark.
Results: The San Francisco district website launched and was so effective that we were selected to upvamp over 50 ULI district websites in North American, as well as sites in Europe and Asia. We were also selected to redevelop the National organization’s website in Washington DC, replacing an aging multi million dollar system, with a highly customized WordPress solution. ULI San Francisco’s website has increased engagement, traction with other organization, empowered staff and resulted in substantial increases in traffic to the site. Compared to traffic at launch, the site has increased visits by 67%, Unique Visitors by 60% and page views by %49.
