Improving the perception of a trade association
The National Federation of Demolition Contractors approached us to change the perception of the association. NFDC’s website struggled to get their message across. It didn’t meet the expectations of members and stakeholders. The unintuitive interface caused a ton of unnecessary calls to the NFDC staff, and the team had little to no flexibility when editing the website. Here's what we did to help.Increase member satisfaction and improve the perception of NFDC
We’ve travelled to the NFDC headquarters in Hemel Hempstead for two fun days of workshops. The first step was to make the team sing off the same page. They warmed up identifying what currently works for them, and then we jumped into the problems.
Dozens of sticky notes and voting dots later, we’ve had a common goal to work towards:
In 2 years’ time, we will increase member satisfaction and improve the perception of the NFDC website. Our number of visitors to the website will increase.
Trust the process, dive in, and don’t worry if the process feels different and strange — you need to stick with it. NerdCow knows what they’re doing, and they will lead you in the right direction.Alex, Marketing Project Manager at NFDC
What we did to help
- Aligned the team on the biggest challenge
- Helped them narrow down how they should talk about the federation
- Ran Prototyping workshops to identify the team’s best ideas
- Tested & validated the prototype with the target audience
- Developed the website in Agile iterations
Why NFDC struggled with their messaging and member satisfaction
Our next step was answering one simple question: what can stop us? We’ve identified three potential blockers – one internal, and two external:
- Can we hold ourselves to account and stay the course?
- Can we validate that visitors find relevant content?
- Can we validate that we come across as a federation?
This solidified our early findings. NFDC had trouble speaking to their audience, and the information architecture caused unwanted calls – people couldn’t find answers online. Lastly, the internal challenge was stakeholder pressure. We had to keep all three in mind.
Therein lies the problem…
We knew the challenges and the goal – now we’ve had to see what’s the actual cause. The suspicion was obvious – the website. But that’s not always the case.
Many companies find that their issues are in the “discovery” phase, or even in the post-purchase, offline operations. So we’ve created a map of users’ interaction with NFDC and overlaid it with our issues. In this case, they were spot on. The website was the weakest link.
Discovering and validating NFDC’s new voice
We’ve facilitated exercises that helped NFDC find their new voice. The team learned so much about their business because of our structured and tailored exercises. Our framework helped them cut out the noise and establish a new voice & journey for the visitors.
With an incredibly aligned team, the exercises went like a breeze and we were ready to start prototyping after two days of workshops. An interactive prototype was ready the next day, and five testers joined us on day four of our collaboration to validate the team’s ideas.
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