The National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF) is a non-profit association that serves the institutional real estate investment community as a nonpartisan collector, validator, aggregator, converter, and disseminator of commercial real estate performance and bench marking information.
NCREIF members include investment managers, investors, consultants, appraisers, academics, researchers, and other professionals in the real estate investment management industry. The NCREIF website is the primary channel for providing valuable data to its members.
The Problem
The NCREIF website user experience made it difficult for members to leverage their digital resources. NCREIF sought to overhaul its digital experience with a focus in two primary areas; Providing better access to their reporting tools and establishing a streamlined process for keeping their website up to date.
The project kicked off with a discovery initiative to identify NCREIF’s organizing idea, or their guiding principal for making decision throughout the project. The results – Exclusive, Valuable and Credible. Once identified, Adage built a site using an easy-to-edit content management system and integrated it with NCREIF’s custom association management software.
Responsive Design
NCREIF’s overhaul began with a bold new design. It featured striking full-screen visuals coupled with intuitive navigation. The design is fully responsive, allowing the users to access their content on any device.
Thanks to NCREIF’s foundation in Episerver and new efficiency-focused code from the Adage back-end team, the query tool also runs faster than ever before. This is especially useful when running large batches of reports.
Episerver (Optimizely) CMS
The new site was implemented using Episerver content management system (now Optimizely). Episerver allows users to build pages using a WYSIWYG-style, on-page editing experience.
This CMS also provides user management and workflow tools that make it possible for non-technical NCREIF staff to update website copy and add new blog items.
Integration
The Episerver site was integrated with NCREIF’s association management system. This allows NCREIF to utilize AMS content within the CMS. The connection provides personalized member experiences based on user profiles. Which allows the CMS to leverage a single source of authentication from the AMS.
Additionally, NCREIF can use Episerver’s integrated rules-based personalization tool to segment its site visitors into groups.
Reporting Tools
Adage also worked to improve the user experience of NCREIF’s reporting tools; the most important benefit of membership for many users. This included creating an interactive infographic-style map display tool, as well as rebuilding NCREIF’s quarterly data query tool.
The new query tool not only follows the site brand, but also offers new features and an Advanced Mode. The new features include easyto-apply filters, preset templates, and customizable saved queries. The Advanced Mode allows users to code their own queries right from the browser.
See More of Our Work
Check out our other work in the association space.