Case study

Sitefinity and Avectra Single Sign-on

Sitefinity and Avectra Single Sign-on
The NSA website is very user friendly and our client was pleased with the results implementing the Sitefinity CMS has brought to their site visitors, members, and staff. The drag and drop functionality without HTML knowledge is invaluable to day-to-day users of the website.
Patrick Geers
Project Manager at New Target
  • Industry
    Non-profit
  • Background
    The National Speakers Association (NSA) is an organization for professional speakers providing resources and education to advance the skills, integrity and value of their members. NSA is the leading source for community, education, and entrepreneurial business knowledge needed to be successful in the speaking profession. Their thousands of members include experts in a variety of industries and disciplines, who reach audiences as trainers, educators, humorists, motivators, consultants, authors and more. NSA is a member of the Global Speakers Federation (GSF), a global network dedicated to advancing the speaking profession worldwide.
  • Technical Details
    Avectra,Constant Contact,Google Analytics,Asp.Net,AJAX, JavaScript,T-SQ, Web Services,SQL Server 2008
  • Why Sitefinity
    We chose Sitefinity for its ease of use and the high level of control it gave to website administrators, as well as its ability to integrate with the client’s chosen AMS. We wanted our client to be empowered with the ability to add content authors and to have access to an extensible library of controls for adding on to the site as desired.
  • Challenge
    New Target was requested by NSA to consolidate the websites into one with a redesigned look and feel and implement the site into a content management system that would be easy to use, extensible and allow for customization, flexible enough to integrate with their chosen AMS product, Avectra, and with options for multiple user roles and workflows.
  • Results
    Through the work of five developers and designers, the website was completed within four months. The staff at NSA is full of positive feedback and is pleased with the results they have seen, particularly in the time and effort they are saved with this easy to use CMS.

The Challenge

The National Speakers Association (NSA) is an organization for professional speakers providing resources and education to advance the skills, integrity and value of their members. As with many associations, their website is an integral platform for keeping members engaged and informed and is a main vehicle for driving membership growth of the organization.

When NSA approached New Target, their web platform was built in DotNetNuke and required the utilization of multiple sites with separate logins for each site. In addition to a desire for a fresh design, NSA wanted to streamline their efforts and free themselves from multiple sign-ons and redundant websites. New Target was tasked by NSA to consolidate their multiple websites into one, create a new information architecture with a redesigned look and feel, and implement the site into the chosen CMS.

Their decision to use Sitefinity was largely guided by the desire for a consolidated single sign-on experience between their content management system (CMS) and their existing association management system (AMS) and by the easily customized backend of Sitefinity. Additionally, they wanted a CMS which would be easy to use, extensible and allow for customization, flexible enough to integrate with their chosen AMS product, Avectra, and which would give them options for multiple user roles and workflows.

The Solution

Sitefinity is a perfect CMS choice for NSA. Its user-friendly interface with simple “drag and drop” functionality gives NSA site administrators the control they want. They can easily customize the site by revising page layouts and building out with new features as needed.

Using a combination of Sitefinity’s out-of-the-box features and New Target created customized modules, New Target was able to give NSA the functionality they requested all manageable within one website. Out-of-the-box functionality included a blog module, the navigation module, and a site search module, among others. Additionally, to keep the website moving and active, we displayed a rotating list of statistics on the home page through the implementation of the Sitefinity Lists module.

To meet specific NSA needs, New Target built a custom slide show for the home page of the website. We also built a “What’s New” module that pulls data from the blog, news and events pages for display on the home page. NSA wanted to easily share videos from YouTube on the home page, so New Target created a “Featured Video” module which simplifies uploading a video to inserting a link on the backend.

Finally, New Target built a customized single sign on module allowing site visitors to move between the Sitefinity powered web pages and the Avectra powered web pages seamlessly. To maintain the look and feel for all pages of the website, New Target coordinated with Sitefinity and Avectra to successfully match the finalized branding and design of the Sitefinity template to the Avectra sections of the website.

The Results

With Sitefinity, the development occurred over a short six month period with a team of five developers and designers working together. NSA’s new website is a perfect solution to their needs and the staff at NSA has been pleased with the results. They have greater control of their website and have seen immediate improvements in areas such as search engine optimization, which was possible though the use of page to page meta tags, URL settings, and page titles that can be edited by NSA. The time and effort that was taken up in managing multiple sites has greatly diminished since they have moved into Sitefinity’s straightforward, user-friendly CMS.

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