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American Trucking Associations, inc. |
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American Trucking Associations, inc. 2200 Mill Road
Plexus Consulting Group, LLC |
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Vital Stats: American Trucking Association's (ATA) membership base includes 9.3 million people and more than 501,000 companies involved in trucking. The Challenge | The Solution | The Process | Unforseen Benefits | Measurements & Results | Lessons Learned
How to devise and execute a web strategy to integrate ATA's disparate websites, which each had a separate "look & feel," while encouraging individual ATA divisions and operating units to embrace the concept of creating a "web-enabled enterprise" and ultimately position ATA as the trucking industry's Internet information "Portal"? In 1998, ATA had four separate websites that needed to be cross-linked coordinated to achieve maximum leverage and to support ATA's brand in a consistent manner:
To create a "Truckline Network" of integrated ATA web sites by cross-linking content, creating a generally consistent look and feel, consistent navigation schema and consolidating web development leadership to centralize network administration. Interlinking the sites into a "Network" was also designed to drive traffic among the sites, boosting the number of marketable page views on each site. By coordinating the content and branding and placing the overall
administration of ATA's web sites under a central Director of Web
Development, ATA was able to transform its web-based resources into
an effective service center for association members as well as an
effective image-building and informational site for members and non-members
interested in the for-hire trucking industry. By following the model
of an Internet information publishing start-up, ATA's web development
programs were able to attract sponsorship funding and some banner
advertising sales and begin to generate new non-dues revenues.
As with many initial web efforts, ATA's first sites were created by a handful of staff members with "day jobs" who were early adopters of the Internet. Editorial staffers on the Transport Topics weekly newspaper staff, which had a ready supply of weekly and monthly news content, and a staffer from the ATA communications department worked with Internet Services Provider DigitalNation to launch TTNews.com and Trucking.org, which subsequently was redirected to Truckline.com. After some initial excitement about having a "Home Page," the day-to-day demands of building, maintaining and populating an Internet site without dedicated full-time staff began to tell. While Transport Topics was able to continue posting fresh content each week when the newspaper was published, the main ATA Trucking.org site became stagnant. In the fall of 1997, the association also began a radical, member-driven reorganization aimed at tightening business practices, downsizing the labor force and redefining the ATA mission. One of the goals was to make the gathering and dissemination of information about the trucking industry one of the core ATA objectives and to make the association's Internet sites "Best in Class." In 1998, when the recent Web redesign project began, ATA had just upgraded its enterprise software platform to Windows 95 on all desktop work stations, and initially had two staff members dedicated to web development. ATA President & CEO Walter B. McCormick, Jr., recruited Bob Rast, then Vice president of New Media for Journal of Commerce, Inc., an Economist Group company, to integrate all of ATA's key information infrastructure and publishing departments into a single Information Services Division. The new division comprised Management Information Systems, TT Publishing Group, the Graphic Center, Mail Center, Shipping and Warehouse operations, Economic & Statistical Analysis, the ATA Survey Center, Trucking Information Services, and the new Web Development Department. Under Rast's direction, ATA then invested the necessary funding to demonstrate "repeated and quick victories" to ATA members during the development process. One of the largest initial outlays was for adequate staffing dedicated to the web project. With turnover, the web staff ranged between eight and 10 full-time employees over a two-year period. Job titles included a director of web development, web producers who focused on posting content and working with all association departments to keep content fresh; a web applications programmer, art director and intranet manager. By early 2000, it became apparent that a "Web Content Specialist" with strong editing skills and news judgment was critical to standardize style and assure editorial quality of items created by different departments for web posting. The Development Process The process involved two key steps: Step I: Transforming Truckline into the ATA Web Portal ATA began by:
Key elements of the transformation:
Step II: GreenTruck In the second phase of the project, GreenTruck was spun off into a separate domain name, Greentruck.com, with its own logos and branding designed to mimic the look and feel of Truckline. A key challenge in this phase involved overcoming resistance to change and resolving the internal debate over "making everything look alike." In the end, the decision was to focus on the best interests of the web visitors, and in the early stages of the re-launch, it was critical to demonstrate the success of this new "leading-edge" site. De-Bugging Builders and Maintainers: The Challenge of De-Centralizing The core web development group of "builders" re-distributed its authority to the "maintainers" responsible for long-term implementation. This involves ongoing challenges. For example, Transport Topics has created a dedicated web editorial team that updates the TTNews.com news site several times a day and this web news team is more involved in day-to-day content maintenance. After a two-year effort, ATA is nearly ready to roll out a dynamic
database-centered web content management system aimed at lowering
the staff skill set needed to publish to the Internet and intranet. ATA's web strategy also resulted in significant benefits, some intended and some not, including:
"The web has infiltrated everything we do as an association." The ultimate objective of ATA's web strategy is to improve member services. Measurement criteria included the conventional pages per month, number of unique visitors and user sessions. Also, key elements of success included:
"Building a sense of community." Message boards were developed to build a sense of community. While this proved to be difficult at first because the technology used was too complicated, ATA implemented a simpler system powered by O'Reily's "WebBoard" software. It currently hosts 14 different message boards ranging from private to general discussion topics. These message boards generate an average of 20,000 pages views per month. Ultimately, ATA was able to use the web to create an integrated service
center, enhance its marketing efforts and provide and effective educational
tool. Also, the re-design of Truckline as a portal enabled ATA to
drive more traffic to its smaller sites. "It can be done." ATA's web development process proved that there are benefits of adopting a more conventional business model to address association e-commerce challenges. Some key challenges and pitfalls:
For example, e-mails to members advertising the portal became the
primary generators of new visits. The launch of a daily Transport
Topics newsletter generated a 25% increase in page-views the subsequent
month. By December 2000, ATA was sending 9,200 e-mails a day, six
days a week. A $3,000 software purchase supported this effort. However,
it is clear that continuing revenue streams will be required to fund
needed technology upgrades as the system matures. Building out a web
development program from a central location is one thing. Managing
it as an association-wide enterprise involves quite another challenge.
But for ATA's web development team, it is satisfying to show the results.
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