Plexus Consulting Group    Success Stories

American Trucking Associations, inc.


American Trucking Associations, inc.

2200 Mill Road
Alexandria, VA 22314-4686
703-838-7999
[www.truckline.org]
Contact: Bob Rast, Senior Vice President of Information Services



CEO: Walter B McCormick, Jr.
Budget: $47.5 Million
Staff Size: 205




Plexus Consulting Group, LLC
1620 Eye Street, NW
Suite 210
Washington, DC 20006
Phone:  202-785-8940
Fax:      202-785-8949
Email:   info@plexusconsulting.com


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

 

The Challenge

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:

  • TransportTopics.com: Launched as TTNews.com
  • Truckline.com: First launched as Trucking.org in 1997
  • GreenTruck.com: Built in 1998 and partially funded by an EPA grant
  • CargoTips.org: Web-based data application developed in conjunction with U.S. Department of Justice to track cargo theft, built in 1997


Of these sites, TTNews.com (content from the weekly Transport Topics newspaper and operated by the TT Publishing group staff) was self-sufficient, the best run and had the best design. The Truckline site itself needed to update information more frequently and to implement design standards. While Green Truck was being updated every one to two months, Cargo Tips' technology had become outdated and the site was getting little use.

The Solution

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.


The Process

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:

  • Focusing on its main site
  • Transforming Truckline.com into the main ATA "portal" destination
  • Integrating Transport Topics and TTNews.com by cross-linking to news headlines and online classified ads


The process involved redesigning the look, feel and content of Truckline and recoding 700 relevant pages. The redesigned site was beta-tested in late March and went live in April 1999. From the start, Rast decided that because Transport Topics (the nation's largest paid circulation transportation news weekly) competed against commercial, for-profit trucking trade publications, it was critical for the "news" site to have a distinct identity and separation from its parent and sister, non-profit trade association websites in order to maintain as much editorial balance as possible.

Key elements of the transformation:

  • Creating a Web Development Committee with a representative from each ATA department to help decide on content and to encourage adoption of the web as a new publishing channel
  • Hiring two temporary, full-time employees focused on graphics and daily HTML production
  • Identifying and cross-linking related content across ATA's four-site web menu


Better integrating Transport Topics news coverage into the main ATA site
Because Transport Topics is a paid circulation, ABC-audited news publication, it had traditionally operated at somewhat of an arm's length from the parent ATA in order to maintain as much editorial independence as possible for an association-owned publication. Although, editorial and classified advertising staff members helped create the first TTNews.com web site, there were concerns among the publishing group's business management that posting too much of the newspaper's content on the web for free might undermine the print publication's circulation base and jeopardize some $6 million in annual advertising revenue. However, Rast, who also was publisher of Transport Topics, convinced TT's editors that the promotional value to the publication and ability to drive visitor traffic from Truckline.com to TTNews.com was worth an experiment. As a result, ATA's web development team encountered little resistance and, with the cooperation of Transport Topics reporters and the support of ATA's senior executives, was given wide latitude to cross-reference the content between Transport Topics and Truckline. Similarly, the smaller sites were incorporated into the portal strategy.

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

Since 1998, ATA has grown its web development infrastructure from one to four servers that are hosted off-site with a major Washington, D.C., area Internet Service provider. To resolve technical problems, ATA maintains technical support with hosting. However, additional technical support is still needed. Other issues to resolve involve improving customer service, sales and marketing. Enterprise management and software integration challenges involve streamlining the duplication of data entry.

Builders and Maintainers: The Challenge of De-Centralizing
Initially, ATA had to centralize the initial web development process to unify diverse departments behind the project. However, the ongoing maturation of the Internet and intranet as another channel in the information publishing process is driving organizational changes.

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.

Unforeseen Benefits

 ATA's web strategy also resulted in significant benefits, some intended and some not, including:

  • Significant additional monthly revenue from products sold online
  • Weekly approaches by potential strategic partners
  • New business opportunities


Truckline.com now offers the following services and business tools for trucking professionals:

  • News Message Boards
  • Free E-mail Classifieds
  • About ATA section including Help and Contact Us functions
  • Sponsorship information
  • Advertising information
  • Career Center, a national database of trucking-related jobs and resumes
  • MarketPlace, the largest catalog of trucking-related products on the Net
  • Free e-mail and calendars
  • Free interactive message boards and mailing lists
  • Searchable databases of trucking industry suppliers and ATA member companies

Measurements & Results

"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:

  • Increased member usage of password-protected member-only areas of the Truckline web site
  • A significant savings in fax and mailing costs due to a shift away from paper mail and faxes to e-mail newsletters
  • Rising use of the web portal for conferences and meetings registration
  • Use of new electronic publications devoted to fuel prices, macroeconomic issues facing the trucking industry and technology


ATA increased its total "page-views" on all sites combined from 85,000 in May 1999 to nearly 600,000 in February 2001. The number of unique visitors in February 2001 for the Truckline.com and TTNews.com sites was more than 61,000 with average visitor session length exceeding 9 minutes on site. Also, the number of online pages has increased from 700 to 3,200 for Truckline and to a total of 11,000 pages on all ATA sites.

"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.

Lessons Learned

"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:

  • Keeping tracking of more than 100 Internet domain names registered by ATA for future business use or to prevent their use for competitive or image-related reasons
  • Documenting licenses and keeping track of all software applications on every server, including those of third-party providers
  • Ensuring that contracts with vendors were thoroughly vetted by the association's legal department and conformed to evolving Internet and technology law


Keys to success included:

  • Quick implementation and frequent "victories" that solidified management's commitment toward the web-development process
  • Fewer meetings and less paperwork
  • Making an adequate investment in people and technology
  • Effective use of e-mail as a marketing tool
  • Use of free banner exchange programs instead of expensive paid advertising


Because traditional nonprofit associations focused primarily on advocacy are not business operations in the routine sense, the business-oriented segments of these associations have to find creative ways to generate revenue.

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.