American Wind Energy Association

Solution: content management, video
Vertical: association, nonprofit

AWEA is a national trade association representing wind power project developers, equipment suppliers, services providers, parts manufacturers, utilities, researchers, and others involved in the wind industry - one of the world's fastest growing energy industries. In addition, AWEA represents hundreds of wind energy advocates from around the world.

AWEA approached Fig Leaf Software to redesign the organization’s public website which did not satisfactorily convey the message that the association wished to portray. Staff and members felt that the previous website was difficult to navigate and the homepage had no aesthetic quality. In addition, the organization was seeking to implement PaperThin’s Content Management System (CMS) to enable dozens of staff who are subject matter experts to manage and maintain the website content.

The intended objectives of the project included:

Improve website site design and user experience.
Enable staff members to maintain their content portfolios using a more streamlined approach.
Integrate videos into content authoring process.
Implement templates from which all content pages are to be derived with options that allow easy manipulation of layout and design on a page by page basis.

The new site enables AWEA to grow their membership and to continue to provide our members with up-to-date information on wind energy such as policy and legislation, financing, and small wind for residential use.

Fig Leaf Software analyzed AWEA’s content authoring needs for different types of content including AWEA News, AWEA Videos, AWEA Into the Wind Blog, AWEA Workshops, Exhibits & Conferences, and implemented a content management system utilizing PaperThin’s CommonSpot Enterprise Server 6.0. The new AWEA CMS allows content creation and filtering with jQuery-based rendering for AWEA Newsroom (http://www.awea.org/newsroom/).

Fig Leaf Software recommended BrightCove Video platform for AWEA multimedia content needs, and implemented a custom video element that works well with BrightCove video embed code, and integrated BrightCove video playlists into the homepage layout.

The “AWEA Blog: Into the Wind” was replaced with a new implementation utilizing PaperThin’s Blog Application that seamlessly integrates with CommonSpot CMS (http://www.awea.org/blog/) with its own custom archive for blog posts.

AWEA event planners and content authors can now create CMS pages for upcoming workshops, industry exhibits, and conferences featuring their Tera-Watt, Giga-Watt, and Mega-Watt sponsors utilizing different template layout variants. All AWEA events can now be created as CommonSpot custom content elements and managed easily within the CMS.

Other content management modules include managing member-only content such as industry reports, fact sheets, and white papers for AWEA members. The new site integrates with the iMIS Association Management System via a series of web service methods to validate member credentials, retrieve member profile information, update membership information, and future enhancements to register new advocate and business members are currently scheduled to be implemented by Fig Leaf Software in the second phase of the implementation. In addition, Fig Leaf Software will be implementing a multi-site framework to bring in other existing AWEA-managed standalone websites into the new content management system as micro-sites with their own design identities and branding.

The new site streamlines information to make it more user friendly. The CommonSpot CMS enables staff members to maintain their areas of the website, including creating and removing content and images.

The new site improves members ability to stay-up-to-date wind energy information, including new policies, legislation, financing, etc., and will generate increased interest in wind energy among the general public. In addition, members to the association will be better able to inform members of Congress on work being done in the wind energy arena.