About the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC)
Founded in 1902, the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) represents 26 member inter/national sororities/women’s fraternities with more than 3.9 million women at 655 college/university campuses and 4,500 local alumnae chapters. It is one of the oldest and largest women’s membership organizations in the United States and Canada. Each year, NPC-affiliated collegians and alumnae donate more than $5 million to worthy causes, provide $2.8 million in scholarships to women and volunteer 500,000 hours in their communities.
The Project
The prospect of developing a single central Internet portal to effectively and efficiently serve the information requirements of this large and diverse group of women was to be a unique and exciting challenge for the team at GlobalMagic. Included among the project tasks for the re-development of the website would be; the complete overhaul of the site layout/architecture, the redesign of the page layouts, rewriting the content, revisions in treatments for images and photographs, and the introduction of a style sheet for a consistent site wide look and feel. An additional requirement, and quite possibly the key for project success, was that, once delivered, the entire site could be managed through an administration system to be operated by the central office staff; a team with little to no web authoring (editing) experience!
The Development Strategy
The first order of business was to set up a joint web-dev team comprised of members from NPC and GlobalMagic. Together this group identified and planned each stage of the site development, including:
- Audience Definition
- Creative Brief
- Creative and Content Planning
- Usability Studies
- Identification of the Technical Infrastructure
- Planning for Future Maintenance and Growth
The result of these meetings was GlobalMagic’s ability to effectively devise the methodology and plot the timeline to deliver streamlined site architecture, navigation schema, and page layouts. Throughout the ensuing development phase, weekly meetings were held to discuss content, answer questions, and address scope changes.
The Result
The collaborative effort of the NPC and GlobalMagic web team has resulted in a robust online information portal that has proven to be extremely popular with members and visitors alike. Many have remarked that the site is now a primary tool for locating the wealth of valuable information and other resources that are available through the central office. Additionally members now have secure access to dynamic online forms, other data-driven assets, user forums, listserves, and more – some of the many benefits enjoyed by this large organization due to the greatly enhanced communication features and other infrastructure-related efficiencies. As required, NPC central staff members are the recipients of an intuitive site management solution whereby they can easily control the content of the entire web site using the custom Content Management System that has literally proven to be the backbone of the project. This new dynamic web site represents the broad platform upon which additional NPC processes and procedures will be staged and developed.
VISIT THE National Panhellenic Conference WEBSITE