YMCA Increases Registration With New Site & App

Website Design for The Y

For nearly 160 years, the Y has been strengthening communities, regardless of age, background and income. A non-profit with locations in 10,000 communities, the Y leads the nation in youth development, healthy living and social responsibility. Up until recently, the Y was known as YMCA. Through thoughtful research, careful introspection, and exhaustive exploration, the organization determined that it was time for a dramatic, international change. With a focus on honing its communication and representation to its members and communities, the YMCA rebranded, and renamed itself as “the Y”. We’ve all known the YMCA as “the Y” for years, and in an effort to better reflect its role in the community, the organization adapted the name. The organization then embarked on one of the largest rebranding initiatives ever.

In November of 2010, the YMCA of Greater Nashua hired MESH Interactive to execute their new branding on their website. Given this unique opportunity, the organization opted to not just reskin their existing website, but dig down deep and examine what the website could do for members, the community and the organization. The scope of our engagement included rebranding the organization, and developing a new, more usable and functional website. This included:

• Review of hundreds of pages of national brand standards
• Adherence to strict brand guidelines
• Redesign of website
• Development of an open-source content managed website

Upon kick-off, MESH conducted a member survey to determine the communities needs for the website. Across the board, those needs aligned with the specific requirements of the initial project with one exception. This exception focused on the Program Schedules functionality of the website. As it stood, the existing site allowed the site admin to create pages and attach PDFs of the Program Schedules. This was noted as an area of the site that was initially going to be maintained exactly the same way. The users however, determined that this was one of the areas that they felt needed the most improvement. They wanted the schedules to be dynamic, searchable, and connected. In addition, it needed to work with the Nashua Y’s third party scheduling software.

Even though it was outside of scope of the initial project, MESH agreed to build out a new, proprietary scheduling tool that was easy for Nashua Y admins to create and update schedules, was mobile friendly, and allowed users to quickly and easily search related programs.

The results? Users can now efficiently research and register for programs. Registration through the site has increased dramatically, site usage has increased, and Y admins are able to use the new site as an integrated part of their marketing campaigns through unique landing pages.