About this website.
The Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce is the largest chamber in New Hampshire representing nearly 1,000 businesses. Incorporated in 1911, the Chamber today is the most active business organization in the Manchester region. The GMCC engaged MESH in a brand refresh, creation of a brand wall for their new lobby, and the design and development of their new CMS-based website.
A new direction gets a new look.
The Chamber was moving to new offices in Manchester, and in conjunction with this, hired MESH to redesign their website and create a brand wall in their new front office. The new move also coincided with a change in messaging and focus by the Chamber, “Build your brand. Expand your network. Shape your community.” In every aspect, the team at the Chamber was making adjustments to reflect this new vision. Unfortunately, the existing logo only captured a piece of this.
Done well. Done fast.
The existing logo, while serviceable, only showed the Mill building and flowing river. When we reviewed the new vision, and overlaid it on the logo, Build your brand could be represented by the Mill, and expand your network could be represented by the flowing river. But there was nothing to capture the “life” or community that the Chamber and its new vision represent. We made some recommendations to clean up the logo, as well as introduce a new element to complete the trifecta—in this case—we represented this with a tree common to the Manchester downtown area. Lastly, we were able to complete the redesign—and get client approval—in about a week. Yeah, we work fast.
Easy to update. Easy to manage.
In the next phase, we developed a website that embodied the spirit of the new direction, was easy for the Chamber staff to update (the previous site was noted as being extremely difficult to manage), and included many dynamic properties.
Outstanding results in only a few months.
The project ran about 2 months, and MESH’s solution included:
Custom ad management tool, allowing Chamber to monetize the website for the first time
Integrated with third party accounting and eCommerce software
User-maintained custom photo galleries
Organization of information into discreet areas for different users / audience types
Home page animation
Standardized quick links and enrollment opportunities on every page
Social Media integration
Site-wide search
Dynamic calendar of events
Robust user generated forms
A new way to raise money.
The outcome? With the new custom ad management tool designed and developed by MESH, the Chamber was able to sell $28,000 in advertising space—PRE-launch.