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>Case Study.


National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts (NFAA)

Background
The mission of this philanthropic nonprofit foundation is to award grants to high school students who have shown excellence and promise in various artistic disciplines.

Marketing Communications Challenge
As of May 2006, NFAA’s primary communications platform was an outdated website whose form, function and content was no longer relevant to key stakeholders (students, educators, contributors). In addition to its unappealing graphic design and poorly-integrated database applications, the site was a tangle of “legacy systems” dating back several years and layered on top of each other, causing dead links and other malfunctions.

Solution
In September 2006, Wax Custom Communications proposed an integrated marketing communications plan to NFAA. This included a complete redesign of the existing NFAA website, www.nfaa.org, to include new and repurposed editorial content, an upgrade of site architecture and the implementation of new registration processes with a migration of large databases. Wax was also commissioned to create an online content “editor” tool which would allow NFAA to make its own website edits once the site went live.

Results
Starting with close and comprehensive collaboration with its client, Wax formulated an integrated strategy – content (front end) and technology (back end) – delivered on an aggressive timeline. Once editorial and design were finalized, content work progressed quickly and smoothly as programming of the site and database migration occurred in tandem. Wax was also called upon by NFAA to handle a complex series of web domain acquisition activities. This included negotiating the purchase of several domains that were already held, in both cases by foreign owners. Wax conducted these negotiations in three languages (English, German and Japanese), established escrow accounts, dealt with non-U.S. internet service providers (ISPs) and successfully handled the transfer of monies to one domain owner. This resulted in NFAA’s consolidation of more than 15 domain names that are now linked to their Wax-designed and created website. Wax also provides web hosting, site traffic reporting, training and ongoing technical support.

Wax completely recreated the NFAA site as an alluring web environment that conveys many organizational hues to diverse site constituents – from high school artists to adult educators and affluent donors – populating the new site with hundreds of pages of fresh content, including custom animation, plus MPEG audio and video, and backed by a robust database application that automates critical registration and donation functions.