Three birds approach to content organization

We’re finishing up two projects with interesting content organization challenges.

One is AIME, a trade association that supports mortgage brokers with content, events, training, access to technology. Like most trade associations they monetize through sponsorships, but also generate revenue through events and membership fees.

Another is inCourage, a group of subject matter experts creating educational content around the mission of stopping the flight of youth from playing sports in middle and high school. They are also planning to monetize through sponsorships.

Out of the gate both sites appear to serve three distinct target groups for their content and services.

AIME has: a) current members, b) mortgage brokers, and c) sponsors while inCourage has a) student-athletes, b) parents, and c) educators/athletic directors and coaches.

So how do you handle structuring navigation and ultimately organizing content to optimize for everyone so they get where they want to go?

The approaches for these two cases are actually pretty different.

For AIME, session recordings reveal that potential sponsors spend a fair amount of time on the Membership and About page before even going to the Sponsorship page and requesting information.

That is, the sponsors are much more concerned about viewing what and what the trade association is doing for members and to convert non-member brokers to brokers, than it is about content intended for prospective sponsors.

We know this because once they do finally get to the Sponsorship page, they immediately fill out a form, typically glancing over current sponsor logos.

The other groups, members and non-member brokers are pretty similar: mortgage brokers looking to improve skills, gain access to group pricing opportunities and technologies, network at events. The goals for members are around increasing engagement, revenue for brokers, making their lives easier, basically providing value. The goals for brokers is to get them to become members.

BUT (suspending nuance for a second) they’re the same group, just at different points in the journey. If we can do a good job of saying, “AIME serves brokers. Brokers are better as AIME members,” then we have a three birds approach because, they’re on this site for a reason, that’s what sponsors, members, and brokers care about. At that point, it’s pretty safe to say that we should really be organizing content solely around the broker journey to being a better broker and treating AIME membership and then engaged membership as our approach.

Then there’s inCourage.

They don’t have a lot of existing data we can gleam big win insights like what sponsors care about to work from.

More on that next.