Background UMBC Training Centers www.umbctraining.com UMBC Training Centers is the premier provider of technical, engineering, and professional skills training in the Mid-Atlantic region for individuals, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies. Their exclusive Rapid Applied Learning (RAL™) unites highly interactive, participatory learning, and exceptional content with UMBC’s instructional excellence. Goals Industry Education, Training Partner Brave New Markets 10811 Red Run Blvd., STE 210 Owings Mills, MD 21117 +1 410-902-0801 www.BraveNewMarkets.com Marc Waldeck Chief Results Officer mwaldeck@bravenewmarkets.com Website operations had become a bottleneck for the organization. Executives at UMBC Training Centers sensed that the website should be able to generate more training revenue. However, backend administration had grown so complex that only a few staff members could accomplish what should have been simple tasks. The decision was made to replace the site with a platform that featured strong content management capabilities, automated business rules, flexible e-commerce, and overall ease of administration. Specific goals for the project were: Increase utilization of the website for attracting prospective clients, delivering information, and generating class registrations. Create a central, online repository for course information. Automate website content using various data such as class date, delivery method, and certificate program. Integrate class registration and inquiry data with Salesforce.com Promote search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and facilitate the creation of multiple landing pages for marketing/advertising programs. Challenges UMBC Training Centers offers hundreds of course titles with multiple delivery methods—on-site and off-site classroom, group, online, and self-paced. This created complex content management, registration, and inquiry challenges. Prior to this project, the website was comprised of thousands of static HTML pages for courses, classes, registration, and inquiries. It was almost impossible to keep content current. There was also no time remaining for user experience (UX), search engine, or landing page optimization. If UMBC Training Centers was going to realize the revenue from their website that was essential to their business strategy, it was clear that they needed a change. Solution To transform their business online, UMBC Training Centers chose Brave New Markets to deliver managed digital marketing services. Following a thorough review, the decision was made to deploy Kentico CMS as their website platform. Compared to the competition, Kentico delivered a more flexible and versatile suite of features. At the heart of the new website is a comprehensive online course catalog that exploits Kentico’s powerful CMS capabilities. Along with an HTML course description, numerous additional data fields support automated business logic for grouping courses into certificate programs, building class schedules, processing registrations, automating marketing landing pages, and much more. Numerous data handling forms and business processes were created to allow UMBC Training Centers’ team members to edit the course catalog, create classes, and manage online registrations. Class fees are collected through online credit card processing (Kentico E-commerce) and invoices that are created through a data connection with an existing billing system. More structured navigation and content, combined with robust meta and tag data, facilitates content relevancy with search engines. To support the sales group, client data collected for registrations, inquiries, and other interactions is fully integrated with their Salesforce.com account. Results Results for UMBC Training Centers have been transformative. Search optimization and marketing programs are delivering more website traffic. Clean visuals and intuitively organized navigation greet every visitor. Class information is always up-to-date. For administrative personnel, maintaining the website is no longer a guessing game. Common editing tools and automated business processes have made their job easy. Goals Accomplished: Increased website traffic and inquiries with online marketing Implemented online registration with credit card processing Fixed content management problems Eliminated out-of-date information on the website Automated Class Schedule Integrated lead and sales information with Salesforce.com Key criteria for selecting Kentico Powerful content management Content and business logic capabilities Ease of integration with external applications Search engine optimization (SEO) features