ISITE Design, a full-service interactive agency with offices in Portland, Oregon, and Boston, Mass., provides strategic consulting and website planning, creative design and web development services for Ektron clients across North America and beyond. As an Ektron Certified Platinum Partner, ISITE Design has an established Web Content Management Practice Group that provides the right level of strategic consulting and services to help organizations plan, implement, customize, deploy and train users on Ektron CMS400.NET, frequently in the context of their larger website or intranet strategy.

The mission of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde's website is two-fold:

1. First, to effectively communicate news and information with the tribal membership – which includes local Oregon-based members and those who’ve moved far away from the tribe’s ancestral land on the Oregon coast. The tribe (which was re-established in 1984 and has worked hard to build and strengthen connections with and among members since then) has more than 5,000 known members worldwide. Sharing information across members has been a challenge.
     
2. Second, the site helps to preserve and communicate the tribe’s heritage through words, images, video and more. The site is a resource for members and the public (citizens, tourists, educators) to learn more about Grand Ronde and its deep history in the Pacific Northwest. The site is part of a comprehensive and detailed web strategy that includes an online “museum” experience with video, audio, images and text generated to preserve the tribe’s heritage and culture and share it with the world. The effort has been noted by national museum organizations as a model for other organizations, and the site has been honored as a 2007 Webby Awards honoree. 

One of the challenges they faced was building a membership-oriented site. The idea of creating a site to inform tribal members everywhere about private tribal info (tribal politics, tribal healthcare benefits, financial reports, and other vital data) was a key goal. The challenge was making it work effectively on the web – and encourage a majority to take part. Grand Ronde is unique among organizations with “members.” Unlike a club, or an association, or an enterprise, the tribe already knows who its members are. Tribal leaders wanted each member to be registered with the site – proactively, to encourage participation. So an initial part of the project was extracting all member information and loading it into the Ektron membership system.

Ektron CMS400.NET solved the challenge of memberships, and a private account was created for each and every tribal member. A communication effort and outreach centered on pushing members to validate their account and start using the website was successful in getting a large percentage of members to “turn on” their accounts and stay in touch.

According to David Aponovich, ISITE Design, "As a benefit more members are 'in touch' and informed than ever before. The tribe also has enjoyed major cost savings by NOT having to send postal communications - which could cost $1500 and up for a simple letter to the membership, multiple times each month."

Another challenge they faced was overcoming barriers to making the tribe's web strategy successful. ISITE, with the Ektron CMS, overcame this challenge by developing a deep partnership with Grand Ronde, including Willie Mercier, a tribal member and its staff Web Designer. During the website project, ISITE Design invited Mercier to work side-by-side with ISITE's Ektron .NET development team in Portland, providing him with office resources to participate in the web project and process, and to learn in-depth information about the Ektron CMS400.NET system during development. This had a major impact on the total client success of the project.

"ISITE brought me in, gave me a desk, sat me down next to the guy doing the developing," Mercier says. "I tell people about this aspect and they say they never had a contractor go that far to help out. That’s a defining characteristic of ISITE. They were very accommodating. If they hadn’t been, we would have been lost."

ISITE also extended the CMS:

• Calendar extended: ISITE Design's work to extend and customize the Ektron Calendar was part of this project. It's highly flexible, filterable, easy to use internally.
   
• Memberships and Document Management: In addition to creating memberships for each member of the tribe, the site uses Ektron document management for official documents, forms, policies, etc., that members are required to access.
   
• Integration: The tribe/ISITE Design integrated Ektron with the tribe's Laserfiche database for official forms, document repository, integrated with Laserfiche database for officials forms. 

Central resource: Today, the website is at the center of the tribe's ongoing effort to remain vibrant, serve members, provide information and resources to all members, and the public. "The website’s ability to interact with tribal membership is so important," says Mercier. "It wasn’t there before. The old website was flat. There wasn’t anything to it. That has completely changed."

Cultural representation: The site (and the related sites under Grand Ronde) showcase the tribe's cultural history in a vibrant, accurate way. 

Rapid web content publishing: Information, forms, news, etc., changes frequently at the tribe. Each change requires a communication with the members. The CMS makes it easy to get the information up on the site, and to proactively communicate with members at an affordable cost. "Getting that information up within a matter of minutes is something that members couldn’t expect before. Any changes that happened, a lot would read it in the paper," Mercier says. That has been completely turned around with the new site.