Kelsi Collins, Director of Membership & Marketing, says the internal website for The Oaks Club had been a project in the making long before she came on board.
Before the redesign, Collins describes the website as clunky and unorganized. It also didn’t fit member expectations.
“Our members prioritize the availability of information that’s readily available,” she says. “By that, I mean our members want to see everything from town hall presentations to recorded Zoom meetings of architect meetings to committee meetings to our newsletter.”
Collins understood that members wanted a website that they could go to for easy access of meeting minutes from two years ago. It was her job to build that for them.
Defining the new website’s role
The first thing Collins did when starting the redesign was figure out who was actually using the website, especially since the club’s app is popular among members.
She went to each of the club’s committees and sat down with those members and asked what they were using the member website for.
“Through those sessions I was able to prioritize if people were booking things through here, if it was more of an information seeking tool and if this should be used as a social tool to check calendar events,” she says.
What she found is that the member website is essentially a library for documenting everything that the club is doing.
She also found that the club’s app, ForeTees, is where most members book dining reservations and tee times.
“That told me that because they’re seeking that information as quickly as possible, I’m still going to give them an avenue to do it on the member’s website,” she says. “But I’m going to put it right at the top of each tab.”
Conversations like this helped Collins strategically decide where to put certain things and how the website would look.
The biggest part of the project was deciding how to better organize the governance sections and capital projects.
“Like I said, our members prioritize information and governance availability, information and presentation are their number one thing,” she says.
Capital Project Section
The Capital Projects section keeps members updated on projects like the Eagle Golf Course renovation, currently underway at the club.
With help from a website design company, the club decided to implement blog-style updates for these projects.
“We are a club that over communicates, as everybody does,” she says. “We send out GM updates about capital projects on a monthly basis.”
To save members from scrolling through their emails to look for the one The Oaks Club sent on a specific renovation update, Collins takes those emails and turns them into a blog-style post to live on this page of the website.
When members go to the page, they see the FAQs regarding active projects, then if they scroll, they can see the most recent updates and all the other updates that have been sent beforehand.
Collins is also able to add videos so members can rewatch architects walking through a project.
Governance Section
Collins says her research showed that members were going to the governance section to watch a town hall video they missed or view results from a survey sent out months earlier.
“They’re looking for things like important presentations, videos and information that’s being sent out,” she says. “But sending them out by email isn’t enough.”
Because members wanted all of this information in one space, Collins had to find a way to make the page user-friendly and organize it appropriately.
She added tabs for videos and presentations, linked to PDFs, and blog-style posts called Club Updates. Each department head went through their section and cleaned it up or added anything that was missing.
“Anytime we have a board recap monthly email that goes out to members is on the Club Update section,” she says. “Whenever we have Holly [Farrell, General Manager/COO] sending out an email, that email is on there.
With so many members being seasonal, they’re not going to pay attention to their email while they’re not here. Now, they have access to view important updates that they might have missed, presentations that they can watch again, and go right to a PDF of a deck we talked about.”
Collins didn’t complete this transformation alone. She spoke with each committee head and heads of the women’s and men’s club to see what they wanted and to create cohesiveness across the tabs.
The club also connected its professional photographer to the website by giving her a link to upload photos from club events, which syncs to the site.
Simplifying information
Collins says while members are still getting used to the changes, overall everyone is very happy with the refreshed look.
“They love how once you get to the information you’re looking for, it all makes sense,” she says.
Another big change was cutting back on redundancy.
On the old website, the same information was stored in multiple places.
“If you updated maybe two of the three spots that this information lived in, but a member finds conflicting information on the one spot you didn’t update, now we have a problem,” she explains.
Now, the website is streamlined, and the club is only putting information where it belongs and not repeating it elsewhere.
This was a big help from a staff perspective, especially in the committees’ section or the men’s and women’s club sections.
Only high-level information is on these pages, so Collins and her team don’t have to update the page every time something small changes.
“For example, our book club on the old website had all the dates of book club, the books that they’re reading, who’s presenting it, and where they’re going,” she says. “We’re not doing that anymore. Instead, you can have the dates and the books, but you have a contact form of who oversees book club to confirm the smaller details.”
Approaching technology like a capital project
The redesign of the internal website was a two-year process, given the amount of member input and backend work Collins and her team had to complete before even launching.
Constant communication with members throughout the process meant the launch wasn’t a surprise — members knew it was coming.
Collins also educated her team to make sure they were prepared to handle any questions that would inevitably come in from members once it rolled out.
“The goal of doing this was we want this investment in our membership experience to last a long time, just like you would any capital project,” she adds. “We took this on like any capital project. We’re going to do the work and do this one time and make it great, so we don’t have to do it again a few years down the road.”
