The California Faculty Association (CFA) is a union of 23,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches who teach in the California State University system.

CFA had an aging website that was not user friendly and couldn’t be updated by CFA staff.  It was visually outdated, difficult to navigate, and both visitors and staff reported that they were not able to find what they were looking for.

The website’s inflexibility put great strain on the organization. The communications department couldn’t make updates directly, which meant the IT department had to divert valuable staff time to perform the updates and solve problems like facilitating online voting for contract ratification. To make things worse, the chapters resorted to building and updating their own sites, scattering valuable content across many different domains.
 

The Solution

CFA had heard about the results Digital Deployment had achieved for another client, so they invited Digital Deployment to demo their technology and discuss their process. The conversation brought many new options to light that CFA hadn’t considered, such as hosting the site externally and having their development partner use a proven method of interviewing stakeholders and facilitating the website development. Within two months, CFA hired Digital Deployment to redesign the website and work its magic. Eight weeks later, CFA launched a new site, on time and on budget.

The Result

Communications empowered: Today, the communications department has numerous staff updating the site on a daily basis, making major changes with ease. CFA sends out a weekly newsletter using posts from its website using Digital Deployment’s Bundle and Blast™ technology, all without assistance.

IT-Free: The IT department is completely free of the burden of maintaining the site. CFA instead receives unlimited support, monthly website updates, and hosting directly from Digital Deployment as part of its comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA). Questions sent to Digital Deployment from the California Faculty Association are answered within one (1) hour, on average, and resolved within one day.

Chapters empowered: CFA found the technology was so easy to use that they were able teach all 23 chapters how to make updates to their own “Microsites” — separate sections of the website with a slightly different look and feel that reflects each chapter’s unique brand. Using workflow management tools, each chapter is empowered to maintain their own content and approve content locally, while CFA administrators can feature a chapter’s content on the homepage, cross-post content to other sections, or bundle any chapter’s content into e-mail blasts.

Ongoing support: Once the site was live, CFA found itself having to solve new problems on the web. Within the scope of its Service Level Agreement with Digital Deployment, CFA was able to facilitate online voting to allow faculty to ratify their contract, add a “contract countdown” timer to the homepage, and integrate “e-mail your local editor and/or legislator” 3rd party tools to help them accomplish their goals.

Four years strong: Four years and one design “refresh” later, CFA is still working with Digital Deployment and is satisfied with their ongoing partnership.

“You are doing a heroic job on the CFA web site, getting ready for the vote to start Monday. We appreciate and all the upgrades, and just want to say thanks!!”

—Alice Sunshine, Communications Director, California Faculty Association

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