A strategic approach to supporting a company expansion
We partnered with CPC to showcase how their organization is revitalizing neighborhoods.
Affordable Housing for All
The Community Preservation Corporation (CPC) is a non-profit bank that launched in 1974 through a joint agreement between the City of New York and its leading commercial banks to restore and rebuild New York’s aging neighborhoods. Since then, they have evolved and expanded their reach to become a consistent source of capital to underserved housing markets throughout New York State where they financed more than 170,660 affordable housing units with $9.7 billion in public and private investments.
In preparation for a nationwide expansion, CPC approached Division Of/ to redesign their website to become the digital face of the organization
When asked to describe how a potential buyer decides on a lender, the response was one word, “credibility’. A key objective of the website was to convey the transformative impact that CPC has had on the communities that it serves and how it will continue to do so as it expands to new communities. To do this, we built an interactive map application that shows projects that CPC financed over the years with featured stories and case studies.
From a functional perspective, the key objective was to build a website with the flexibility to grow and expand with the company.
Our Impact Interactive Map
We built an interactive map application in order to house the data on over 4000 projects that CPC has funded in the last 40 years. In addition to metrics from the project data, the interactive contains case studies and featured project write-ups that convey the history and impact of CPC on communities. A line graph view of projects over time traces the history of CPC in every region that it has served.
Thought Leadership
CPC creates a wealth of materials and resources for potential buyers as well as thought leadership content such as videos and podcasts. We created a Publications section to house all of this content in an SEO optimized way that makes it easy to find, share, and use as a marketing tool to drive traffic to the website.
Loan Finder
Potential borrowers vary in their sophistication and understanding of financing options. That’s why the loan finder tool is a simple way to start exploring the financing products that CPC has to offer by answering a few basic questions about a building project.
Contact Directory
The ultimate goal is for potential borrowers to contact a CPC representative via phone or email. Existing loan holders also need a way of finding contacts for support. At the same time, who to contact depends on region and type of product, and the rules change as the organization moves into new territories. The contact directory was designed to accommodate these complex and evolving requirements. Using a flexible “contact card” system it’s a solution that will grow and develop with the organization.
Easy to Use Wordpress CMS
Beyond the consumer-facing website, a major goal for the CPC team was to have a content management system (CMS) that is easy to use so that they can establish ongoing processes to update the website.
The Results
Using the newly organized CMS has allowed the CPC team to build efficient processes and workflow around regularly updating the website.
When we started, back end was a mess – no real place for updates – duplicated info, back end is now organized, all content has a specific place and now they have one person to manage content – set up to use website as a tool.
Their efforts have yielded results. In the 5 months since launch, website traffic increased 18% from the same time last year.