Canadian Institute of Planners

Summary

The Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) works on behalf of the more than 7,500 planning professionals nation-wide, serving as the voice of Canada’s planning community. Since it’s beginning in 1919, CIP has grown into a federated national organization with Provincial and Territorial Institutes and Associations across Canada, and with links to planning associations worldwide.

CIP engaged Seventyeight to develop a fully bilingual, dynamic, engaging, socially interactive information and communications platform optimized for desktop, tablet and cross-device mobile compatibility.

Key outcomes included:

• Development of a modern, dynamic, engaging, visually appealing design –one that presents CIP as a progressive, authoritative and member focused organization.
• Responsive Design - The website was architected and constructed using Responsive Web Design (RWD) best practices in order to ensure optimized viewing for users through the device of their choosing - desktop, tablet or smart phone. The design was implemented using Bootstrap 3 framework in conjunction with Kentico CMS Page Templates and Transformations. This provided a tremendous amount of design flexibility while providing a powerful framework for tailoring the sites responsiveness.
• Integration with third party Association Management System - we needed to serve data and content from a third party system into public and private sections of the new website.
• Facilitating effective information sharing among planning practitioners, the provincial affiliate organizations, academics, students, the public and other stakeholders.
• Providing connections to social media elements to amplify messaging, provide professional networking opportunities and strengthen relationships across the CIP membership.
• Empowering users to complete key tasks – obtain news and information, learn about and register for events, disseminate communications using social media channels and connect with CIP staff.
• Search Engine Optimization - Implementation of SEO best practices to increase exposure and visibility and drive qualified traffic to the site.
• Content Management - Implementation of a flexible and intuitive web-based Content Management System (Kentico CMS). One that is scalable and extensible with the capacity to integrate third party applications and services.

The website was built in Kentico CMS.