Member-Oriented Rebrand & Website Redesign
Futurpruf Marketing Proposal to the CUPE EWBT
February 16, 2024
Knowledge and Understanding
The CUPE EWBT Context
We understand that CUPE Education Workers Benefits Trust (CUPE EWBT) is the organization responsible for managing the health and wellness benefits offered to education workers within CUPE. In this capacity, you play a stewardship role, whereby you orchestrate the best possible health and wellness benefits for the money provided by participating employers and the members themselves.
Your Plan Sponsor Responsibilities
Central to the CUPE EWBT’s stewardship role is your commitment to make prudent and sustainable decisions that truly support members’ health and well-being.
There are a number of levers that the CUPE EWBT can pull to achieve this goal:
- Learning what members and their families most want or need from their benefit plan
- Building a program that best supports members’ health and well-being – for today and for tomorrow
- Ensuring members are aware of the benefits and resources available, and how to access them
- Procuring the most benefits possible for the spend available
- Managing rising costs year-over-year, in part by inspiring members toward healthy habits and encouraging wise plan use
What’s the key to achieving many of these priorities? Effective benefits communication that’s relatable, accessible, clear, and engaging. In other words, communication they’ll actually read.
Your Plan Sponsor Responsibilities
Central to the CUPE EWBT’s stewardship role is your commitment to make prudent and sustainable decisions that truly support members’ health and well-being.
There are a number of levers that the CUPE EWBT can pull to achieve this goal:
- Learning what members and their families most want or need from their benefit plan
- Building a program that best supports members’ health and well-being – for today and for tomorrow
- Ensuring members are aware of the benefits and resources available, and how to access them
- Procuring the most benefits possible for the spend available
- Managing rising costs year-over-year, in part by inspiring members toward healthy habits and encouraging wise plan use
What’s the key to achieving many of these priorities? Effective benefits communication that’s relatable, accessible, clear, and engaging. In other words, communication they’ll actually read.
Benefits Communication Challenges
There can be many barriers in ensuring plan members are well-informed to access the benefits and support available to them, including:
- Your members are diverse (in literacy, primary language, groups with significant diversity (age, background, gender, family responsibilities, etc.), meaning they also have broad communication needs and preferences
- Communication formats can be limiting for some members, e.g., digital-only format may disadvantage members who aren’t regularly accessing emails or even the Internet
- Members accessing digital communications through mobile devices can have a less-user friendly experience, if emails or websites are optimized for desktop
- Members may not understand the role of the CUPE EWBT or the many other partners in the benefits ecosystem
- Insurance language can be complex. Members may not be familiar with benefits jargon or concepts (e.g., out-of-pocket, coordination of benefits, prior authorization, point-of-sale, etc.) and how these factor into their benefits experience
The Rebrand & Website Redesign Project
The CUPE EWBT has already identified a number of concerns with the current brand and website.
Confusion
Branding doesn’t accurately reflect members and website is hard to navigate to get relevant information.
Complexity
Branding and website makes it hard to understand the role of the CUPE EWBT and what it is offering.
Access
The website contains many PDFs, which are not searchable, and the layout makes it difficult for the members to easily find what they're looking for.
Our Assessment of the Current Brand and Website
Strengths
Simple, straightforward design
While we might suggest several ways to up-level the brand, the overall design simplicity is appropriate. The colour palette doesn’t contain too many colours, the font used is a single sans serif family, and webpage length is fairly short. This indicates a desire to keep things simple for members.
English-French Transition
The experience of changing languages is seamless. The CUPE EWBT has done a terrific job of ensuring that content is in both languages.
Beautiful, informative newsletters
The member updates in the form of quarterly newsletters are well-designed and full of valuable information. The newsletter’s table of contents is a nice touch, allowing members to quickly see what’s relevant to them.
Opportunities
Site navigation is difficult
The navigation bar consists of only parent-level pages, which is a missed opportunity to provide easy access to lower-level content that members would find useful, such as the FAQs. People tend to read left to right, but the order of pages doesn’t reflect the order that most members would prioritize the information. For example, the parent page for OSBCU is before the page for the CUPE EWBT, and Trending Topics is before Your Benefits Plan. Simply put: the architecture of the site (the organization of the content on the site) is not aligned with the member and what they are looking for on the site.
Content could be more targeted
The site’s content uses technical, accurate benefits language. While there are some sections that use more lay-language, many sections provide little context for a non-benefits expert. The use of very technical language without sufficient context means that a great deal of important information could be missed or misunderstood. For example, the information on the Trending Topics page scores 12.4 on the Gunning Fog Index, meaning that it would require post-secondary education in order to understand. The site’s content should be written at a Grade 5 level for all knowledge and language levels to easily understand (best practice for all websites).
Lacking in responsiveness
The website is not mobile-optimized; text doesn’t fit in a standard mobile screen and the use of PDFs means a lot of zooming in and moving around to get all the information. The proportion of website traffic that is from a mobile device has grown steadily since the advent of smartphones. In early 2020, this proportion crossed the 50% mark and continues to rise, meaning that a significant majority of site visitors access the CUPE EWBT website from a mobile device but aren’t served a mobile-friendly experience.
Accessibility standards not met
The logo design and several areas of the website would not meet AODA or WCAG 2.0 guidelines for accessibility. Contrast ratios aren’t sufficient – for example, the white text in the logo does not have sufficient contrast against the light green of the apple and the white text of the nav bar is too thin – which would disadvantage people with a visual impairment. Another example would be the use of red and green font colours, which would provide a poor experience for a person with colour blindness.
Poor user engagement
Overall, the site lacks many features that can be used to engage visitors. There are very few Call to Action buttons or forms that guide users to next steps. There also could be more interactive and engaging content and features, such as video, user-prompted animations, and a chat bot.
Dated and inconsistent look and feel
The combined effect of crowded text, lack of visuals and animation, and loud primary colours (lacking depth and dimension with tints and shades) on the website signal an outdated look and feel. These issues are not present in the design of the PDF Member Newsletters, leading to an inconsistent brand experience.
A person is judged on their resume, but an organization is judged on their website. Your website needs to be at the leading edge of good design and user experience.
Lack of automation
There are a few key places to include more automated functionality, including in the copyright in the website footer, which currently still says 2023.
Security Concerns
The current website has outdated JavaScript libraries, which can be exploited by intruders. Using the latest version of each library and updating it regularly will help keep the CUPE EWBT safe.
Achieving the CUPE EWBT’s Goals
We recommend the following approach for the new brand and website in order to reach the CUPE EWBT's goals.
Be the #1 information resource for members
Ensure the site’s navigation and content are perfectly tailored to the CUPE EWBT’s members. Simplify the language or add more context, and reorganize the pages and layout to align with what the member is looking for.
Increase understanding of the benefits plan and offering
Put the benefits plan information front and centre. Recognizing that the carrier's benefits booklet will likely need to remain as a PDF, we would build out the benefits guide as web-based content with optional PDF download. To engage and inform plan members to support their well-being through the benefits and resources available, we suggest avoiding technical jargon, adding more plain-language context, and/or creating a glossary of commonly misunderstood terms. Involving actual members in the development of the new website can help ensure the layout, content and design are achieving this goal.
Inspire members to actively manage their health and healthcare needs
These past years have had a lasting impact on everyone's well-being, and supportive benefits and services have become more important than ever to plan members and their families. When a member is struggling or needs support, it's even more critical that they can easily navigate to the benefits and resources available. Increasing awareness of programs available, how they can help, and how to access when they need them, in turn empowers members in managing their health.
Lean into web-first content that is presented in an engaging way, while also still allowing for PDF download. Include Calls to Action that guide the member to other parts of the site that complement what they’re seeing at any point. Include call-out boxes in a consistent colour throughout the site, all with member actions or takeaways. Encourage interest and navigation to preventative health resources, informative content, and self-assessment tools available throughout the site.
Maximize reach to increase member awareness
With respect to the website, we recommend incorporating share functionality onto every page to prompt visitors to email or otherwise share the information they find to their home. Additionally, using a good balance of internal and outgoing links throughout the site will ensure that members have a good journey around the site and out to other partners. We would generally also recommend sending requests to partners to share the website content with their audiences to increase reach. A significant way of maximizing reach is through the use of social media. If the CUPE EWBT wants to consider reaching their members through social media, we may suggest establishing a Facebook page or group, as member demographics align with use of that platform.
Ensure accessibility to all available information
As stated above, we recommend clearer, more interactive navigation and a web-first content approach to ensure all information is searchable and easily accessible. Optimizing navigation is one of the best ways to achieve a “choose-your-own-adventure” viewer journey.
Branding and Websites in the Benefits and HR Industry
Successful Rebrands
How do you measure success for a new brand and website? The main question to answer is, “who is the target audience, and is the new brand and website successful at meeting their needs?”
We ensure that our rebrands (or initial branding projects) are successful by gaining a deep understanding of the organization and its target stakeholders. This ensures that we don't allow our pre-conceived ideas or personal preferences to influence the final fine-tuned brand.
That's exactly what made the difference in rebranding Actuarial Analytics and redesigning their website.
Actuarial Analytics
Actuarial Analytics’ original website didn’t do justice to their high-quality services and impressive clientele. Unfortunately, prior to Actuarial Analytics engaging Futurpruf, they had already hired another digital marketing agency, but never launched their new brand and site because they weren’t happy with it.
When they approached us to do a website redesign, we identified deeper brand issues affecting the site’s potential. With their approval, we embarked on a rebranding journey first, leading to a vastly improved and more reflective website and brand identity. See our experience for more information.
Futurpruf Partnership Overview
We would be honoured to support the CUPE EWBT in redesigning both the brand and website. We believe we could add value in the following areas:
Clear purpose and client-focus
The new brand will be optimized for the member and their needs and goals, and the website will be organized to clearly answer the main questions that might have led them here.
User experience
The new website will give users/readers an enjoyable and memorable experience through easy-to-digest text, intuitive layout/navigation and beautiful design.
Strategic navigation and CTAs
The new website will anticipate the diversity of users/readers and make it easy for a user to access the information or resource they need most. It will strategically place appropriate, low-tension Calls to Action (CTAs) to help guide to the next step.
Flexible and multi-functional
The new brand will support and convey an intentional brand personality, and includes multiple versions of the logo suitable for different uses. The CUPE EWBT internal team will also be equipped with a comprehensive suite of brand assets such that they can continue to communicate with members and other stakeholders in a consistent brand experience. The new website will also use brand-consistent messaging and designs.
Influences change
The new brand and website will be designed to create change for the member. That could mean influencing the member to a position of better health and wellness, or increasing awareness of member benefits resulting in fewer calls to the CUPE EWBT or partners, or any other goal that the CUPE EWBT wants to achieve.
Guiding Partnership
The project will be a collaborative journey of discovery achieving a positive outcome that will have been created with contributions from all key stakeholders. Our team’s obsession with good project management and collaboration mean that we successfully balance the need to get inputs from all CUPE EWBT team members, Board members, and even the members themselves with the need to make decisions and execute on our deliverables in a timely manner.
Partnering with Futurpruf Marketing means gaining a partner who thinks broadly about your organization’s goals and how the project mandate meets those goals. For instance, future-proofed branding and design considers additional ways that a project or asset can deliver ROI for the organization. For example, aside from creating better user experience, designing the newsletters such that they are accessible via both PDFs and web-based content expands their usefulness.