Collaborated with a team of stakeholders, product managers, and engineers at a leading investment forum to deliver increased value to investment firms, attract a broader audience to the investment organization’s membership base, and position them to bring in the revenue required to run the organization.
The New York Alternative Investment Roundtable (NYAIR) is a non-profit organization focused on providing a forum for thought leadership to the investment community. Here, industry professionals have the opportunity to enhance their knowledge-base and connect with other professionals.
When NYAIR looked to modernize its brand and create a compelling website as a hub to publish information and tell the stories investment professionals want to hear, they reached out to us. We took the firm in a new and vibrant direction, shedding an outmoded look and crafting an online user experience focused on the target audience.
UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCE
While all of the investing process (trading, allocating, managing) is going on, events and thought leadership simultaneously operate. The world’s pensions, endowments, family offices, managers, and fund accountants put effort and countless hours sharing insights and building relationships. Their process is about people and connections, as much as it is about economics. The last thing they want is to lose access to the people critical to their trade.
Investment firms need to launch products, manage offerings, and educate investors, often with limited time. Service providers want to grow their presence, and everyone wants to hear what the smartest minds are thinking.
THE SOLUTION
Enter NYAIR, "the place to connect in alternatives" with a mission to lead the industry forward. We crafted this tagline, along with copy across the entire site designed to resonate with this audiences’ values and culture. At every turn, we designed for the users, starting with a honed value proposition and architecting a content strategy geared to defined personas.
We optimized every word to help NYAIR users perform tasks quickly and turned every message into a valuable conversation. Buttons, assistive text, the sign-up process, error messages, control labels, tooltips, empty states, and success messages were all crafted to work toward increased memberships and better experiences.
VISUAL DESIGN MEETS FUNCTION
We created designs that are aesthetically appealing to users while focusing on the technical aspects of the website, too. Intertwining these functions set-up NYAIR for online success with typography, color, and user elements working together for a functional system.
Improving the NYAIR website's quality meant supporting members' needs through the usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interactions they have with the website. Through copy, design, and development, we executed the vision for the organization's information architecture, navigation, pages, sections, and how site content is connected together.
Through this process we orchestrated user experience design for NYAIR.
This industry values subject matter expertise, curated thought leadership, and bespoke events. Investment professionals pour their lives into their trade and want access to hard-to-reach people, industry insights, and educational information from vendors and peers. The pandemic has accelerated an industry shift toward virtual events and tech-savvy perspective. To help NYAIR attract members, we helped them focus on providing members access to an indispensable community online as well as offline.
Branded promotional products are inexpensive yet effective for expanding awareness and improving brand affinity. Logo imprinted shirts and other brand swag are integral to getting the message out.
