Overview:

Mackenzie Investments wanted to take a large portion of their website, Advisor Resources, and re-launch it as a newly branded, exclusive experience for advisors under the name Mackenzie Institute.  The overall objective in creating the Mackenzie Institute was to reinforce and position Mackenzie as a leader and innovator when it comes to advisor engagement and development.

The Challenge:

Traditionally, the web user experience with financial and investing content is less than ideal on the user experience front. Content is often posted from multiple departments, as it comes up and users need to wade through many layers and rely on basic search tools to find what they need.  Mackenzie Investments saw an opportunity to lead by example in tackling this problem within the industry.

Also within the Advisor Resources section of the website was an amalgamation of input from many teams and external partners over many years, and was in need of systematizing and clean up.

This was the first time Mackenzie is taking on a content reorganization of this magnitude. Further, this was a pilot project within the company to run a large project in an Agile methodology, bringing together Scrum and Kanban for different teams.

The Big Ask:

The task at hand was two-fold – figure out how to tackle the review and categorization of the immense amount of content available, and put in place a user-friendly new portal that focussed on seamless, intuitive user experience for advisors.

The Simplification Plan:

c+p digital devised a system that would allow for the review of each piece of content against a matrix of criteria.  This was built into an online Kanban board to follow a process of project management with the ease and accountability of online tools.

Because of the many internal team members working on this project, the system needed to be transparent and easy for all to use throughout the process, which we facilitated.

This system allowed for efficient decision making on hundreds of pieces of content – to retire, to update, or to move forward to the new portal as is.  Each piece of examined content was then organized into new categories and subcategories carefully chosen based on advisor usage patterns.

To ensure fresh content will always appear in the Mackenzie Institute without user intervention, the team set up a dynamic tagging system that allowed for the continual influx of new material from across Mackenzie digital properties. This means that content will be automatically featured in the Institute based on tags, with no need for web management teams.

To meet the goal of making the new property modern and visually enticing, the c+p team provided design advisory and managed image selection.

The Results:

Mackenzie Investments launched the Mackenzie Institute April 2019.

The look is very visual, and only the most useful content is housed here, carefully organized in a manner that makes sense to their advisor audience.

The automation solutions put in place will allow for a continually updated central portal that requires no additional web team management to ensure content is featured on the Mackenzie Institute.