Case Study
RiverFront Investment Group
Helping a dynamic investment group support their financial advisor partners
01
The Challenge
To replace an aging, inflexible marketing website within a complex technical environment.
02
The Approach
A content management system replatform paired with an application and hosting upgrade.
03
The Outcome
A more powerfully connected digital experience with enhanced content publishing features.
Client Introduction
Unwavering commitment to financial advisor partners and their clients
RiverFront Investment Group is a global asset manager utilizing a dynamic investment approach with uncommon transparency. They provide flexible, risk-managed solutions for a range of investment objectives and risk tolerances, which can serve as the core of a client’s portfolio or as a satellite to complement other investments.
Project at a Glance
What Our Team Provided
Solutions
- Websites
- Custom Software
How it started
Finding the right solution.
When RiverFront was ready to redesign their marketing website, they had a dilemma; it was tightly coupled with their Advisor Portal, one of their main tools for sharing portfolio and product information. They came to us looking for a way to address their aging website while supporting a measured, longer-term path to reimagining the Advisor Portal. We landed on a phased approach, starting with a website redesign and CMS replatform paired with an application and hosting upgrade to the Advisor Portal. To achieve this, we'd have to decouple the two systems and then develop a seamless integration between the new website and upgraded Advisor Portal. In the end, this approach would allow us to meet pressing needs and deliver immediate value while minimizing project risk and paving the way for a new Advisor Portal in the future.
Backend development
Laying the groundwork for success.
The project started with a hefty amount of back-end development to address initial requirements vital to the project’s success. To provide a more secure and reliable framework, we upgraded the Advisor Portal to the latest supported version of Django and migrated their technical environments to AWS. We also built integrations between the Advisor Portal and the new website built on Craft CMS, including single sign-on (SSO). Additionally, load-balancing provides scalability and path-based routing while secure, automated updates provide synchronized data for investments numbers and graphs between their systems at scheduled intervals.
CMS development
Building a flexible and powerful website.
Older websites tend to lack the flexible content publishing infrastructure that modern marketing teams need to do their jobs effectively. It's a common problem, and RiverFront's prior website was no exception. Basic content updates required the involvement of IT and the programming team. Robust content changes took too long and cost too much.
To fix this, we delivered an incredibly intuitive publishing experience with a new website built on Craft CMS that gave them more control over their content with a dynamic "page builder" system that has over 30 modular components which can be used to create unique pages with reorderable content blocks.
The new website also makes it easy for RiverFront to deliver individualized experiences to different audience members with additional features like password protected landing pages, advanced scheduling and expiration of content entries, and more granular permissions controls for viewing certain pages or even specific pieces of content. Overall, we helped significantly reduce the amount of effort required to manage the website while also empowering the RiverFront team with increased capabilities.
User Experience
Delivering a more cohesive experience.
Beyond an updated, modern and fully responsive user interface (with UI designs by circle S studio), we fine-tuned the overall user experience to be as intuitive and enjoyable as possible. Efforts to improve navigation and transfer former PDF content into web pages results in users finding items more efficiently and staying on the website longer. We also wrapped the older Django application with the new website's header and footer to make them feel more consistent, which not only improved the experience of navigating between the two platforms, but also makes it so seamless that users shouldn't even notice.
Search & Discovery
Building a dynamic search and discovery experience.
To further improve content findability, we built a global search and discovery experience. We combined four Algolia implementations into one global system with built-in permissions and filters that get applied on the fly, so results are automatically filtered out if a user doesn't have access. This makes results more personalized while eliminating roadblocks and frustrations at being presented with gated content.
The end result
Success in numbers.
RiverFront's audience only had positive things to say about the new and improved experience after it went live. The numbers confirmed the favorable reception. Just a month after launch, they had a 70% increase in overall traffic and a 140% uptick in registrations for commentary subscriptions. More than that, we set RiverFront up with the ability to accomplish so much more in-house while also reducing their website management time and effort. As a result, RiverFront is excited to redirect the outside help they used to need for basic website updates towards new feature development and future phases of work.
Website images and content in this case study are shown as samples only and not intended as marketing or sales material for RiverFront.
Client Testimonials
"FosterMade’s team worked diligently to understand our goals and collaborated seamlessly with our team and circle S to deliver a website that delights users and is easy to manage from a content management perspective. The level of communication throughout the project was impressive. Their team was able to translate a multi-layered user experience based on levels of permissions flawlessly."
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