February 5, 2024
College and University Retiree Associations of Canada (CURAC)
College and University Retiree Associations of Canada /Associations de retraités des universités et collèges du Canada (CURAC/ARUCC) is a not-for-profit federation of retiree organizations at colleges and universities across Canada. CURAC/ARUSS's objectives are:
- to coordinate activities that promote communication among member associations,
- to share information about activities of member organizations,
- to provide mutual assistance, and
- to speak publicly on issues of concern to the over fifteen thousand individual college and university retirees across Canada.
The Challenge
Northern Village was asked to create a user friendly website for the CURAC board, CURAC board sub-committees, affiliate members, retiree association members and others to have access to CURAC news and knowledge sharing. Their priority was connecting members to events, documents and outside opportunities through use of newsletters, an online calendar, blog posts and recorded events.
The website had to be in both English and French. Event information for the annual conference and an archive of media from the conference such as recorded talks, written accounts and speaker bios were to be presented in an accessible way, for a traditionally low tech audience. A news section was needed for member and CURAC specific news.
The Solution
Northern Village was happy to use an upgraded CMS, now branded as Niiwin for the site. It adds considerable flexibility in creating custom sections for the website. In particular, a Library section was created with different categories attached to the articles. This way one article can have multiple categories, and the article appears in each one, making the management of the site easy to do.
The Conference section of the site is within the Library, and contains the many articles that were presented at the conference, making it a more robust part of the site.
As historical content was only partially translated, our flexible CMS allowed for French language elements to be added as created, which allowed for a faster launch of the new design after core pages were completed. Another element that Northern Village encourages customers to do is to have a land acknowledgement in the footer of each page.