A Website Serving Silicon Valley Company Directors

The Challenge

With the challenges of Sarbanes Oxley and pressures to keep corporations growing, how do you help Silicon Valley Company Boards negotiate and thrive in this new environment? A solution, the Silicon Valley Chapter of the National Association of Corporate Directors (SVNACD).

The National Association of Corporate Directors, the parent organization was founded over 30 years ago to help educate and enhance director effectiveness through education. The Silicon Valley Chapter was started just over 5 years ago. At that time, they turned to WMSMedia to help with the design and web hosting of their website www.svnacd.org.

The SVNACD mission is to focus on issues that impact public or soon-to-be public companies here in Silicon Valley. They present six programs each year, dealing with "hot" topics that independent directors (and executive officers too) wish to learn more about from speakers with "hands-on" experience. All of the programs are interactive, so that attendees can receive advice regarding the issues that concern them.

Designing a Solution

WMSMedia went to work to provide an easy-to-use site that could incorporate the growing needs of the chapter. These needs include publishing meeting notices, maintaining a contact database, handling payments for events, offering membership applications, and sending e-mail blasts.

Helping to manage a database of over 3,000, WMSMedia is using the services of Cvent, an event management service. These services allow the handling of large volumes of e-mail traffic and the critical managment of registration fees, discounts, and refunds. Once a payment is made, the funds are directly deposited into the SVNACD bank account eliminating the need for any U.S. mail transactions. Everything is done electronically.

One Click Away

One of the key design elements of the site was to be sure the majority of items a user is interested in is only one click away. For this purpose the home page publishes every month the upcoming events and an instant registration page link. This has proved to be a great benefit for time-pressed directors or casual site visitors. Every other item on the site is only two clicks away.

Advertising

Getting the word out is done with the help of the Silicon Valley Business Journal and using Google ads. For example if you type in Silicon Valley on a google search you'll see in the right-hand corner a link to SVNACD. It is first out of 34,100,000 other possibilities!

Lon Allan, President NACD Silicon Valley Chapter: "Tom Wohlmut, our Webmaster since 2001, has creatively and professionally spread our message to directors, officers and advisors of Silicon Valley companies.  Given our long-standing and positive relationship with Tom, we would recommend him to any company eager to take their web presentations to the next plateau."

The resulting website has been a success for the Silicon Valley Chapter of NACD. Since it's inception it has gone through a complete re-design to keep it fresh. In the future we are planing podcasts and videocasts of meetings and other educational material.

Free Offer

If you are a director or have an interest in attending an SVNACD meeting please contact Tom Wohlmut for a complimentary admission. This is a $75 retail value free to WMSMedia clients and referrals.