The National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing information and strategy to those involved in the hobby or business of model railroading. The NMRA was founded in Wisconsin in 1935 and has worked since then to promote model railroading for communities around the world.
NMRA chose New Media Campaigns’ to build an updated version of their old website because of their experience with non-profit website design in the hopes of bringing to life the enjoyment of scale model railroad building.
Website Goals
NMRA wanted to better organize the wealth of information provided on the many pages of the old NMRA site. By achieving a more polished and categorized look, the National Model Railroad Association hoped the new site would attract more users and encourage interaction between communities of builders.
With more than 19,000 worldwide members, the NMRA wanted a website that provides information and services to potential and existing railroading hobbyists and promotes the value of a membership with NMRA for those considering joining.
New and Improved NMRA
The revamped NMRA site was built on the Drupal content management system and is easily navigated on any device because of its responsive layout.
For an organization whose members are mostly in an older demographic, it was important that the New Media Campaign team create a site that highlighted large diagrams, used bright colors, and made good use of images of scale model replications. It was equally important for the site to resonate with a younger audience, so as to cater to the future of the membership.
The new site is organized by specific categories that reflect their mission to increase the global scale of the model railroading community through different forms of:
Available Resources
The new site also provides a variety of resources for users and members. The new site has an improved navigation that makes much more content available in fewer clicks. Through committee contact information, regional data and information on upcoming events and conventions, users are able to interact and work with a wealth of like-mind builders.
Resources are easy to find at the bottom of the site, including an online store, member services information, libraries and publications for NMRA affiliates.
Importance of Membership
Users can not only find all the information they need, but they can also ‘join the club’ at any time by becoming an NMRA member. Membership provides a variety of perks such as special layout and collection insurance, reduced rates and subscriptions. Users can sign up for a trial membership easily through the site. As well, there are many different subscription options for different types of memberships including students and international members. NMRA staff members manage the membership database through a spreadsheet and any changes to the database are automatically updated every night through a script written by NMC.
Overall, the NMRA new website is a massive improvement from a design standpoint, makes finding deep content easier, and is built on a system that makes changing and adding content simple and intuitive.