WorkForce One: Case Study

Last year, Broward County, FL-based WorkForce One decided its website needed a makeover. They turned to DMNI, and a new, customer-friendly, service oriented site was born. Here’s how it happened:

In the beginning….

WorkForce One is the administrative arm of the Broward Workforce Development Board (BWDB). A quasi-governmental organization, it is headed by a fifty-seven member board, including private sector business leaders, educational institutions, elected officials and community-based organizations.

The organization provides funding, contract administration, oversight and technical assistance to agencies, businesses and faith-based organizations. These services include career counseling, business services, job placement and support services to job seekers and employers.

“Our primary goals are to maximize the use of taxpayer dollars, provide valued services to the community, get businesses to list their job openings (with us), hire our job applicants, and create a competitive community workforce advantage,” says WorkForce One Vice President Khalil Zeinieh.

Its mission is strong. But WorkForce One’s website needed work.

“The website was a static, on-line magazine that provided basic information,” Mr. Zeinieh explains. “(We needed something that) better served job seekers by providing links to current employment and training opportunities. We also needed it to serve businesses by allowing them to access information on prospective employees, funds for job training and other benefits.”

Websites are also designed to be an important part of a company’s marketing and public relations strategy, and WorkForce One is no exception.

“The perception was that we were some kind of government bureaucracy,” Zeinieh said. “We wanted the site to complement our marketing and public relations effort, focusing on value-added services and excellent customer service.”

Work Force One turned to DMNI for help.

Creating A New Site

One of the first things DMNI did was to survey WorkForce One extensively to learn about the organization, its processes, its goals and most important, its needs for the new site. This included gathering examples of sites WorkForce One admired, learning how the company was currently perceived by the public and why, seeing how WorkForce One wanted to be perceived, surveying its content structures, logo use, need for secure vs. non-secure pages, and much more.

With information in hand, DMNI staff went to work designing the site alongside WorkForce One’s staff. Starting in May 2004, the teams worked together, implementing a new approach to the site’s design and new tools to make it all work together smoothly, efficiently and economically.

“We worked very closely with DMNI to design the new site and learn about the on-line tools,” Mr. Zeinieh says, who was impressed with DMNI’s approach to the site design. “DMNI brought a private sector, value-added, business approach to the site. They provided powerful tools that will help maintain the site as a demand-driven resource for job seekers and businesses.”

The final result….

The new WorkForce One website launched in January 2005 with a new look, new tools, and the ability to better serve WorkForce One’svalued customers and partners..

“The new site is extremely dynamic,” Mr. Zeinieh says. “It allows our staff to easily update and change information based on customer feedback. The initial response has been tremendous and we look forward to fully utilizing the powerful tools that DMNI has provided.”

To learn more about WorkForce One, and to see the new website, visit www.wf1broward.com