The Trustees of Reservations, one of the nation's oldest conservation organizations, approached Synthenet to develop a new web site to showcase their 94 Massachusetts properties, as well as five brand new "satellite" web sites, each featuring a specific enterprise:

A major issue with the Trustees' original web site was that it presented the organization from their point of view - what they do and what they need, versus the user's perspective - what the properties have to offer and the benefits of membership. The site was maintained by an outside agency at a substantial hourly rate.

The Trustees' goal was to solidify their identity as a very active conservation community facing huge challenges - and not be confused with state government properties (state parks). The new web site needed to:

• Generate visitation to the properties; attendance at events
• Recruit new members and volunteers
• Solicit feedback from (and better serve) existing members and the general public
• Increase public awareness and understanding of conservation efforts
• Be maintained easily and efficiently in-house by several staff members

Synthenet recommended that the Trustees of Reservations main web site and five satellite sites be built in the Synthenet Content Management System.

Since there was a substantial level of custom development involved to meet the client's goals, both the existing E-Commerce and Form/Survey Builder Modules experienced considerable enhancements during this process, including the ability to process non-taxable, non-shippable transactions (donations and memberships). The Trustees' project also utilizes the Messaging Module.

In addition to the enhancements made to existing modules, the following customized features were developed:

• Events Calendar
• Extensive Property Search capabilities, including an interactive map of Massachusetts and search by activity, region and name.
• Trip Reports (Visitors to the site complete a form, based on the property they visited. An approval process takes place through the administration area and Trip Reports are posted on the end user pages).

Development of the look and feel for the site was also complex. The home page features a Flash piece, as well as several "feature" areas, multi-level dropdown menus and a "Quicklinks" menu.

The Trustees of Reservations' new web site portrays their properties beautifully and in great detail and provides a wealth of information about the organization and their conservation efforts.

Members benefit from discounts in the on-line store, as well as a member-only area featuring threaded discussion forums, downloadable screensavers, wallpaper and more.

Consisting of over 800 pages, 1500+ images and more than 130 documents, the Trustees' staff maintains the main web site and five satellite sites in-house, through Synthenet's Content Management System. All six sites are maintained through one interface. This saves the organization thousands of dollars in maintenance and information contained in the site is always current.

Since its launch on February 1, 2003, The Trustees of Reservations web site has been extremely well received. Although the site was not actively promoted until later in the week, several donations and memberships were processed through the web site within just a few hours of launch.

The number of incoming orders increases steadily on a daily basis. A television spot on WCVB-TV Channel 5’s “Chronicle” drove a substantial amount of traffic to the site and many existing members are now choosing to renew their memberships via the web site.

"Founded in 1891, The Trustees of Reservations is a member-supported nonprofit conservation organization that owns and opens to the public over 90 properties in Massachusetts, including woodlands, beaches, working farms, and historic houses and gardens. More than a million people visit Trustees properties each year, in large part for the recreational opportunities they offer. Others participate in educational programs, take cultural and natural history tours, and attend special events. Several properties offer overnight B&B accommodation, private function rentals, and camping. Behind the scenes, the organization stewards its land holdings, enhancing their scenic, historic, and ecological values through active management programs, while, at the same time, aggressively seeking to acquire and protect for conservation purposes additional landscapes across the state. In short, The Trustees of Reservations is a complex organization with an exciting story to tell and much to offer the public. We engaged Synthenet Corporation in spring 2002 to build a comprehensive and dynamic web-based communications and marketing platform for the entire organization.

Our stated priorities for the project were:

• To have complete and immediate control over site content. We could no longer justify the cost and time inefficiencies associated with outsourcing content management, and were looking to build the entire site in a content management environment that included control over site architecture, text, formatting, links, images, and downloads.
• To integrate disparate Trustees-affiliated web sites into a unified web presence. We needed to bring several free-standing web sites under the umbrella of the organization’s main site and create a series of separately branded microsites for our enterprises.
• To come up with a strongly branded and timeless design that put navigation front and center. The site’s design needed to reinforce the organization’s identity, be classical and clean, and extensively use photography. Given the depth of the content on the site, the navigation had to be apparent and include map- and calendar-based navigation tools to complement global dynamic navigation, audit trails, and text navigation links.
• To deliver a range of new functions. The new site would require secure e-commerce, bulk e-communications, bulletin boards, threaded discussion groups, database searches, click-through photo galleries, polls and surveys, and special user accounts.
• To be able to append add content and new applications modularly. While we could not anticipate all the future needs for the site, the site would need to be built in such a way as to allow us to grow it without fundamentally changing it.

Synthenet Corporation was the perfect partner for this project. A key business advantage is their outstanding and comprehensive content management system (CMS) built in Coldfusion and served on SQL. It is a robust, tested, and intuitive tool that gives The Trustees of Reservations complete control over all the content on our main web site and each associated microsite. Managing content through the CMS requires no knowledge of HTML, permits decentralized responsibilities, and (unlike many content management systems) requires no sacrifice in terms of page layout and design. It is pure pleasure to use and has been built and improved over years to meet virtually every content management need that typically arises.

Working off a marketing and creative brief, Synthenet’s designer developed superb, on-target design concepts that achieved both our branding and aesthetic goals for the main site and each microsite. In addition, design elements and formatting styles are controlled through the CMS, permitting the client to extend the design to every page of the site.

All functionality requirements were handled either through application modules previously created by Synthenet or client-customized applications. In both cases, all applications are integrated into the CMS, making for seamless back-end administration

In every respect, Synthenet’s approach to web site architecture, design, function, and content management was – and continues to be – a perfect match for our needs. Every staff member at Synthenet is a highly skilled professional with a “can do” attitude and made a total commitment to creating the most effective web site for The Trustees of Reservations".

Michael Triff
Director of Communications & Marketing
The Trustees of Reservations