Echelon

The Echelon Business Development Network offers intimate (15 – 20 persons) monthly group meetings in-person, on Zoom or as a hybrid format in-person with a Zoom. The WordPress Plugin used to manage the events was not designed for “hybrid” meeting management, an there was no good replacement plugin available that was compatible with the membership plugin.

Member onboarding was a cumbersome manual process and ripe for automation.

5D Spectrum re-engineered the website to streamline the complicated management processes, and to create a custom implementation of the event management plugin to allow for Hybrid meetings.

The new design makes the many channels of Echelon easy to access from anywhere on the site. Members have all the features they need to manage their membership and participation from a custom dashboard. They can quickly see what events they have coming up and request to guest at other group events. They can submit membership referrals, blog ideas and request to be interviewed for their personal member video or the Echelon Radio Podcast.

The biggest benefit of the overall site architecture is the on-page SEO combined with the off-page SEO to give members the best results in search engines. Their public facing profiles allow non-members to connect to help them build their businesses. Their private member profile gives members more details about each member. Members have 100% control over what data is public-facing and what is private.

Members can easily network outside of their own group by requesting to guest at any group event they are not a member of. The hybrid meeting format made it easy to be compliant with COVID restrictions during the pandemic. And it is still in use today!

Members’ data is syndicated through the toptrustedadvisors.com website, the annual member directory published in the Echelon Professional Magazine distributed throughout the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles areas.