Farm Credit Canada

Community Development

Company Description

FCC is Canada's largest provider of business and financial services to farms and agribusiness. Operating out of 100 offices located primarily in rural Canada, FCC employees are passionate about the business of agriculture. A healthy portfolio of more than $13 billion and 14 consecutive years of portfolio growth are a reflection of FCC’s customers' success.

Business Challenge

FCC has around 8,500 loyal panelists across Canada that they turn to using surveys when evaluating new products and services. These panelists are great at responding to surveys, so FCC wanted a way to connect them with each other in an effort to increase the collaborative effort even more. One of the main challenges is that many of these panelists are located in rural locations where no high speed internet is available. FCC wanted a website where panelists could go to share ideas, find information about current surveys and agricultural events and FCC also wanted the website to act as a recruiting tool for new panelists.

Solution

Urban Lighthouse custom developed a website with CMS functionality enabling administrators at FCC (with no technical skills) to easily update content. A community site was also custom developed where panelists can go to brainstorm ideas and vote or comment on ideas submitted by others. The application was developed using as small of foot print as possible, keeping its rural users in mind. The application is similar to digg, or Dell’s Idea storm and was developed in ASP.NET 2.0 utilizing Microsoft SQL 2005 as data storage.

Urban Lighthouse implemented the design that was provided by Farm Credit Canada’s in-house brand department.