From the March issue of RE Magazine:

As a member-driven organization, NRECA draws its strength from the breadth and quality of the relationships we maintain with our members and other stakeholders.

In recent years, NRECA has undertaken several projects to grow those relationships and evolve how we engage with members. In many respects, these changes reflect how we use technology, consume information, and stay connected.

With the launch of a completely redesigned version of our member-focused website, cooperative.com, we've successfully completed a critical project to enhance member engagement.

The new cooperative.com is built to give every member of the electric co-op family a customizable hub where they can connect, grow, and get things done.

As a portal for everything from benefits information to conference registration to technical papers, we know the sheer volume of information available on cooperative.com can make the site overwhelming to use. The older version had become cumbersome and less user-friendly.

We have addressed that challenge through easy-to-navigate menus, an improved search function, and better organization of resources, including the ability to explore by topic rather than department.

You can also specify which topics and types of information are of interest to you, and the site will provide that content to you each day. We hope this change will be especially helpful to the many co-op employees who wear several hats and need to stay up to date on topics that might fall outside their official job title.

This project was not simply a fresh coat of paint on an aging house. Working with our website partners CFC and Federated, it is a complete rebuild that blends data from several different systems into a seamless user experience.

It required many thousands of hours worked by dozens of NRECA employees across multiple departments over two years. I am grateful for their efforts, and impressed by the member focus, attention to detail, and collaborative spirit displayed by everybody who contributed to the project.

Since the launch, we have been actively monitoring the site for any glitches, which inevitably occur with a project of this magnitude. We have allocated resources to promptly resolve issues as they are identified.

Once we are confident the site is performing as expected, we will launch the final piece of the new cooperative.com: professional community pages.

These professional communities are designed to boost engagement and collaboration by giving co-op employees a secure, social-media-style platform where they can network, ask questions, and share ideas with peers.

The new cooperative.com is just one of the actions we've taken to transform the way we engage with you.

Together, we are lifting the voices of America's electric cooperatives and ensuring that the people and places we serve are part of any national conversation about energy and rural development.

I encourage you to make cooperative.com one of your default pages when you launch your browser. Our goal is that you will be rewarded with useful information that is frequently updated.

No matter how often you visit cooperative.com, I am confident you will have a better and more engaging experience.

— Jim Matheson, NRECA CEO