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Investments & Wealth Institute

Founded in 1985, the Investment & Wealth Institute (IWI) exists to elevate and advance the financial advice profession. By uniting members, educators, leadership, and advocates, IWI addresses critical challenges in the industry: demonstrating the value of specialized investment, retirement, and wealth management services and fostering public trust in the professionals delivering them. Guided by clear principles, IWI empowers its community with resources, education, and a shared commitment to excellence, ensuring the financial advice profession continues to meet the evolving needs of the public.

Mockup of the Investments & Wealth Institute website displayed on a laptop, featuring the headline 'Certified Success' and promoting a 'Win a Trip to Experience 2025' contest in celebration of the organization's 40th anniversary. The banner includes a 'Learn More' button and an image of an audience attending a conference.
Technologies
Storyblok
Services
Design, Development, Discovery and Roadmap, Integration, Messaging, Web Content Strategy
Industry
Association
Awards

List, List

Live Site
investmentsandwealth.org

Results

Improving Business Outcomes, Advancing the Member Experience

Every association needs to drive revenue to continue advancing their mission.

IWI’s new website puts their mission and values front and center, while positioning their highest value offerings in easy reach.

  • It’s easy to differentiate IWI from other certifying organizations—and to differentiate IWI certifications from each other.
  • Through a universally shared experience, every visitor—members, certificants, consumers, and newcomers—can quickly find the personalized pathway they are looking for.
  • Marketing staff can easily drive traffic and business to IWI certifications and partners.

Most important, the organization is now able to make meaningful, positive changes to their site, content, and tech stack—without starting from scratch ever again.

 

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Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute website on a laptop, tablet, and smartphone. The homepage features the headline 'Certified Success' with a promotion for a 'Win a Trip to Experience 2025' contest and a section celebrating the organization's 40th anniversary.
Screenshot of the Investments & Wealth Institute membership comparison table, outlining features for Basic, Signature, and Elite membership tiers. The table highlights benefits such as access to publications, newsletters, continuing education, and discounts on courses and webinars.

BizStream has been able to do more for us in 2 months than our other partners were able to do in a year—and they’ve become a key strategic partner for our organization. Their pragmatic approach, responsiveness to our requests, and guidance on marketing strategy has made them an invaluable resource for Investments & Wealth Institute.

Jamie Lewis
Director of Business Application Solutions, IWI
Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute 'Featured Courses' page on a smartphone and tablet. The page highlights courses such as 'Private Markets for Advisors,' 'Private Wealth Essentials,' 'Global Financial Planning Essentials,' and 'Investment Management Essentials,' each offering 15 CE hours.

Challenges

Giving Members Value They Can’t Get Anywhere Else

For associations today, staying relevant is critical to their long-term sustainability.

For Investments & Wealth Institute (IWI), reviving that relevance—and making their industry-leading certifications easy for new and existing members to embrace—had become a critical need.

Their old website had become overgrown, overblown, and overly difficult to navigate—for both site editors and site visitors. Existing and prospective members couldn’t easily find what they were looking for.

And their most important message—the value of their certifications and education programs—had been buried.

Leaning into the trusted relationship they had with BizStream, IWI looked to fully transform their brand and build a modern website that showcases:

  • The unique value of their advanced certifications
  • Their practical, career-boosting member benefits
  • The impact of IWI’s evolutionary leadership in the financial advising profession

Requirements

Discovery, Alignment, and a Roadmap to Value

The efforts of IWI’s marketing, membership, education, events, and sales teams were shackled by a traditional, decentralized infrastructure and rigid page templates.

To move multiple agendas forward, internal teams had splintered the site navigation, diluting the brand with competing messages and duplicate content.

IWI’s leadership team knew the website redesign would be a herculean effort, but they were looking for several non-negotiable outcomes. The new site needed to:

  • Elevate IWI’s unique value in the financial certification space
  • Be highly navigable, creating a personalized, intuitive experience for members, prospects, and partners
  • Empower their internal teams to innovate, adapt, and better serve their members

BizStream started IWI’s process with a detailed Website Discovery project to align their stakeholders, leadership, and board and clarify the most critical opportunities for website transformation.

Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute 'Industry-Leading Financial Advisor Webinars' page on a smartphone and tablet. The page features upcoming webinars for 2025, including 'Wealth Planning Trends 2025: Super Bowl, Asset Values, and Silver Tsunami,' with a 'Click Here to Register' button.

Impactful Improvement Opportunities

Content Management
  • Simplify brand story
  • Consolidate content
  • Develop process for content review and updates
  • Apply metrics to drive change
UX/IA
  • Improve navigation
  • Eliminate noise
  • Simplify nomenclature
  • Unify visual design
Systems
  • Adopt an easy-to-use CMS
  • Streamline admin ownership and processes
  • Ensure security
  • Reduce IT burden and redundancy
  • Lower costs where possible

Solutions

Simplifying the Digital Ecosystem

As a certifying membership organization and professional association, IWI’s website is the hub of member, partner, and prospect interactions across an interconnected architecture of best-of-breed technologies.

To create a unified, scalable, and future-proofed solution, we recommended that IWI build the new site in Storyblok. Moving to a modern, headless architecture enables them to:

  • Improve their brand impact, story, and content management
  • Optimize their member experience seamlessly across the website, member portal, LMS, events microsites, and publications archives
  • Continue making meaningful changes to the site going forward, easily and flexibly, without incurring new costs

Simplifying the Digital Ecosystem

  • Accredited certifications
  • Premier financial publications and research
  • Premier industry events
  • Continuing education courses and webinars
  • Professional education programs
  • Partner and sponsor programs

Content Editor Control: Brand, Story, Message

Storyblok’s centralized content architecture gives IWI’s disparate internal teams a single place to unify their storytelling, initiatives, and communications.

  • Best-in-class Visual Editor empowers page- and site-level updates—without developer intervention
  • Easy-to-use Modular Components enable flexibility while maintaining brand standards
  • Improved metadata access and advanced control for search engine optimization
Screenshot of the Storyblok platform displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute Membership page. The page highlights the introduction of 'The Visual Insights Series' with a group photo of smiling members at an event and a section emphasizing the value and impact of IWI membership.
Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute website's mobile navigation menu on a smartphone and tablet. The menu includes categories such as Certifications, Online Education, Conferences & Events, Membership, Publications & Resources, Partner Solutions, and more.

Personalized Experience: Intuitive UI & UX

BizStream’s UI/UX designers and content strategists teamed to dramatically consolidate the volume of content that visitors must sift to find what they are looking for. Navigation is streamlined, key information is easy to digest, and common actions are easy to complete.

  • Personalized pathways to each IWI certification
  • Scannable design supports key decision making, program comparisons, and cost transparency
  • Simplified access to key member interactions
  • Enhanced visibility for partner and sponsor programs

Connecting What You Want to What You Already Have

Storyblok enables fast, easy, API-based integrations with IWI’s existing tools and technologies. Without ripping and replacing systems that are essential to their operations—and leveraging BizStream’s comprehensive Web Accelerator components—they now have a seamless, intuitive experience. Members can get whatever they need, on desktop or mobile, and always feel like they are at home with IWI.

Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute website on a laptop, tablet, and smartphone. The homepage features the headline 'Certified Success' with a promotion for a 'Win a Trip to Experience 2025' contest and a section celebrating the organization's 40th anniversary.

Process

Maintaining Modernization Momentum

Once we had completed IWI’s Website Discovery project, we had a clear roadmap for making sure their website rebuild stayed on focus, on track, and on budget. Our experienced account teams took a leadership role, directing the project, ensuring timely milestone completions, and guiding their teams through a phased process following a logical progression.

Site UI and UX Design

Before moving the visual elements into a design, our designers and account strategists produced a comprehensive set of wireframes, prototypes that enable us to map the user journey from top-level navigation through every interaction.

Responsive design mockup displaying the Investments & Wealth Institute 'Industry-Leading Financial Advisor Webinars' page on a smartphone and tablet. The page features upcoming webinars for 2025, including 'Wealth Planning Trends 2025: Super Bowl, Asset Values, and Silver Tsunami,' with a 'Click Here to Register' button.

Renewing the Brand

BizStream’s creative team worked closely with their executive leaders to create a fresh visual design and messaging that faithfully represent the association’s mission, values, and position as an innovator in the financial services industry. Our teams translated their core concepts to create an instant, emotional connection and convey a member-centric view of the practical and long-term value of IWI’s certifications and membership.

Dramatic Design and Content Uplift

With an approved sitemap and layouts, our design and content teams went to work producing high-resolution mockups and fully revised page content for more than 50 core site pages.

We also coached IWI’s editorial team, empowering them to carry forward the same brand and content changes on their extensive internal pages, leveraging our best-practices–configured components in Storyblok.

Overview of multiple webpage design sets for the Investments & Wealth Institute, organized into categories such as Home, CMA Overview, Conferences and Events, Online Learning, and Certifications. Each category is labeled 'Ready for dev' to indicate approval for development.

Ensure an Effective IT Solution

From the selection of the Storyblok CMS to building the site to establishing integrations with existing and new tools, BizStream is more than a tech support provider.

We are a strategic partner, continually moving IWI towards modern technology solutions that provide the best possible ROI in a best-of-breed, composable ecosystem.

A Multifaceted, Consultative Approach

  • Foster IT involvement with platform selection
  • Ensure your staff can easily update and maintain systems
  • Identify platform best suited to goals, scope, and objectives
  • Incorporate centralized content infrastructure, connected to core systems
  • Match platform selection with in-house team’s capabilities
  • Ensure tools can adapt to future needs

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