NRMLA

Challenge

The National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) is the national voice of the reverse mortgage industry: an educational resource, policy advocate, and public affairs center for lenders and the professionals who work with them. Its website is where members find regulatory reference material, event information, and industry news, and where the public looks up lenders.

The site ran on a proprietary .NET content management system, with membership and event registration handled by a separate association management system. Nearly everything lived in one master Reference section, so both visitors and staff had to dig. NRMLA needed a platform its team could publish on, a structure people could browse, and a member login that kept working with the registration system it already had.

Approach

Replatform and reorganize. cre8 moved the site to WordPress and split the master section into Industry Reference, News Coverage, and Resources, with categories NRMLA staff could apply themselves. Member-only content and event materials went behind a login; event pages link straight to registration in the member system. The new site launched in July 2015.

Build on it. Once the platform was in place, each new need became an addition rather than a project: an online membership application, on-demand learning for the Certified Reverse Mortgage Professional (CRMP) program with a courses dashboard, a store for purchases, a job board, a members-only CRMP forum, digital editions of NRMLA’s publications, a vendor directory, lender listings fed from the member system, and sponsored articles with ad placements. Ten years on, the site runs on the same WordPress install it launched on.

Keep running it. cre8 provides ongoing support: WordPress and plugin updates, a move to new hosting with Cloudflare in front in 2024, and the changeover when NRMLA switched association management systems that year, so login and registration kept working. cre8 also rebuilt NRMLA’s consumer site, reversemortgage.org, on WordPress in 2024.

Outcome

• Off a proprietary .NET CMS and onto WordPress in 2015, with the content restructured into three browsable sections and members-only material behind a login.
• A decade of features added on the same platform, none of which required a rebuild: courses, a store, a job board, a forum, publications, and directories.
• Member login and event registration carried through two changes underneath: new hosting and a new association management system.