• Read more about Navy Mutual: Deep Dive into Mobile

Navy Mutual's Mobile App

Navy Mutual Aid Association provides life insurance and annuity products to military families. In our previous blog, we discussed how an association’s struggle to face the challenge that investing in technology can pose.

 Navy Mutual Aid Association chose to face this challenge head-on and Mobomo helped usher Navy Mutual Aid Association through their first foray into mobile with the launch of their Survivor Benefits app.

The Navy Mutual Aid Association has a focus on educating members on their legally entitled government benefits, as well as on matters of financial security.  

In creating this app, Navy Mutual is now able to put appropriate resources directly in the hands of their members in an overall effort to increase awareness of government benefits.

It also allows Navy Mutual to more directly reach members through a new channel and increase its footprint in members’ lives.

Incorporating Legal Resources

One of Navy Mutual’s goals is to ensure veterans and veteran’s families fully understand their legal rights and benefits.  While the Navy Mutual website housed many valuable resources, the team wanted a tool optimized for, and easily accessible from a mobile device.

Throughout the process, the Mobomo team worked collaboratively with the Navy Mutual team, as well as their existing brand guidelines.  During all creative discussions, Navy Mutual ensured that the app would meet member needs and fulfill their mission.

We led them through the design, development, and launch of iOS and Android mobile apps. In order to meet these goals, we created various palettes to finalize a look and feel for the mobile app’s overall User Experience.   

For maintainability purposes, Navy Mutual opted to move forward with a React Native cross-platform application in order to create both iOS and Android apps from a single codebase.

The Benefit Calculator

One of the key features of the mobile app is a set of Benefit Calculators, which are on the website as well. These are for users to estimate survivor benefits and entitlements.

The calculators are processed through a legacy, internal backend database that did not have an optimized interface for plugging in new systems.

In order to make the backend accessible to the mobile apps, our team had to create new APIs for the apps to submit user inputs and retrieve the appropriate output to be displayed.

All of the tools that were created for use in the Survivor Benefits app are user-friendly as well as engage members throughout their experience.  

As discussed previously, members believe that the investment in technology was critical, but associations want their investment to last longer than the latest trend.  

The Navy Mutual Aid Association ensured that this app, not only was a financially sound investment but would meet their member needs long term.

• Read more about How Associations Manage Technology

Only 1 in 10

In 2018, there is an association for everything, and many people are involved with at least one of these organizations. While associations are created to serve member needs, there is one area that many are falling behind in: technology. According to ASAE’s article, “Tech Success for Associations,” only 1 in 10 associations are managing technology and tech integration in ways that can be considered innovative. Of those polled by ASAE, 60% consider access to digital documents through the association website to be critical. The poll also found that members would like access to registration for conferences and events online and that this was essential to member satisfaction. Resolving the disconnect between what associations are doing and what members want could be the key to member engagement. How associations manage technology could change the nonprofit industry for the better.  

Facing the Budget

Associations often face an uphill battle to meet members' needs. The most difficult challenge is budget; new technology can be a huge investment and a risk, which associations tend to want to avoid. Members' needs are also constantly changing, which makes investing in technology a nerve-wracking process. In addition, to justify the expense, any technology investment needs to also support the organization's mission. Imagine you are shooting at a moving target and that target suddenly shrinks—that is how associations feel when trying to decide on technology to improve their members’ experience.

Navy Mutual Aid Association

How do we solve this? Let’s take a shallow dive into a project Mobomo recently launched with the Navy Mutual Aid Association. One of Navy Mutual’s main goals was educating members on the government benefits they were legally entitled to. To achieve this, they enlisted Mobomo to create their Survivor Benefits app, enabling Navy Mutual to put appropriate resources directly in the hands of their members and grow awareness of government benefits. The app achieved their initial objective while simultaneously allowing Navy Mutual to reach members directly through a new channel and increase its footprint in members’ lives. In this case, Navy Mutual found a way to invest in technology that supported immediate member needs and their overall mission—providing an excellent example of how associations can utilize technology to ensure continuing success.