Fannie Mae

Creating Housing Opportunities for All

Fannie Mae is a large organization with a multitude of sites. Managing seven, non-integrated platforms had become a huge challenge—time consuming for content marketers and expensive for the organization to maintain.

Fannie Mae realized they needed a platform solution that would enable them to better communicate with their borrowers and lenders, build out applications, and meet the growing demand for their services. Phase2 and Fannie Mae understood these goals could be achieved by establishing:

One platform; consolidation of its existing sites and content into a single, unified platform
One team; through close partnership, Fannie Mae and Phase2 collaboratively built and launched this new platform
Governance and management; together, Fannie Mae and Phase2 created the rules and processes necessary for post-launch success

Increasing Speed to Market

Phase2 partnered with the Fannie Mae team on an ambitious effort to redesign and re-platform a total of seven websites including the flagship site, fanniemae.com.

Phase2 built a digital experience platform with a slew of capabilities that can be leveraged for future Fannie Mae projects. We created responsively designed, flexible, uniform templates that can be used to quickly create campaign landing pages and update existing sites.
The core platform functionality includes:

Flexible page layouts and content views
Component design library
Preview environment
Enterprise and marketing microsite profiles
Blog module
URL management
Robust WYSIWYG tools

This new platform affords the Fannie Mae team a host of benefits. In addition to easily publishing content, syndication was enabled—meaning the team can publish content once and have this content distributed across multiple domains—an immense time savings.

Know Your Options

One of the first sites Phase2 rebuilt was Know Your Options. Launched during the 2008 housing crisis, this is the site where borrowers land when they need the most support. Phase2 re-architected and rebuilt the loan lookup tool—the backbone of the site—to improve the user experience.

When COVID-19 hit, Know Your Options quickly became the most frequently visited site within the Fannie Mae ecosystem. The loan lookup application not only assisted consumers, it also provided a robust API for lenders to quickly parse loans held by Fannie Mae. Additionally, the flexibility of the platform enabled swift rollout of new consumer-facing digital products and services necessitated by the pandemic.

The Dreamers Award

The Fannie Mae site is hosted on Acquia Site Factory. With this platform solution, Acquia does the work of maintaining the hosting environment, freeing up the Fannie Mae and Phase2 teams to deploy the highest-quality code to create an experience with impact.

In 2021, Phase2 and Fannie Mae won the Acquia Engage Award for our work together. These annual awards showcase the best examples of Acquia’s customer and partner work. The Fannie Mae initiative was honored in The Dreamers category:

These are the people who don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Who never let anything stand in their way. Who look for a way to do everything better, every day. They’re always learning, always creating and always searching for what’s next.‎

Phase2 has been a close Acquia partner since their inception. We've worked together on innumerable projects ranging from non-profit website builds to enterprise systems for Fortune 500 companies.

Looking to the Future

Consolidating Fannie Mae sites into a single platform:

Improved efficiency and speed to market
Enabled data collection so that informed, strategic decisions could be made
Enforced brand consistency via a design library
Fostered self-sufficiency through training and support of the Fannie Mae team
Reduced overall expenditures through cuts in hosting, licensing, and support fees

This initiative has been an incredible success as Fannie Mae has excelled at platform adoption, training and ongoing governance and management.

Affordable Homes Across the Nation

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, was founded by Congress in 1938, during the height of the Great Depression, to support low- and moderate-income mortgage borrowers and renters.

Fannie Mae continues its mission to this day—facilitating equitable and sustainable access to homeownership and affordable rentals through safe, efficient financing for more housing opportunities in communities across the country.

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