Building a new, CRM integrated website
Success achieved
Delivery of a fully integrated and scalable web solution to manage membership, courses, registration, fellowship applications.
- Website
- https://www.essoweb.org
- Project dates
January 2016 – September 2016
Project team
- Gemma Applebee, Society Administrator, ESSO
- Carine LeCoq, Chief Operating Officer, ESSO
- Ana Galan, Education Manager, ESSO
- Jane Hopkins, Client Services Director, Worldspan
- Ian Davies, Head of Creative, Worldspan
Tools & Systems
The site is a standalone, bespoke, mobile responsive system developed in Python Django - an open source programming language.
All functions of the association website, membership management system and event registration system have been designed and built into a single application which give a better user experience for members, as well as a single tool for all administrators to manage their various functions within the organization.
Introduction
Following a growth in terms of what the society offers its members we felt that our previous website had limited capability and often proved time consuming and inefficient for association administrators to manage – both in terms of content and for membership management. It was not particularly user friendly for both outside users and the administrators. Members did not receive a personalized experience and considering the content rich nature of the site, information was sometimes not easy to find.
As an organization we took a bold approach to develop a bespoke fully functional site, with built in tools for every part of our online requirements. We worked collaboratively with our chosen partners to develop a site and associated bespoke software to deliver a unique, scalable solution that entirely met our requirements, rather than compromising to fit our aims into an off the shelf package. As a result we now have a digital tool which allows us to manage our membership, registrations and information sharing from a single admin area – and gives a coherent, integrated view of our member and delegate interactions and behavior.
Discovery
A membership survey was carried to explore what the society means to its members, this included asking questions relating to the website. Members mentioned that the content of the website was good but that it was sometimes difficult to find. They also said that the look of the website could be more modern and user friendly.
We believed that following this survey and with our experience of the challenges of maintaining and managing the previous site that we needed to have a CRM site with more advanced membership database, reporting and user friendly website management tools.
While we had a high level overview of the association’s requirements, we engaged with a range of potential suppliers to research the best approach for the organization. We worked with our chosen supplier to create a detailed scope of functional requirements that would allow us to develop a new website to meet the association’s current demands, but to be built on a framework that would allow for further phases of development in the future – a scalable and future proof solution.
Objectives
- A user-friendly website with a modern, eye-catching design – mobile responsive to work on all devices and with functionality to promote the most relevant information on the home page.
- Better navigation to help users to find the content most relevant to them – with the site supporting links to social media, association news etc
- A personalized and engaging experience for members through the ‘My ESSO’ login area – sharing of the association’s journal to qualifying members.
- Editable profiles for all members – with associated member directory to facilitate networking and cooperation between members.
- Membership management tools with a user friendly interface and better reporting for administrators, including bulk upload tools for members who qualify through their national association memberships.
- Event registration tools to allow participants to quickly and easily register for courses and events and pay online, with a user friendly interface and reporting for administrators.
- Ability to build and promote courses and events throughout the year.
- Management of fellowship applications.
- Attendee feedback and online certificates.
- User friendly content management system to allow administrators to keep the site up to date and relevant to all members.
- To be measured by member and executive feedback and assessment of site useage and course registration numbers.
Timeline
Project timeline
Activities
Homepage
The old ESSO Website homepage had an heavy overlay text, with few clear calls to action for frequently visited areas of the site.
The New ESSO Homepage is visually appealing with a full height full width design that scales to perform well on all devices. It has clear areas to click directly through to the most commonly visited areas of the site to make the user journey and experience simpler and quicker.
It presents a clear navigation to ‘My ESSO’ area where members can logon to use their specific areas of the site.
A carousel can be used to click through for more information allowing the association to promote the latest and most important information and offerings.
Navigation
Navigation - Wireframe
The old website had a restrictive drop down menu that required multiple clicks for the site user to identify where relevant information lies within the site. As the layers of content couldn’t be identified from the top level drop down this resulted in multiple clicks forward and back to find the right areas in the secondary menu on content pages.
The new website navigation employs a ‘Mega Menu’ approach – common in modern ecommerce site builds. This allows layers of information to be clearly displayed from the top line navigation and can include images and featured items where appropriate – to allow site users to click directly from the home page to the information they require without clicking backwards and forwards through different pages – a cleaner, simpler and quicker user experience. This allows very content rich sites to manage the navigation of information more easily.
Course overview
The old course overview pages had a confused navigation and did not allow site users to access other areas of the site without back tabbing to the main menu.
The New course overview is clean and easy to read with clear navigation to associated information to reduce excessive scrolling. The main menu is always available to allow users to quickly navigate throughout the site.
Membership Application Online
The old website had a very basic membership application online and left large gaps in data.
A detailed smartform gathers a range of data to build member profile automatically – allowing
the association to build a fuller picture and better reporting on members credentials, specialities, institutions and other society memberships. Not all fields are mandatory.
The new members profile area allows members to update their profiles, cvs, add a profile image, access private member only content, see courses attended, add qualifications – creating a personalised experience and a valuable information source for the association.
Innovation
The site makes use of a wide range of modern development technologies:
- Dynamic data – allows admins to populate content and share in various places throughout the site without having to populate multiple times.
- Mobile responsive – the site is fully optimized giving the best experience for all users regardless of device and improves the site’s seo.
- Personalised editable profiles allow members to share information without the need for admins to update.
- Role based logins allow multiple administrators to edit their own areas of the site – reducing the workload for a single administrator.
- Page specific carousels can be deployed in any area of the site to allow the sharing of relevant images and information.
- The site has a CMS which will, in the future, allow us to build a native app which can be managed through the existing platform.
- Currently populated with English content, the site can support multiple languages which would automatically change based on the user’s browser settings.
- Automatically generated personalised pdf certificates for any course attendee – triggered only once feedback has been submitted to ensure we receive valuable data and reduces admin time.
Achievements
We have developed an easy to navigate, content rich site which delivers a personalised, engaging experience for our membership.
We have integrated all our membership and registration needs into a single platform which delivers a coherent, user friendly interaction for our membership – and also an improved mechanism to better understand member behaviour and data.
We have created a user friendly administration system which allows quicker and more flexible functions for our administrators, allowing us to reduce the workload of managing memberships and registrations for courses.
We are able to easily update the website to promote and share the most up to date information and offerings to members.
We believe we have achieved all of our initial objectives and since launching have continued to develop the site and have plans for future enhancements.
Member experience
Each registered user has a unique profile accessible with a username and password. It can be edited by the user and contains their personal information. This profile is enhanced when the user becomes an active member by paying the membership fee.
Membership subscriptions can be completed and paid for online. Once payment is received members can access all the membership benefits such as the online society journal and E-learning material within their profiles.
Any action such as registering for a course or applying for a fellowship is recorded and linked to the user profile. Evaluations and attendance certificates are also available which means that a history for a user is always available both for the user but also for the administrators.
Targets & Statistics
As the site is still only 6 months old – we do not have an annual comparison – but based on our last set of data for our old site – which was for 272 days of 2014 we have seen an upward trend in all of our site analytics.
Statistics
In a period of 77 fewer days the site has an increase of:
- 8224 more site visitors
- 0.89 more average pages per session
- 45 seconds longer duration of average visit
- 127805 increase in total page views
Financials
We have invested Euro 21,769.45 . This includes the initial design and development, some phase 2 enhancement, support and hosting.
As the site is only 6 months old we have not yet analysed revenue return versus the previous site but are reporting an increase in the number of event registrations which we believe is due to the easy to use interface.
We are investigating further enhancements to the membership renewals system which we believe will also improve retention of existing members. While not quantifiable as revenue, we believe the improved user workflow for administrators has provided a saving in man hours for our organization.
What would we do differently?
Broader requirements gathering from the wider team. We now use different types of prototyping software to model applications which we would use on similar projects in the future.
Wider impact
- The website now allows members to apply for and pay their subscriptions online easily meaning we have seen an increase in membership applications.
- Users can apply and pay for educational events which has resulted in high attendance levels.
- The system enables the secretariat to efficiently manage workloads which has meant we are able to increase the opportunities available to users such as additional educational events and membership online tools.
- We have noticed higher levels of users accessing the site than with our previous site, members are now wanting to visit the site.
