CRF
Flexible content hub for a membership organisation
CRF is a membership organisation that provides private and public organisations with a professional network, members-only content, events, and training to improve individual and organisational performance. CRF‘s goal is to be valued for excellence, rigor, relationship building, and providing an independent view which, together, lead to measurable improvement in members’ performance.
www.crforum.co.ukWhat we worked on
Consultancy
UX
Design
System integration
Migration
WordPress
Revival of the digital experience
CRF’s member experience was originally very much driven by in-person events, training, and networking with a supporting digital experience. The maturing digital value proposition was blocked by the inflexibility of the old site. One of the things the CRF team wanted to introduce was ‘Communities’ where members with common interests could find each other and interact online much as they do at in-person events.
This meant the need for stable integrations and a rehaul of the user experience with better content search and discovery.
Focus on stability
Membership sites always have more layers than one might imagine – as soon as you have a ‘logged out’ and ‘logged in’ state for site visitors, the number of different UX components and permutations increases significantly, leading to an overall higher complexity for the solution. We definitely saw that in this project, especially as the logged-in members’ user data is reasonably rich (being informed by the CRM as the master data) and used in multiple user journeys on-site, for example for pre-populating form fields when a logged in member wants to register for an event.
The main technical challenge was the Your Membership integration. This required a full rewrite of the integration focused on stability.
UX transformation for better discoverability
A key challenge was the overall UX of the site, in particular related content where we leveraged Bibblio which is a personalised related content engine. Content search and filtering were also important as the volume of the online content library grew and the taxonomy space became clearer. For this, we leveraged Search & Filter Pro to introduce a clear and simple faceted search experience.
By using Gutenberg blocks, in addition to a richer page-building experience, we were also able to create stronger SEO. These things together gave CRF the opportunity for clearer value proposition communication.
Optimizing user journeys to generate leads
Something we saw a need for was the ability for ‘soft gating’ data capture as an alternative to the ‘hard gating’ associated with purely members-only content. As a relatively premium offering, the CRF team felt that there was likely an opportunity to understand their prospect pipeline better by using a data capture modality that was a much lower barrier to entry than a full ‘become a member’ user journey. This means more ways to capture data and generate leads.
A thorough process with bonuses
We spent a lot of time working with the CRF team’s various internal stakeholders through a comprehensive discovery process. This allowed us to capture all of the requirements and to plan solutions that were in line with both the business objectives and our internal expertise and experience. With regular contact, we stuck by our commitment to getting the site launched before a business-critical deadline.
As an extra bonus, the client was able to re-use the CRF site to also relaunch their sister business’ site parcentre.com with only minor variations. This is an excellent example of the incremental value that a flexibly executed website can have for an organisation
If you’re facing challenges similar to those at CRF, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Angry Creative. We’re ready to guide you through, starting with a meeting with our expert, Amy Slade. Book a meeting today!
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