CRF
Flexible content hub for a membership organization
Marketing and Promotion
CRF is a membership organization that provides private and public organizations with a professional network, membership content, events and training to improve individual and organizational performance. CRF’s goal is to be associated with good, solid, relationship building and to provide an independent view that together lead to measurable improvement in member performance.
What did we do?
WordPress
Backend development
Migration
Consultation
UX
Design services
A thorough process with bonus
We spent a lot of time working with the CRF group’s various internal stakeholders through a comprehensive discovery process. This allowed us to capture all requirements and plan solutions that were in line with both the business objectives and our internal expertise and experience. With regular contact, we stuck to our commitment to launch the site before a business-critical deadline.
As an added bonus, the client was able to reuse the CRF site to also redesign their sister company site parcentre.com with only minor customizations. This is a great example of the higher value that a flexibly developed website can have for an organization.
Rebuilding the digital experience
The CRF membership experience was initially driven very much by in-person events, training and networking with a digital platform as support. The maturing digital value proposition was hindered by an outdated, inflexible website. One of the things the CRF team wanted to introduce was ‘Communities’ where members with common interests could find each other and interact online just as they do at in-person events.
This created a need for stable integrations and a redesign of the user experience, with easier ways for users to find new content and improved search functionality.
Focus on stability
Membership sites always have more layers than you can imagine – as soon as you have a ‘logged out’ and ‘logged in’ mode for visitors, the number of UX components and permutations increases significantly leading to an overall more complex solution. Something we clearly saw in this project, especially since the logged-in members’ user data is quite heavy (with information from the CRM as the base data) It is data that is used in multiple user journeys on the site, for example to fill in form fields when a logged-in member wants to register for an event.
The main technical challenge was the integration of ‘Your Membership’. This required a complete rewrite of the integration solution with a focus on stability.
UX transformation for better accessibility
A key challenge was the overall UX of the website, especially for related content where we leveraged Bibblio, a customizable content engine for related content. Search and filtering was also important as the volume of the online library grew and categorization became clearer. For this, we leveraged Search & Filter Pro to introduce a clear, versatile and simple search experience.
By using Gutenberg blocks, in addition to creating a more versatile page building experience, we were also able to improve search engine optimization. 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 possibility of data collection via a soft paywall as an alternative to a hard paywall related to member content. As a premium offering, the CRF team felt there was likely to be an opportunity to understand their prospect pipeline better by using a data collection method that had a much lower barrier to entry than a hard paywall. This meant more ways to collect data and generate leads.
