SCIENCE & COMMUNITY
Slowed down by an aged CMS system, an abundance of site content was lost behind a complicated navigation, and a less than seamless CRM integration hindered user interaction. Introducing Kentico has enabled the RGS to take back control of their website and share relevant content, tailored to their audience’s personas requirements. Clearer branding and navigation have brought clarity to the RGS’ proposition to support the recruitment of new members.
NEW USERS
Background.
The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) is a UK learned society, professional body, and registered charity serving diverse public and professional audiences, including their 16,000 members. Founded in 1830 to advance geographical science, today the Society’s work reaches millions of people through their support of geographical research, education, fieldwork, and expeditions.
RGS wanted to build an online home for geography and geographers— an out-of-reach ambition as their outdated CMS lacked scalability to support their business growth.
An abundance of interesting, relevant site content about geography and the Society was lost behind a complicated navigation, and a less than seamless CRM integration hindered user interaction. Both were high on the agenda for significant improvement.
The looming PCI-compliance deadline was a ticking time bomb and as the Society reached their peak season for membership renewals, an urgent deadline was set to prevent disruption to online transactions.
Goals.
- Enable automatic content scheduling to keep the site up to date.
- Integrate seamlessly with the Society’s CRM.
- Simplify the navigation to easily access content including content filtering for personalised user experiences.
- Drive membership recruitment and renewals.
- Provide seamless and intuitive booking and transaction functionality (events, subscriptions, and online joining).
- Increase subscriptions to the mailing list (via the CRM).
- Be adaptable and responsive to different screen sizes, devices, and browsers.
Challenges.
Technical Challenges
The legacy RGS website was built in 2005 and due to its age, the extent to which it could be changed became increasingly limiting. The integration with their CRM, OpenEngage, was problematic and inflexible. This led to inefficiencies and ultimately it was the website users who were being negatively affected.
User Experience
The previous site hindered users from accessing the information they needed. A complicated navigation created challenges for their audience and the wealth of interesting site content was difficult to find. The website didn’t encapsulate their work and was visually unappealing.
Compliance Factors
The RGS site was at risk of becoming PCI non-compliant in January 2018, their busiest time of year for membership renewals, and this was a problem that would prevent them being able to take credit card payments online, which is fundamental to their business.
Solution.
Manageability of the RGS site, given the wealth of valuable content and resources, was high priority for their team. Thanks to the flexibility of Kentico, NetConstruct was able to maximise content management capabilities to enable the following:
- reorder and reorganise content using drag and drop functionality
- easily add, edit, and delete pages
- determine which pages appear in the menu and sitemap
- use linked documents to put the same content in multiple places in the content tree
- offer image cropping and resizing within the Media Library
- built-in widgets
- forms
- banners
- maps
- dynamic content
The familiarity of formatting features within Kentico meant that administrators didn’t need specialist skills and NetConstruct has been able to quickly teach basic content editing.
The ability to define an unlimited number of steps for any documents designated using Kentico Standard Workflow meant that it was possible to implement defined user roles for editing and publishing along with clear workflows and approval processes. Throughout the workflow process, users can get a full overview of the status of all documents. The content administrators can view the full version history of the document and how it went through the workflow process.
The level of personalisation that is possible with the Kentico Editor Toolbar gives different users the right amount of flexibility over formatting and fonts. This means RGS can keep their site design consistent and polished.
Results.
Contemporary and visually appealing, RGS’ new website encapsulates the very spirit of the Society and the breadth of their work catering to the needs of their expansive audience. Useful resources have been brought to the forefront and RGS’ value is evident.
With PCI compliance resolved and seamless integrations in place, RGS now has a scalable website that will accelerate achieving objectives, supporting user interaction, and encouraging growth.
Between 8th March 2018 – 31st January 2019 were measured these statistics:
- New Users: 371,700
- Session: 617,000
- Page Views: 2,000,000
Key criteria for choosing Kentico
Kentico was selected because NetConstruct’s experience has proven Kentico to be well suited to RGS’ integration requirement with the OpenEngage CRM. It is also more stable, scalable, and secure than other solutions on the market.
To achieve the full features RGS wanted via an open source website, a number of add-ons would have been required. As add-ons are developed by the open source community across the world and designed to work with the CMS version in place at the point of development, they would not necessarily work correctly with newer upgraded versions, meaning that the upgrade path is complicated, time-consuming and often costly.
Kentico’s content management system has increased our organization's efficiency in uploading large amounts of content to our website throughout the year for our busy program of events
Its ease of use has enabled our staff across the organization to be more involved in the content creation process, and it has given them the confidence to take ownership of pages without requiring in-depth HTML knowledge or specialist technical skills.
