The DPP Rebuild
‘Our members don’t even know they’re members.’
The Challenge
When we first spoke to Rowan de Pomerai of the DPP in 2019, a striking sentiment emerged: ‘Our members don’t even know they’re members.’ It was an intriguing realisation – that memberships were secured and funded at an organisational level, yet individual employees were often unaware of the rich resources available to them through their company’s DPP membership.
Yet, despite the apparent lack of use, administrative effort on DPP’s side to manage users was high. 50%-of-someone’s-job high. Onboarding was manual, and managing the job changes of members seemed incidental. This all contributed to the wrong individuals having access to the wrong parts of the DPP ecosystem.
The Work
The incumbent CMS, WordPress, had been set up so that content was unstructured, insecure, and difficult to update. Rebuilding a completely revamped site on CraftCMS – a platform more modern and sophisticated – offered the following benefits whilst retaining a familiar interface:
- Modular content page creation, with custom modules developed for the DPP to fit their content and workflow.
- Inbuilt previews and versioning, allowing the DPP to take control of content generation workflows
- Document repositories with varying degrees of security – something that WordPress is particularly bad at handling.
Our custom integration with Salesforce allowed us to implement a bespoke registration and authentication system. A user’s work email address could be validated – and revalidated periodically – to be checked against company membership records. This allowed for the automated user onboarding that DPP so desperately needed.
The registration flow allows members and non-members to book online or in-person events.
They could now encourage their registered users to share content with their peers, safe in the knowledge that doing so wouldn’t result in an administrative overload. Document requests from non-members were tracked, too, allowing the website to add qualified leads to DPP’s sales pipeline.
The Outcome
Since the launch, the DPP has experienced a significant 1000% increase in monthly downloads, with the site now averaging over 100 new registrations each month.
During Covid, we had the opportunity to help out the DPP once more by helping them host conferences using our streaming platform 4forty.io
“We’re a dynamic, content-led organisation. But our old site didn’t offer the kind of user experience to match the quality of our content or our in-person events. Getting it right required a web team that could truly ‘get’ our organisation’s drivers – and Spork really took time to understand us, our team’s needs, and our customers’ needs.”
— Rowan de Pomerai, CEO of the DPP