Boosting membership through better content

In the client’s words

‘DCA’s membership has grown strongly, doubling over the past five years, and our website has played a crucial role in that. Overall visits to the site have continued to increase and we’ve been particularly pleased by recent growth in member visits because it means they clearly value the online resources we have to offer.  Weave has been fantastic in helping us build a site that meets our evolving needs and that of our members.’  
– Operations and Communications Director, DCA

Background

Diversity Council Australia (DCA) is a not-for-profit organisation that helps businesses, including many of Australia's largest companies, implement workplace diversity initiatives.

The problem

The previous website had a poor user experience at key points in the user journey, and crucial gaps in content.

Major issues included:

• content silos that made topic-based discovery of content difficult
• not enough information to determine the value of membership
• no clear process for existing members to create individual user accounts.

What we did

We began with intensive research to identify and clarify the most important user experience issues, and to set clear strategic goals for the new website.

The research process included:

• a workshop with key stakeholders involving collaborative exercises such as user journey mapping
• interviews with existing members of the organisation
• a content design workshop to co-design the membership benefits pages
• a full content audit of the existing website to identify out of date, redundant, ineffective or missing content.

Out of the research process we developed:

• a core content strategy including user personas, key objectives and a concise statement of our overall strategic intention for the site
• information architecture, sitemap and wireframes for the new website.

As we designed and developed the site, we carried out usability testing and addressed the issues that emerged, improving clarity around the labelling and making elements of the interface design more intuitive.

The results

A Drupal website delivered on time and on budget with:

• a global taxonomy with dynamically generated topic pages that break down content silos and make it easy for both users and DCA staff to find content by topic
• clear pathways to membership signup and account creation, resulting in a marked increase in membership
• clear, compelling explanation of the benefits of membership, supported by statistics and testimonials, making the website a reliable source for other organisational marketing copy
• an SEO strategy, with the result that DCA is now appearing at or near the top of Google search results for key terms like “diversity”, “inclusion”, and “diversity and inclusion” (the previous site had been virtually invisible when searching for “inclusion”).

What happened next

Membership has grown consistently for the 3 years since the website was launched. Weave continues to work closely with DCA, helping them use analytics, usability testing and member feedback to continually refine and improve users’ experience of the site.

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