615% increase in new membership registrations

This is the story of how we modernised the digital presence and infrastructure of this established organisation to increase new members and improve the overall membership experience.
615% increase in new membership registrations
"The Distinction team were excellent throughout the project - consistently responsive to our queries and those of our many stakeholders. They deftly adapted timelines to best suit us and our CRM partner, and their developers are friendly, relatable, and easy to understand. Overall, we found the culture at Distinction an excellent fit for us, the individuals across the company are intelligent, easy to work with and clearly dedicated to succeeding at their profession. We recommend Distinction as digital partners."
- Dilip Manek, Director of Finance and Operations

The challenge

The Society & College of Radiographers (SCoR) is the trade union/professional body and registered charity respectively for radiographers and all non-medical members of the workforce in diagnostic imaging and radiotherapy in the UK. It’s responsible for their professional, educational, public and workplace interests. Founded in 1920, it’s one of the oldest and most experienced radiography organisations in the world.

SCoR's legacy CMS was out of support, members were increasingly frustrated by the lack of self-serve options, and they were falling behind. Membership numbers were on the decline as a result.

The results

We worked in collaboration with SCoR to undertake a full discovery phase - aligning stakeholders is key to a project’s success, especially a complex digital transformation programme for an organisation that has 30,000 members.

Discovery workshops were held with each team that represented the main areas of SCoR: education, practitioner, the membership success team, and sales and marketing. Understanding their needs and internal processes allowed us to map out the customer journey with a cross-departmental user flow that included every on and offline touchpoint to inform UX design.

We migrated SCoR to Kentico Xperience (DXP), which give lots of functionality and flexibility for future initiatives.

A full redesign, optimised based on member feedback, made the website both member-centric and mobile-optimised.

The end result is:

  • 615% increase in new membership registrations
  • 482% increase in conversion rates
  • 31% increase in overall website visitors
  • 53% increase in mobile visitors
  • 74% increase in organic search performance

The websites also won two Kentico Site of the Year awards - in the NGO & Association and Education & Careers categories.

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The full story

The Society & College of Radiographers (SCoR) is the trade union/professional body and registered charity respectively for radiographers and all non-medical members of the workforce in diagnostic imaging and radiotherapy in the UK. It’s responsible for their professional, educational, public and workplace interests. Founded in 1920, it’s one of the oldest and most experienced radiography organisations in the world.

User-centric discovery

Every project starts with a discovery phase to really get to the heart of what users want and need. For SCoR, this involved workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather qualitative insights. Surveys followed to gather quantitative data.

Discovery workshops were held with each team that represented the main areas of SCoR: education, practitioner, the membership success team, and sales and marketing. Understanding their needs and internal processes allowed us to map out the customer journey with a cross-departmental user flow that included every on and offline touchpoint to inform UX design.

Aligning fragmented stakeholders

Aligning stakeholders is key to a project’s success, especially a complex digital transformation programme for an organisation that has c30,000 members, from a largely national base, and across multiple medical disciplines. In addition, the Society and College had separate identities and leadership teams so getting feedback and ensuring there was equal representation within the design and user journey was challenging. But in the end, we had a joined-up leadership team with a clear project outcome that helped towards their ultimate goal of total digital transformation.

CMS migration

SCoR’s legacy CMS – Drupal – needed to be migrated to Kentico Xperience (DXP). Not only does Xperience give the SCoR marketing team a superior content editing experience, it also has an extensive marketing functionality with features such as content personalisation, email marketing and analytics. This meant SCoR’s digital marketing strategy could be implemented and managed from one place by a distributed workforce and content governance was easy to control.

Self-serve user experience

The old site had limited self-service for visitors to apply for membership and for members to manage their membership online so making sure the new sites had this functionality was a big part of the vision to transform members’ digital experience.

The new site has a vastly improved interface, information architecture, navigation and search function, so relevant content is served up consistently with members able to easily find the guidance and support they’re looking for.

Now members no longer have to log into multiple platforms (CRM, CPD, event software, payment gateway, and website) – everything they need for their profession and studies is accessible through a single sign-on.

Multiple integrations

Giving members a seamless user experience meant a number of third-party integrations needed to be made. Our discovery phase had identified all the data points and mapped every customer journey. It was time to pull everything together to give SCoR’s members the exceptional experience they deserved.

Firstly, we integrated with SCoR’s CRM (Stratum by APT) so that member data could be pushed to the CRM and replicated back into the CMS via a two-way sync so members could update their account online and be prompted when their membership was up for renewal.

The claims-based authentication tool, Auth0, was integrated to give members an SSO, allowing them to access the website, CPD portal, extranet and event management system from one set of login credentials.

For the sections of the site that needed a more customised approach than the existing Kentico Azure Search integration would allow, we built a bespoke Azure search integration. And integrating World Pay as a payment gateway was required to take payments for events.

UX & UI design

During the design research process, creation of the design concepts, and working with the branding to identify a unique visual identifier for SCoR, our UX/UI designer was inspired to design a circle graphic.

The idea came from looking at one picture in particular, that of an MIR machine, in which circles were identified within the machine. After playing around with this idea, a circle graphic was created that is now featured throughout the site. Circles appear a lot throughout radiography – in the machines and scanners themselves, when carrying out certain procedures (focal spots on X-rays and radiography treatment), and the joining up of governance and clinical practice is a circular approach rather than a linear one.

This cemented the circle idea and in turn, created the circle theme that you’ll see throughout the site’s UI in terms of backgrounds and icons.

See related work:

Institution of Structural Engineers

Improving the examination processes to digitally transform the business and increase revenue.

Building Societies Association

Increasing membership growth and retention for the voice of all 43 UK building societies.

We found the culture at Distinction an excellent fit for us, the individuals across the company are intelligent, easy to work with and clearly dedicated to succeeding at their profession.

Dilip Manek

Director of Finance and Operations | The Society and College of Radiographers

Kentico Site of the Year 2021 Finalist

NGO & Association category - The Society of Radiographers

Education & Careers category - The College of Radiographers

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