The Society and College of Radiographers (SCoR) is the professional body and trade union for radiographers across the UK, representing around 30,000 members working in diagnostic imaging and radiotherapy. Like many membership bodies of its scale, the organisation had two distinct but closely connected roles: the Society supports members' professional development and advocates for the profession; the College focuses on education, standards, and clinical guidance. Both operated under one roof - but with separate identities, separate leadership teams, and, increasingly, a digital presence that was struggling to serve either well.
The existing website and member portal had been built on Drupal, a platform that had reached end of support. The practical consequences were significant. The content management system was difficult for non-technical staff to use, which meant the marketing and membership teams depended on developer time for routine updates. The member portal offered limited self-service capability - members who wanted to manage their subscription, access CPD records, or register for events largely had to contact the office. There was no single sign-on connecting the website, the CPD portal, the extranet, and the events system. Members had to remember separate credentials for each.
The result was a growing frustration among members, reflected in the numbers. Membership registrations had been declining. The digital experience was not making a compelling case for the value of belonging to SCoR, and for a professional body whose authority depends on the size and engagement of its membership, that mattered.
The challenge was compounded by the organisational structure. Any new digital platform had to serve two distinct audiences - Society members and College members - with some content and features shared, and others specific to each. Getting alignment across two leadership teams, each with their own priorities and stakeholder groups, was as much a project management challenge as a technical one.
"The Distinction team were excellent throughout the project - consistently responsive to our queries and those of our many stakeholders. They adapted timelines to best suit us and our CRM partner, and their developers are friendly, relatable, and easy to understand. 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."
We started with a structured discovery phase. Over several weeks, we ran workshops with key teams across SCoR - membership, education, practitioner support, marketing, and the events function - to map out how each team worked, what members needed from the digital platform, and where the existing system was creating the most friction.
The user research revealed a clear pattern. Members were not disengaged from the organisation - they valued what SCoR offered. They were disengaged from the digital platform because it made too many things too difficult. The priority was not a visual redesign. It was rebuilding the underlying architecture so that the things members did most often - renewing their subscription, logging CPD, booking events, accessing clinical guidance - worked reliably and required minimal effort.
We migrated SCoR from Drupal to Kentico Xperience, a digital experience platform that gave the content and marketing teams direct editorial control over the site without developer involvement, while supporting the personalisation, email marketing, and analytics capabilities the organisation needed to understand and respond to member behaviour.
The member portal was rebuilt with a single sign-on system that unified the website, CPD portal, extranet, and events management platform under one login. For the first time, a member could move between any part of SCoR's digital offer without being asked to authenticate again. The self-service functionality was extended significantly - members could manage their own subscriptions, update their details, track CPD progress, and register for events entirely online.
The site architecture was redesigned around the two-audience structure of the organisation. Shared content - news, guidance, policy positions - was accessible to all. Content and tools specific to Society or College membership were served appropriately based on the member's profile. The dual-identity requirement that had created stakeholder complexity at the outset became a design feature rather than a constraint.
The full project - discovery, design, platform migration, portal rebuild, and launch - was delivered on schedule, with no disruption to member services during the cutover.
The impact on membership registrations was the standout result. In the period following launch, new membership registrations increased by 615%. The scale of that improvement reflects how significant a barrier the old digital experience had become - not to the value of membership itself, but to the process of signing up. Removing that friction, and giving prospective members a clear, straightforward registration path on a site that reflected the quality of the organisation, produced results that exceeded the expectations of the SCoR leadership team.
Website visitors increased by 31%, driven partly by a 74% improvement in SEO performance. The migration to Kentico, combined with a content restructure that gave SCoR's clinical guidance and thought leadership proper visibility in search, significantly improved the organisation's ability to reach radiographers who were not yet members.
The operational shift was equally significant. The content and marketing teams went from depending on developer availability for routine site updates to managing the platform independently. The reduction in support requests related to login issues, subscription management, and CPD access freed the membership team to focus on member value rather than member administration.
The project was recognised with two Kentico Site of the Year Awards - one for the public-facing website and one for the member portal - an external validation of the quality of the work and the outcomes it delivered.
