The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is the professional body for the PR industry in the UK. With around 9,500 members, it produces policy, guidance, training and recognition for PR professionals.

In recent years, the CIPR has faced challenges communicating online due to having a somewhat dated website, with a plethora of pages, difficult navigation and no search facility.  As an organisation at the centre of the communications industry, they realised that they could do a lot better so invested time and energy into revolutionising their online services, starting with a more ‘cutting edge’ website that they (and their members) could be proud of.

The problem

This is what the old website’s home page looked like:

Infrastructure was an area that needed urgently addressing due to lack of measurement.  With no realistic idea of how much traffic the CIPR’s sites were receiving, nor how users were interacting with it or what they were looking for, it was impossible to plan or allocate resources effectively.

Because pages were hard to update, events calendars were published for entire year-long periods and members simply had to put up with trawling through information about events that had already happened.  There was no search engine, frames made it hard to link directly to important resources, there was no consistent approach to navigation or style, and much of the functionality was simply broken or unreliable.

We went to work.  Our first priority was to reorganise the CIPR’s online content and develop a new site map built around the needs of the user, not the internal structure of the organisation. Workshops were organised with all the institute’s departments, compromises were made and people began to think about how they could help users achieve their objectives, in a truly cross-departmental way.

A quiet revolution

Taking a member and visitor focused approach, we helped orchestrate a step-change in the way the CIPR communicates online.  With a massive archive of content to migrate, it was not practical for the CIPR to review all of it, but we coached editorial staff and produced training packs and guidelines to help them identify where content could be improved.  The CIPR’s new army of web editors were thus empowered to write useful, engaging, well linked and well structured content designed for the web.

It’s been a big change.  Staff were used to submitting update requests to a web team – who would then take days to process them.  Now, all the CIPR’s departments and groups are engaged – producing and publishing high quality content in a decentralised way, all under the supervision and moderation of a web administrator, a central controller of structure, standards, style and tone of voice.

Events: Always something happening

We placed a big emphasis on events and education offered by the CIPR. It was clear that along with making much of its revenue from hosting training events and qualification courses, events are also seen by members as one of the most important functions of the institute.  Event-related content is changing all the time, so we need to help members make time critical informed choices about the events that they want to attend and courses they want to take.

The CIPR’s new website has an events database with several easy ways of finding events, and a course finder with a database of approved courses cross-referenced with the events tools to enable a member to find a course, then see all the upcoming instances of that course that are in the events calendar.  Instant booking is powered by a partnership with the excellent Eventbrite ticketing service.

Find a course, find a date, make a booking.  Suddenly, finding and booking events with the CIPR is a breeze.

Connecting business, creating business

The institute also has a central role in connecting the industry.  Members looking for specialist help and advice on particular projects turn to the CIPR to help them network with other members, and businesses looking for a PR supplier are equally likely to want help to find the partner they need.

The CIPR website contains a constantly updated database of all the institute’s members, searchable by any member, and automatically synchronised with the main membership system. Members can also opt to have their profile displayed on a public directory that is visible and searchable by the wider public.

Exclusive members-only content

Much of the content produced by the CIPR is valuable policy research or best practice guidelines that are only available to members.  Previously this content was published in the ‘members area’, the only way in which the old website could provide limited access control over certain pages of the site.

The new site allows the CIPR to protect any page, in any section, and to set a variety of access rights, including restricting access to particular special interest groups as well as the membership as a whole.   Invitation ’teaser’ pages both encourage membership take-up, and remind existing members of the value of their membership.  There are no ‘access denied’ pages – any page the current user can’t access is simply an opportunity to invite them to join.

That said, we don’t forget search engines, which are allowed unrestricted access to the site to index all the content fully.  All the CIPR’s pages are now fully findable through Google as well as our own Google-grade site search engine.

Seamless video, seamless audio

The CIPR now boasts the ability to support rich media publishing of audio or video content, seamlessly integrated into any page.  A wealth of podcasts and video interviews is promised as the institute gets to grips with its new-found publishing capabilities.  Days after launch the first audio has already been published: a six minute interview with Katie Delahaye Paine that perfectly showcases how easy and enjoyable it is to listen and interact with rich media on the new CIPR site.

Measurement and analytics

We planned every measurable aspect of the new CIPR site with measurement in mind.  We use the awesome Google Analytics to track page views and visitor sessions, but more importantly we use GA in an intelligent way to get the very most we can out of the analytics tools it offers.  CIPR can therefore easily report on searches performed on the site (and so add resources to better serve the most popular searches), find broken links, track visitor pathways and measure conversions on event bookings.

The result

We’re not done yet, and a phase 2 will bring another revolution in social media integration, but for the moment, the CIPR can be justifiably proud of a great new front door for the world.

Of course, you need not take our word for it.  We didn’t solicit any testimonials from the CIPR, but they’ve kindly given us permission to reprint the following quotes from emails that they send us during the project.

Thank you for the excellent job you have done for us on our new website. I know it hasn’t been easy and there have been a lot of people involved, so thank you for your patience and taking the time to explain to various team members what has been going on.

You are a team we have every confidence in – thanks for restoring our faith – I never thought I would see this day!

A million thanks to you and the team for going beyond the call of duty in so many areas. Fantastic support and fantastic delivery – thank you for bearing with us!

Since we are talking about the PR industry here, a quick search of twitter will show that no-one is short of an opinion, and in the week since we’ve launched the new site, hundreds of tweets confirm that the membership agrees with the CIPR that the new site is a job well done.

HSBC has a very entertaining TV ad in which an American businessman is taken out for a meal by his Chinese hosts, and despite finding the meal revolting, finishes it because in America that would be considered the polite thing to do. However, in China finishing your meal is considered a way of indicating that you were not served a sufficient portion, and so in order to remedy the situation, the host insists upon serving the poor chap another helping.

These situations occur because every time we communicate with each other a certain amount of the meaning is implicit and derived from knowledge already possessed by both parties. If that ‘common sense’ is different, the meaning can be misunderstood. Unless you understand that your audience does not necessarily subscribe to the same version of common sense that you do, your product or service will at best have a ‘foreign feel’ to it, and at worst simply not make any sense.

The web doesn’t just suffer from this problem – it’s an acute example of it. When visiting a site for the first time, not knowing what to expect, the experience can be like wandering around the streets of a foreign city. At every turn there’s something new to remind you that this is an unfamiliar and unfriendly place.

There are obvious things that always cause problems – numbers, dates, times, currencies and language are good examples of irritations that exist within even just the Western Europe / US market:

• In continental Europe, large numbers are presented with a dot as a thousand separator, and a comma as a decimal separator (eg 123.456,78); in Britain and the US, on the other hand, it’s the other way around (ie 123,456.78).
• Dates presented in the format 00/00/00 are considered to be month-day-year in the US, and day-month-year virtually everywhere else, except Japan, where it would be taken to mean year-month-day. In Europe the separator is more commonly a dot, while in Britain and the US we prefer a slash.
• Time can be a problem in two ways: some cultures tend to use the 24 hour clock for everything, while others use it only formally, and prefer the 12-hour clock for everyday conversation. The second problem is time zones – which obviously vary right across the world.
• Even more of a problem than time zones, it’s hard to believe that the world still has so many currency units, and no universally acknowledged base for comparison. People are much less likely to buy stuff when the price is expressed in a currency they don’t know.
• Problems with language are easily forgotten when your audience ostensibly speaks the same language as you do. But when some words have different spellings (color/colour), others simply don’t exist in the target’s vocabulary (vacation/punter) and most irritatingly some words have completely different meanings (chips). The latter problem also applies to any national institution, law or standard that is not prevalent in the target market (referring to ‘the tube’, for instance, doesn’t mean anything to someone not familiar with the nickname for the London Underground)

Across the wider world, more qualitative cultural issues become apparent, like the interpretation of colours and symbols, which are particularly important if you are trying to communicate something without having to translate it into every known language (think assembly instructions for flat pack furniture). For example thumbs-up and thumbs-down is not universal, in some parts of the Arab world nodding means no, and red is not universally a ‘wrong’ colour.

As well as covering your bases with localisation of number and date formats in your website interface, you need to make sure you’re aware of any cultural bias implied by colours, symbology, or recognisable people, places and things. There are two ways of dealing with this. The first is to try to remove them, and the second it to customise the content for each of the target locales.

“Culturally neutral”

To a degree you can ‘delocalise’ your content by trying to remove any specific cultural bias, but this can be very difficult. Also, by removing cultural bias, you may be improving the experience of those users whose culture does not match the bias, but at the same time you’re degrading it for others. I often find it annoying when I’m browsing a site that has done this, because you often can’t work out where in the world they are based. Like a government statement on a controversial issue, the site’s character gradually gets watered down so that in an attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no-one.

Specifically localised content

Instead, if you are appealing to a number of specific markets, you can provide different experiences for each group. This might seem infeasible, but many organisations already do it with translated versions of the site in a number of languages. It’s a logical extension of this concept to consider making changes to the style, layout and formatting of the pages to make them more appealing to the target market. It may not necessarily mean big changes or offering different groups of users completely different versions of your website – in some cases tuning into your visitor’s curtural wavelength can be as simple as changing the examples you use.   Say you have a local classifieds site, and your search engine is prompting the user for a location.  If you can work out approximately where they are in the world and use a local town as an example of what they might search for, suddenly it seems like your site is locally relevant (even if you know nothing about that locality at all).

Ultimately we have to give users not only what they want to see, but give it to them in the way they want to see it, regardless of where they call home. Doing this at a global level without significantly reworking content for local markets remains a very tall order indeed.