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.

Oops doesn’t really cover situations like that, does it. The brokerage responsible for the sale is having to buy back all the mis-sold shares at their market value (since no-one else is prepared to sell them at 1 yen), and suffer a resulting loss of around 27 billion yen (£126 million). All because someone put two numbers in the wrong boxes on a computer screen.

This could be considered a human error, and it’s worth remembering that even if there had been no computer involved at all, the broker might still have written the numbers down in the wrong boxes on an equivalent paper form. However, while a piece of paper is incapable of telling you when you’re writing what amounts to incomprehensible gibberish, a computer is certainly capable of taking a look at your request and checking that it falls within the boundaries of what should be considered rational. So really this is a software failure, in that it is certainly a failure of software to pick up on human mistakes.

The problem is, while computer software is now allowing us to process data and particularly financial transactions at a truly amazing speed, this also means that when technical errors occur, they tend to be large and far-reaching. As systems get ever more efficient and more accurate, we can process even more transactions per second; run trains faster and fly aircraft closer together, keep our cars on the road and even put people in space. We are putting more and more of our personal and financial safety in the hands of computers.

If that makes you shudder with fright and long for the days of manila folders stored in endless file rooms, it shouldn’t. When you’re in a lift on your way to the 50th floor of a skyscraper and the cable snaps, what do you want to rely on to brake your fall? A lift operator manually engaging an emergency brake, or a computer that can recognise the fault and react before you have even had the chance to regret having the chicken tikka for lunch.

Reliance on computer systems can’t be avoided. They’re just far too useful to be sidelined. What must be done instead is to make them absolutely bulletproof, and that’s not cheap.

The need for overwhelming testing and safety has been a staple of the nuclear industry for decades. Instead of being the ultimate source of unlimited clean, cheap power as originally promised, nuclear has become a source of energy no more cost effective than existing techniques. The industry recognised and accepted that the cost benefits of nuclear generation methods were almost entirely swallowed up by the cost of compliance with safety regulations.

Unfortunately many large computer systems are still constructed by the lowest bidder, and resilience is often one of the first things to suffer compromises. Considering the human and financial cost of computer failures should make it easy for firms to see the value in spending money in advance to prevent them. I would argue that any amount up to and including the cost of the worst conceivable failure is a valid investment in ensuring the resilience of a system. Certainly with hindsight Mizuho Securities in Japan would rather have paid the 27 billion yen earlier to develop a way of filtering incomprehensible trading orders, than pay the same amount now to buy back the mis-sold shares and suffer the glare of the media spotlight as well.

When you are considering a new system, calculate the cost of the worst possible failure of the software. Then consider what proportion of that you are willing to invest to prevent the failure from occurring. The system may end up being not as profitable as you’d like, but on the other hand, it may be considerably more profitable, depending on whether the disaster has happened yet.

You may remember the film Mercury Rising, in which an autistic boy is able to decipher a top secret government supercode but doesn’t realise how he’s done it. This isn’t very realistic (and not a particularly good film either) but it demonstrates what happens when the filters in our brains stop working. If they weren’t there, you’d try and interpret absolutely everything around you, and quickly become overwhelmed by the task. As a result autistic children are often highly gifted in some areas but seem withdrawn and socially incapable.

Novice internet users are a little like this, in that everything hits them with equal force, and as a result their navigation patterns can be sporadic. They’re more likely to be diverted by advertising, and don’t necessarily spot the items of content that they are actually looking for. This can be a problem when it leads to frustration and the impression that your service is difficult to use.

On the other hand, experienced users often filter too much. Because these sorts of people have lots of existing knowledge of web pages, those memories are fed into the processing centres of the brain and influence how we interpret what we see. So if our pre-existing knowledge is forming a strong expectation of what will appear on a page that we haven’t loaded yet, the power of those expectations can be stronger than the evidence in front of our eyes. This results in not only the ignoring of areas of content that we did not expect, but in some cases the invention of content that does not exist but that we expected to see.

One of our clients recently placed a quiz on their website, and of the comments received from the people who tried it, one recurring question stood out: “How do I know which ones I got wrong?”. In fact, after every question the user is given immediate feedback – “Well done” or “Sorry, here’s the right answer”, but the same page also contains the next question. And it wasn’t that the answers were difficult to spot, but users were subconsciously filtering out anything that wasn’t the next question, and ignoring it. One solution in that case could be to repeat a summary of the user’s performance at the very end of the test.

So you need to consider not only the needs of the novice, but also the experienced user who can be equally disadvantaged by badly designed content, but in a different way. The best way of satisfying novice users is, where possible, to ensure the key parts of a page are the most likely to attract attention – and that doesn’t necessarily mean making them bigger or bolder. Surrounding something with a generous amount of white space can work equally well, and if your page tends to appear in the browser incrementally, try and make sure the important bit displays first (often the first thing to appear as a page is loading is an advert).

For the experienced users, what’s on the page is less important than the user’s expectation of it. A user will have a clear idea of the kind of structure of the information they want to see, and their subconscious will seek out those patterns before they get around to processing them intelligently. So in the quiz example, perhaps a better solution would be to change the button text on each question from “Submit” to “Check answer”. By doing so we’ve aligned the user’s expectation of the content of the following page more closely with what’s actually on it.

To an extent, getting inside the head of your visitors may ultimately help you get inside their wallet as well.