Challenge
The voice of Greater Manchester’s tech and digital sector for over 20 years, Manchester Digital needed to innovate when they found themselves with a website that no longer represented the sector they served.
The design of the website no longer reflected the vibrancy and proactive nature of the organisation, and while it contained interesting, insightful content, it wasn’t being showcased to those who would benefit.
The website wasn’t working hard enough to attract and convert new members, and internal resource was overstretched facilitating member admin requests, and trying to shed light on member engagement patterns.
Due to the complexity of the site, the amount of member data, and the historical content, a new website seemed like a mammoth task nobody wanted to tackle.
Having been members of the trade body since our business began, we were keen to use our unique perspective to enable Manchester Digital to deliver a completely new experience for members.
Manchester Digital regularly gather insight from their members, and already had a bank of member feedback for us to pore over.
This, combined with our interviews with members including Auto Trader, allowed us to produce a concise report of key member requirements from the new website, supporting Manchester Digital when making key strategic decisions along the way.
Launch
Beyond a new website, Manchester Digital launched a complete membership engagement and administration platform.
The platform not only provided a fresh new design for members, but personalisation features, gamified registration and onboarding, and the ability for colleagues to self-register on the site.
Members were able to post events, news and jobs to the site easily, with advanced features like scheduling and Slack notifications.
It was possible for the first time for members to sign up to auto-renew membership, view and download invoices and update their details – which synced with Xero accounting software.
We developed a unique Member Engagement Score, allowing Manchester Digital to rank members in terms of their membership engagement on the site. Combined with other user behaviour insights and automated reports, the platform became a valuable source of knowledge to inform member outreach.
Huddle created a website for us that we are proud to put our name on. It enables us to market ourselves more effectively and allows members to interact with our services in brand new ways.
The website not only looks great, but the backend system behind it has been revolutionary, saving us time with our marketing and unifying and streamlining our customer management.
Michael Palmer, Digital Marketing Manager at Manchester Digital
Next steps
We continue to work with Manchester Digital to enable them to stay competitive online and allow them to respond to the changing needs of their members.
Shortly after going live, we supported them in responding to the economic effects of COVID-19 by offering freezes on memberships and free trials for new members.
After the project, we gathered feedback from MD and used these insights to improve and refine our project management, documentation and testing processes, noting key learnings to take into our next projects.
