Building engagement by putting members in control

The Institute of Physics is the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland. Our challenge was to increase member engagement between IOP’s digital platforms and grow memberships by creating a connected hub of all current platforms for a seamless and inspiring membership experience.

Innovation and personalisation 

Using Acquia's powerful personalisation tools, we syndicate content from a range of the IOP’s digital properties, all built in different platforms. As Acquia Lift only accepts content from Drupal sources, we created a Drupal-based proxy, which passes the content up to the Content Hub platform for syndication.

That content is then displayed alongside on-site content on the IOP’s new web platform (designed & built by Catch). There, members can log in and - using our simple onboarding process combined with the all-new global taxonomy we devised - personalise their experience with the IOP, with a set of preferences stored in IOP's existing CRM Salesforce.

A digital component based approach

As part of our work on IOP.org and IOP Spark, we created a digital component library called IOP Nucleus, which now forms the core of the IOP’s digital UI.

This library aims to stay lean and platform agnostic, with little opinion of final implementation. 

It has been built with the main iop.org website in mind, but serves as a lightweight starting point for any IOP digital product. Components have been grouped by base, atoms, components and templates. 

Component library approach summary;

• Aims to stay lean and platform agnostic, with little opinion of final implementation
• Serves as a lightweight starting point for any IOP digital product
• Components have been grouped by base, atoms, components and templates
• Built using Fractal

See the component library at IOP Nucleus, or see it in action powering IOP.org and teachers' website IOP Spark.

Clever technology

To encourage engagement and ensure a truly personal experience with fresh, personalised content on each visit key technological features include;

• Single Sign On for multiple web properties
• Users authenticated against Auth0 SSO
• User preference data saved to Salesforce CRM once authenticated
• Content tagged against a global taxonomy and syndicated from multiple sites into a central repository
• Content pulled from central repository and served to users based on preferences
• Registration handled by SEAF 3rd party system

Outcome

A connected hub of all the IOPs myriad of platforms for a seamless and inspiring membership experience.

• Ability for members to personalise their experience, creating a profile 
• Encourages engagement with the site and ensures a truly personal experience with fresh, personalised content on each visit
• Creates a personalised homepage for authenticated members using syndicated content from a variety of IOP properties via Acquia Content Hub
• Member preferences are stored in Salesforce