The Women’s Institute (WI) has partnered with Squiz, the digital transformation company, to create a responsive website that engages with its members, and enables easy on-the-go promotion. Celebrating its 100th birthday this year, the organisation wanted to ensure it was meeting the demands of a 21st century audience. The WI has grown to become the […]
The Women’s Institute (WI) has partnered with Squiz, the digital transformation company, to create a responsive website that engages with its members, and enables easy on-the-go promotion.
Celebrating its 100th birthday this year, the organisation wanted to ensure it was meeting the demands of a 21st century audience.
The WI has grown to become the largest women’s voluntary membership organisation in the UK with a total membership of approximately 212,000 women.
However, with WI events taking place in a range of different venues across the UK from village halls to tents, the organisation knew it needed to find new ways to appeal to its audience on digital channels and to be able to share digital information as easily as possible wherever members found themselves, rather than solely through a traditional desk-top computer.
Charlotte Fiander, Head of Communications at Women’s Institute said, “As our WI membership has grown, so too has the online engagement of our core audience. As a result, we wanted a website where all WIs could update and share their own information, meetings and events, which would form part of the wider organisational site. With 6,600 individual WIs all potentially feeding in and interacting with our website, this was a large project from the start so we needed a digital partner that could help us innovate quickly and effectively.”
The goal was to achieve a new look, feel and functionality for the WI that would boost online engagement. The organisation collaborated with Squiz to deliver a new user experience that gave the WI a nimble, responsive online companion at all times of the day, on any device and in any environment.
Squiz initiated a digital transformation campaign which enabled:
• Easier site navigation to support basic information sharing with members, visitors and prospects across the WI website.
• A mobile responsive site to appeal to WI members using mobile and tablets on the go who wanted a slicker, more dynamic set of content services.
• Greater consistency with the look and feel of the WI brand to ensure that the aesthetics of the digital project matched the great work that WI does.
• Upskilling of the WI federation via video content, step-by-step documents and general support to allow everyone to use the new technology.
In the first month the WI reported a 22% rise in traffic, a 23% rise in new users and a 20% rise in tablet/mobile users. The digital transformation campaign has been so successful that the WI is now exploring even more new ways to innovate their site and boost member engagement.
Stephen Morgan, MD Europe at Squiz commented, “The Women’s Institute has gone on an incredible journey of transformation in order to serve a digital audience more effectively. We have created a platform where future development and additional changes will be much simpler to implement, allowing ongoing digital innovation within the WI. We’re excited to continue working with the WI to drive change across the organisation.”
Fiander, adds: “With the new website running seamlessly across all devices, feedback across the organisation has been positive. Not only can users access key information easily and relay it to any prospective members, but we have found that better organisation across online platforms has freed up member time to focus on community projects or other pursuits. Nevertheless, the best result for us is increased engagement levels and the promotion of a more modern brand for the WI; we may be celebrating our 100th birthday this year, but we’ve never felt more relevant to the 21st Century!”
http://www.thewi.org.uk/become-a-member/membership-options/become-a-wi-member
