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Revamping Water Research Foundation's Digital Experience for Enhanced Subscriber Engagement
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Sensors - Utility Meters
Applicable Industries
- Cities & Municipalities
- Electrical Grids
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Intelligent Urban Water Supply Management
- Water Utility Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Water Research Foundation (WRF) aimed to increase subscriber engagement by making its leading water research more accessible. However, their previous website was cumbersome and required a highly motivated user to find what they needed. The platform also lacked comprehensive personalization capabilities. The challenges for this project were two-fold: technical integration and a simplified user experience. WRF was transitioning from older, outdated systems to newer platforms, which posed significant data connections and migration problems. The migrations included moving from Sharepoint to Acquia DAM, from ASP.NET to Drupal 8 CMS, and from Microsoft IIS to Acquia Cloud Personalization. Additionally, creating an engaging and useful user experience was a challenge. With thousands of research materials untagged and unstructured, content organization was only the start. Delivering the site as a customizable tool for subscribers to get the most out of the research was also key.
About The Customer
Water Research Foundation (WRF) is an organization committed to the funding and distribution of water research, primarily related to drinking water. Municipalities, universities, and utility providers across the country use WRF’s research to improve drinking water. WRF is the world’s leading one water research and innovation organization operating on six continents. Their Foundation represents approximately 1,200 subscribers, hosts an online research library of more than 2,300 projects valued at $700 million, manages an innovation platform with a database of more than 1,100 innovative technologies, and much more.
The Solution
In partnership with Elevated Third, WRF started with a fresh look at not just the information architecture, but the concept of the site itself. They envisioned a digital magazine instead of a research database, something that would be easily browsable and enticing. Hundreds of existing tags and categories were collapsed to a few meaningful ones with the help of digital card sorts with subscribers. Layouts focused on key topic pages to bring together projects, research, articles, and events around central themes important to users. Acquia Cloud Platform provided a stable base for all of WRF’s sites, offering performance and a dev-ops workflow that keeps the development process lean and fast. Using Acquia Personalization, WRF can target users by activity or persona. They will customize content portals by role (researcher, utility manager, city planner), promote local events by user location and deploy a future integration with email and marketing automation to continue to support the goal of ever-increasing subscriber engagement.
Operational Impact
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