The British Thoracic Society (BTS) had many challenges with its old CMS. Content was difficult to update and documents difficult to manage. Agidea used the power and flexibility of Umbraco to transform the way BTS manages its digital presence:
A solution that brought 400% increase in editor productivity ✍
What we were challenged to solve
The BTS website receives approximately 30,000 unique visitors per month and has over 3,000 registered members. The website hosts a range of extremely important and authoritative documents and materials that are used every day by respiratory health specialists in the UK and worldwide. The website is critical to BTS in achieving its organisational goals.
BTS had tried various document management “plugins” for their previous CMS, but they seemed difficult to use and lacked many features required for BTS documents.
How we solved it
We, Agidea, adopted an agile approach, dividing the project into multiple “sprints”, regularly delivering small features for BTS to review and test.
Frequent contact with the BTS team and continuous feedback allowed us to be sure that we were delivering a solution that met (and in many cases exceeded) everyone’s expectations.
Most of the time, when we needed to make changes, we implement them very quickly because of Umbraco’s flexibility - this helped us a lot.
We were able to use Umbraco’s flexible Document Type system to build a resources library that met the exact needs of BTS.
We were also able to quickly configure Umbraco back office user interfaces for managing document files, taxonomy, metadata schema and internal review policy.
What we gained from it
The previous BTS CMS had been clunky and difficult to manage. In some cases, this meant that important materials and documents were not reaching the people who needed them. The new Umbraco system tightly integrates document management with the rest of the website content, making everything both easier to manage and easier to access.
The previous content management system was not integrated with Google Analytics. Thanks to our full integration, BTS has now gained key metrics relating to publications, including the Asthma Guideline, which is downloaded more than 6,000 times per month worldwide.
Our work resulted in BTS staff being able to manage content and upload documents much more quickly. Typically, tasks can now be completed approximately 4 times faster, resulting in time and costs savings throughout the organisation.
Our improvements have enabled a larger volume of content to be uploaded with greater frequency and with improved discoverability for site visitors. This has led to an upturn in the volume of unique visitors to the site and a decrease in bounce rate.
“The British Thoracic Society is delighted to have found Agidea to work with. The impact on the way we do things has gone way beyond the provision of the right software. The approach – from the initial meeting with Sam Flanagan, has demonstrated that Agidea provides added value beyond the quality of their products and the expertise of their team. They have listened, understood, adapted and helped us to achieve a great new integrated website with plans for more in the year to come. We couldn’t be more pleased that we have a business partner which can help us deliver more to our members, provide us with valuable management information and present us so well to the outside world,"
How it works
BTS uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its members. We worked with BTS to integrate Microsoft Dynamics member logins, profile details and events information with the new Umbraco website.
We found that Umbraco’s extensible architecture made in it relatively simple to integrate Microsoft Dynamics functionality into the website.