Association of Anaesthetists

Refining Navigation to Improve the Digital Experience for Members

The Association of Anaesthetists is a 10,000-member strong organisation representing the life-changing, life-saving profession of anaesthesia through supporting and inspiring their global community.

The Association has represented anaesthetists in the UK, Ireland and worldwide medically and politically, promoting the academic and clinical advancement of anaesthesia and the welfare of anaesthetists.

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178% increase in number of pageviews

83% increase in number of new users on the website

52% increase in number of sessions

The organisation continually strives to improve anaesthesia through education, training and research, and supports the wellbeing of its members to, in turn, ensure the safety of patients. The Association has numerous conferences, journals, and online resources which serve to educate and inform their community, with respected guidelines to improve the standards of patient safety. As such, it was critical that the Association had a website that reflected their strong brand and message effectively.

When Cantarus first engaged with the Association, they did not have a clear digital strategy in place. Coupling this with a highly technical content management experience and a lack of digital ability within the team, their existing website became dated, basic, and not reflective of their core values. Content was sporadic and tone of voice was inconsistent. With limited search functionality, it was difficult to navigate to key areas within the site. With this in mind, the Association needed a digital partner that could completely re-platform their site to meet their requirements, and create a more modern and simplified online experience.

The Association approached Cantarus to rebrand their existing website as they were in the process of rebranding from the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI), to the Association of Anaesthetists. As if undergoing organisation rebrand and website redevelopment projects simultaneously wasn’t enough, the Association were also in the process of replacing their CRM system, which would need to be heavily integrated into the new website in order to give members the best user experience possible.

They had several microsites for their annual events that needed to be migrated onto the main site. In addition, the Association had a number of disparate resources that needed to be organised and migrated, some of which needed to be accessible only to members. The Association therefore needed a simple, intuitive way to manage resources. They also required a new content management system (CMS) that would allow them to manage content and resources on the website effortlessly, without the need to rekey information across several pages.

We were tasked with redeveloping the existing website to meet the Association’s requirements, making it cleaner and more modern. Managing these projects could have easily become a logistical nightmare for the Association. Fortunately, we were able to utilise our extensive project management experience, together with development best-practices to decouple the interdependencies and allow us to build the website independently – adding integrations as and when they were available, without delaying either project.

The Association acknowledged that the rigidity of their current solution was frustrating, but we were confident that the core DNN Evoq page-building system would provide them with the flexibility and ease of managing their own content.

As with all membership organisations, the Association revolves around its members. As such, optimising the user journey that allows members to join the Association was a key consideration for the project. The previous membership application journey was manual and paper-based. As the Association has many different types of membership, they needed us to create and implement a user-friendly method of directing potential members to the correct application forms. For instance, students, trainees and consultants all require different application forms with varying fees, depending on what country they came from.

We built a completely customisable membership join journey to effortlessly guide users to the correct application form. In addition to the ease of selecting your membership level, members can now join, pay and become a member all online, which they were not able to do previously. Not only has this perfected the user experience of becoming a member, but this also has the added benefit of reducing the manual effort required by the Association throughout the membership application process.

The Association had indicated that providing intuitive navigation for users was a key requirement, so we rectified this by building a new mega menu. The mega menu is more accessible than before, prominently featured at the top of the homepage.

With the new site, discovering member benefits has never been easier, and accessing the Anaesthesia journal is painless. It is much simpler to find the resources you need with Cantarus’ Central Resource Centre (CRC) module. Members can search for any resource or guidelines they need by simply using the various filtering options provided. Consistent taxonomies across all web content ensures that information is surfaced through the in-site search functionality, as well as maximising SEO. Events are also much more accessible and searchable by topic.

The Results

On the whole, the project was very much a success. From the Association’s perspective, the new site has recently helped to facilitate one of their most successful major conferences (Winter Scientific Meeting 2020), with an increase in online registrations of 11% from the previous year. For the first time in its history, the Association can now track online income directly to the marketing channel which secured the booking or purchase. This will be a significant cost-saver in the long run and will help the organisation to achieve key strategic aims.

With the ability to update and maintain the site and upload fresh content, the Association has saved on any unnecessary costs to hire an external content agency for support. Since the website went live, the average time spent on a page on longer-form content (such as blogs and oral history interviews) has increased by over 2 minutes, evidencing that the presentation of the new site is working to get the right content to the right users, at the right time.

Other highlights include:

11% increase in online registrations from the previous year for their major conference,
Considerably improved UX,
Much easier content management,
Dramatically enhanced security,
Better-quality website performance overall.

The website that has been delivered exceeded our expectations in functionality and ease of use, providing us with an excellent platform for future growth. Added to this, Cantarus are a great all-round team to work alongside, who simplified what was a complex project and were always happy to help.

Gemma Campbell Director, Business Support and Deputy CEO

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