Creating an online members experience

Livery Company websites often have to fulfil many roles.

Whether it is generating awareness of the company, the contribution they make to the industry, the various charitable fundraising activities or how they help steer and guide the future within education.

But Livery Company websites can also play an equally important role in helping to provide a better member experience.

It won’t be a surprise to many when we say that as an industry, Livery Company websites are some way behind the digital curve.

However, like many other industries, recent years have forced Livery Companies to consider digital and how technology can bring value to their company.

Utilising it to create and build an online member’s experience within the website could be a crucial step for many within the industry.

In this blog post, we set out to cover some of the key considerations when creating such an experience.

Defining the member’s user journey.

A key consideration that has to be taken into account is the journey that a member will take on the website and what their end goal is.

No doubt it will be very different from any other audience group.

The existing website can be used to map out each user goal for your members in order to identify any potential flaws in the journey.

You can then map out a clear path that your member can easily follow.

As members are fully aware of the company and everything that it is involved in, it may be something as simple as a button on the homepage towards their specific area.

Delivering the required functionality.

The aim of the members area within the website is to make life easier for both the member and for your membership team.

As the area is bound to hold sensitive information about each member, it is essential that the space is secured with login credentials and multi-factor authentication.

Once logged in, the area should be structured in an easy to navigate way so that members can clearly see what is available to them in their menu.

A member profile page will help to keep all member information up to date, such as their email address, which will be helpful in driving engagement from a regular newsletter for instance.

Implementing an events calendar is a fantastic way to create awareness around the activities of the company, and more importantly, can help to automate sign-ups for those interested in attending. Adding a payment integration, can help take the headache away from having to collect payment too.

Providing a resource area will make the retrieval of important information and documents a lot easier for the member, and will limit the reliance on mass mail outs and letter distribution to members from your team too.

If you want to begin to build an online member community, a forum or discussion board can be a great first step in doing so. This will enable members to hold conversations in the form of a posted message.

As the members area will be secured with login credentials, a membership directory will provide exposure to the rest of the company, which can result in networking opportunities and business referrals.

Clever integrations with third party technologies.

We build all of our websites on WordPress, using the core as a base, and then adding layers of code on top of it to tailor it to each client’s needs.

We feel that WordPress is incredibly well suited to Livery Companies for many reasons.

One of the main reasons is its ability to scale and connect with other technologies at ease.

Due to its global community and following, there are thousands of WordPress plugins that could provide you with various functionalities, everything from enhancing security through to improving performance.

Integrating your online members area with a CRM technology like HubSpot or Salesforce can bring many benefits:

1. Provides your membership team with instant access to up-to-date data
2. Significantly reduces the need for manual administration
3. One central data source reducing the risk of error or duplication

The important stuff – security and ongoing maintenance.

One of the easiest ways to protect your online members area is by implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA).

MFA simply asks the user to provide a second set of credentials to access the system, from Face ID through to a text code sent through to their email or mobile phone.

Having a website update policy is of huge importance and something we stress to clients from the outset.

If you host your website with us, we manage all the responsibilities of keeping the server, the WordPress core and any plugins that we use, all up to date.

Should you wish to host your website elsewhere, then it’s essential that you keep it updated, as your online members area will have access to sensitive data.

For further reading on why you should implement a website update policy, please click here.

We would also recommend implementing the WordFence plugin and Cloudflare too.

The Wordfence plugin provides a WordPress firewall that blocks attackers looking for vulnerabilities on your website.

Cloudflare is a global network designed to make everything you connect to the internet secure, private, fast and reliable.

Lasting thoughts.

Your Livery Company website can be anything you want it to be, and it should always aim to achieve the goals important to each individual company, regardless of the target audience.

Although, a huge opportunity awaits for any Livery Company that wants to utilise their website to better engage and communicate with its members.

The reasons for digitising your membership experience are clear to see, and can go hand in hand, with your existing process, whilst you move over to a digital-first approach.