An Online Community project in partnership with VERINT.
The IET is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community, with more than 168,000 members in 150 countries and offices in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
With a rich history dating back to 1871, the IET has always been champions of engineering and technology, inspiring, informing and influencing the global engineering and technology community to solve the challenges that matter and engineer a better world.
The IET’s online community had been in place since 2012 and had grown to a membership of over 23,000 users, attracting on average 26,000 monthly unique visitors and 115,000 page views.
However, after extensive user research, they realised their community had grown beyond the capabilities of their platform and needed a new solution to continue scaling and providing what engineers want from an IET community.
The fundamental challenges revolved around the lack of control and functionality. Poor site structure meant content was hidden away in silos, making it hard for users to find and engage with content of interest.
Meanwhile, poor user functionality severely restricted how members navigated the site.
Key functionality like search, filtering, tagging, flagging, groups, archiving, integrations, Q&A and webinars was needed to continue providing for the needs of a growing membership.
The IET also understood the necessity of building trust between members and the importance of creating a safe, credible space where engineers can ask questions, share information and demonstrate their industry knowledge. However, without additional functionality, this wouldn’t be possible.
Outgrown Platform
Lack of Functionality
Poor user experience
Credibility
Personalisation
Siloed Communities
After extensive research, The IET selected 4 Roads to build their new community using Verint Community.
The platform, along with its robust features and its history of innovation and continuous improvement, best matched The IET functionality wishlist.
However, unlike other vendors, a key perk in selecting Verint Community is having all features and functionality available out-of-the-box, cutting down development time and enabling The IET to launch with a strong arsenal of community tools.
To create a better member experience, The IET wanted each user to have a personalised experience. To achieve this, 4 Roads extended the community to allow users to select their areas of interest and specialism. Now The IET can expose relevant content within the new activity feed, general discussion forum and digest emails.
This extends into a custom explore page where users can see site-wide content filtered by area of interest, including questions, blog posts and events. For example, a robotics engineer doesn’t have to see content relating to railways unless they want to.
We can now also automatically promote unanswered questions to users with corresponding expertise to show discussions to a wider audience and improve the likelihood of finding/giving an answer in an acceptable time frame.
This improved level of control encourages engagement, networking and the exchange of ideas between disciplines, borders and generations. But as a professional membership organisation trying to advance the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering and technology in the world, validating engagement as credible and professional was also critical.
To facilitate this, 4 Roads added badges to identify community members whose contributions have been helpful, giving members a quick way to validate the advice or feedback they receive.
This also challenges and motivates users to accumulate reputation and recognition, opening the door to collaboration opportunities.
This project aimed to create a safe online space for engineers to share knowledge. To foster an ethos of sharing and collaboration and encourage the positive behaviours and interactions expected on the site.
By migrating The IET community to Verint Community, we have built the foundations for a central hub generating content, questions and answers, putting the IET in a strong position to connect with busy engineers who need support from knowledgeable peers. With the community tools now available to The IET, they can better build a sense of community between their members and The IET. They can forge a personalised user experience that encourages knowledge sharing, archiving and collaboration. And they can raise awareness of the wider IET products and services by highlighting relevant content.
members in 150+ countries
project timeline
monthly page views
of technical queries now answered the same day
At 4 Roads, we’ve been building online communities for global brands since 2004. In that time we’ve built over 150 unique communities, so you can be confident you’re in safe hands. Fill out the form below to find out more about an online community solution:
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