Filene Research Institute

CHALLENGE
Organize a treasure-trove of member content that is partially public and partially gated and optimize search across the site to create the most value for members.

There was no question that Filene provided tremendous value to the Credit Union community, their research products and applied strategies have been helping Credit Unions for more than thirty years. But the large volume of research and related content had grown beyond the capacity of their digital interface and was not serving members as well as they would have liked. In addition, Filene knew it was time to update their brand image and refresh the site design.

SOLUTION
A fully re-designed site that offers state of the art search and user tracking tools.

Design partner Swink, Inc. knew from experience that Earthling has a knack for managing the technical challenges of content-rich sites and invited us to partner with them to power several key features on the site: Elasticsearch integration and interface with an enterprise Digital Asset Manager, User Authentication via Salesforce and Custom Analytics and Reporting through Salesforce, Pardot and Google Analytics.

Critical to the success of the site was adopting a robust search tool that could filter the tremendous amount of information available. We integrated Elasticsearch to index the website content published in Craft CMS as well as Widen’s Digital Asset Manager. Members could now not only find things like blog posts and content published on the website but also find research papers and other reports available in pdf format.

One of the most pressing challenges facing Filene was how to balance the need to display the wealth of research available to potential members vs needing to limit access in order to maintain a membership value proposition. We tackled this dilemma with a custom Craft to SalesForce integration to check member status before users could download a document from the Digital Asset Management platform. Reports on user activity could then be produced in Pardot and aggregated analytics for KPIs on user behavior were collected and reported in dynamic Google Studio dashboards.

In addition to limiting access to only members, Filene wanted to pay particular attention to site user behavior and to utilize user data to improve services and direct marketing strategy. Earthling drew on our background in automated marketing to integrate SalesForce, Pardot and Google Analytics to create a login portal and user tracking service to support digital marketing efforts.

RESULTS

The improved site has significantly increased Filene’s ability to serve members in the digital space and meet their goal of offering maximum benefit from their top-notch research. They are thrilled with the way the system publishes content from the asset manager to the site and indexes new content for search, allowing them to reach more members with great content faster.

The radically improved search function has increased the number of users that use search to quickly find content by 800% YOY, opening their vast warehouse of research and reports to members on a scale not previously possible. Earthling continues to support Filene with internal and external search reports that allow the internal teams to improve and optimize content plans to keep pace with the interests of the members.

Streamlining and integrating member data and key site actions into Salesforce means the customer relationship team has a single record of meaningful actions by which to customize their outreach to members.