The challenge

Overhaul CIPS’ current website to better engage with 65,000 members across 150 countries.

The Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply promote good practice and develop high professional standards of skill and integrity globally across purchasing and supply chain management.  In order to meet the needs of such a broad breadth of members, they created a huge pool of invaluable insight, advice, guidance and best practice, and made this all available to them online.  The problem was that members simply weren’t finding or using enough of the resources, and the website wasn’t working hard enough for either CIPS or their audience.

To tackle this situation head-on, CIPS commissioned us to look at the site structure, to talk to their members and to come up with a more attractive proposition. 

An additional layer of complexity was added to the task as a wholesale rebrand was taking place across CIPS at the same time.  The creative challenge of working alongside the rebrand was how to translate this freshly minted, print-focused visual language into the online space.

The solution

We felt the following points were key to the success of this project:

• We built a very strong working relationship with the CIPS team over the course of the project, which led to an adaptable, solutions focussed partnership.
• Our Digital Strategy team worked with all departments to ensure we reached internal alignment.  We knew that getting everyone on board was vital to the success of the project.
• We undertook detailed research with their members to really get under the skin of what they wanted from CIPS and how they wanted to see it delivered.
• Our User Experience team used outputs from this research (“we want a website that’s simple to use yet gives us all the information we need”) to inform a series of practical exercises that shaped the new site architecture, navigation, content and functional requirements.
• We tackled the rebrand issue by working iteratively with the CIPS team to refine our work to the point where it fitted in seamlessly with offline efforts, without compromising any aspects that made it work in the first place.

The results

A well-designed website delivered to our client within time and on budget that has so far has received very positive reviews from their members.

“Having managed website re-brands in the past, I’d never had to deliver one in such a short timescale. With meticulous planning from the Sift Digital project team, day to day contact and some extremely hard work, we ensured any issues were raised and addressed quickly, and the project was delivered on time and to budget.

I have been thoroughly impressed with the work that Sift Digital have undertaken on the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply website over the past 6 months.  Sift Digital’s experience with member based websites, coupled with their excellent design skills, and ability to create cleaner more intuitive websites, played a large factor in bringing them on board to help deliver our project.”

Over the coming months, we’ll be making use of Sift Digital’s expertise in online communities, as we look to provide a higher level of interaction through the site.”

Ben Meadows, CIPS Marketing Manager Online Services