Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) encourages the study and advancement of the science and practice of obstetrics and gynaecology through postgraduate medical education and training development, and the publication of clinical guidelines and reports on aspects of the specialty and service provision.

Challenges

The project presented two key challenges: the general overhaul of the existing website which had not been significantly updated for three years, and the delivery of a range of key objectives identified during an intensive planning and requirements gathering phase. The fundamental objective was to become the first port of call for the sector, not only in terms of the provision of advice, guidance and governance, but also to bring together international members and to provide training and career development for members.

Delivering a solution

Stage 1 – Developing the strategy

With tight timescales involved, bringing together a representative cross-section of RCOG members and stakeholders to define the requirements would have been both time consuming and costly. Our Persona Profiling process allowed the knowledge within the RCOG team of their stakeholders to be developed into a series of “paper people” who would represent the wider audience throughout the design and build process.

The Personas

Testing the extensive selection of potential content and commercial offerings that could be delivered by against the personas ensured that the investment in the project was focused on extracting the maximum possible benefits for site visitors, and identified Ask the Expert sessions, events information and booking and clinical guidelines as particularly high-value content.

Stage 2 – Design & Build

The desire to maintain a central user record within RCOG’s Integra CRM system, implementation of a comprehensive Single Sign On integration was a high . With an Information Architecture, module set, permissions model and registration and profiling process agreed, we delivered an online community and content site on the Drupal Open Source platform, using an Agile project management approach based around planning and delivery of manageable sets of functionality with iterative delivery and client review.

Deliveringimproved revenue

A key element of the project was the delivery of a fully functional bookshop area, with comprehensive product listing and discounting capabilities as well as secure online transaction support. The popular e-commerce tool Ubercart was tightly integrated with the Drupal platform to enable cross-promotion of products alongside related content, with Protx used as the payment gateway.