When the previous NLT website was created in 2010, the organisation was a very different beast to the one it is now. The site's primary focus was on providing information to support their core literacy work with schools.
The main Trust site and the extras bolted on to it over six years served the organisation well, but they were built with proprietary technology that was no longer supported. As a result NLT were stuck, unable to iterate, or develop further.
When we began working with NLT they had an average of 60,000 unique visitors to their site per month, and around 2.5 million pages viewed per year. Sadly they had a 68% bounce rate across the site, so much the hard work being done by the brand was wasted.
We worked with the key stakeholders and support staff to drill into what made the NLT content compelling and original enough for educators and parents to pay a subscription. Part of this exercise was designed to fill the gaps in knowledge, but also to encourage the NLT teams to share the kinds of anecdotal insight into their users lives that quant data just can't begin to provide.
Given the sheer quantity of content and the number of members and stakeholder users we decided to build the CMS with Wagtail, and integrate with their existing ThankQ CRM.
Wagtail meant we could give NLT a hugely powerful and truly adaptable CMS - something that could scale with their membership, and business requirements.
We used user preferences to control the site experience and content using a bespoke taxonomy system. This means that content can be filtered according to a range of tags and can be served to members based on a range of metrics and behaviour.
For NLT staff they now have a full user membership system, with tiered permissions around accessing resources, three payment options (including renewals, upgrades and programme purchases) and automated CRM friendly data exports.
Within a month of the new site going live, bounce rates halved, and new membership and membership renewals increased exponentially. The team at NLT now have a powerful and scalable platform to help the organisation with their next six years of growth.
