The client
The Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment (IEMA) is an international membership organisation committed to global sustainability. With 15,500 individual members and 200 corporate members across multiple countries, it is the largest professional body for environmental practitioners in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
We have been working with IEMA since 2019, helping to build a new website to facilitate growth and transform services online. After the success of this initial project, we continued to work with IEMA to develop their website further, expanding their online offering in an effort to grow their membership.
The opportunity
IEMA publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Transform, which provides expert opinion and insight on a variety of topics relating to environment and sustainability. The magazine is mainly consumed online, where all IEMA members can explore the full archive of articles.
When we built the new IEMA website, the Transform content was available on a separate domain and managed by another company. However, IEMA had decided to bring the publication of the magazine in-house, and they wanted the existing Transform content to be migrated to their own website.
As well as migrating several thousand articles, there was also a desire to improve IEMA’s paywall functionality to allow non-members a sneak preview of Transform content before prompting them to sign up for a membership to read more.
Phase one - content migration
We were provided with a copy of the old Transform database, which contained thousands of articles published over the course of the previous decade. This data needed to be curated before it could be imported into the IEMA website, so we wrote a MySQL query to extract the data and convert it into a format that would make it easier to import into Craft CMS using the Feed Me plugin. We started with the most recent two years of content and worked backwards from there.
The Transform website had a complex hierarchy of topics which had become messy and difficult to manage, with nearly 600 topics including many duplicates. We worked with IEMA to select a core group of key topics and built pages for each of these on the website, focusing on subjects which were of particular interest to IEMA members such as climate change, energy, and biodiversity.
As IEMA planned to move from a printed magazine to online-only, we also designed and built a page to display the archive of previous editions of the magazine, allowing users to revisit old issues and explore new releases as they would with a printed copy.
It was crucial to IEMA that the search engine ranking of the articles should not be badly affected by migrating their content to a different website. We dedicated time to making sure that redirects were all in place from the old URLs to the new ones and a fresh sitemap was generated to ensure a smooth transition.
Phase two - the paywall
Following the successful launch of the Transform section on the website, IEMA decided to implement a paywall which would require visitors to the website to sign up for membership if they wanted to explore the full archive of Transform articles.
They wanted to allow non-members to view a small number of articles for free so that they could get a sample before signing up for membership. This would require an innovative solution to limit the number of articles a non-member could read and prevent them from finding workarounds to view more articles than allowed.
The method we chose uses browser fingerprinting to track a user’s browser device signature, thus preventing them from resetting their allowance by clearing cookies, or using a VPN.
This is fully configurable in Craft so that IEMA staff can specify the number of article views allowed, change the period of time before the allowance resets, and turn the paywall on and off if required.
The outcome
There are now over 8,800 articles on the website, with new ones added all the time. Transform articles are viewed around 10,000 times each month by IEMA members and non-members. IEMA’s membership has increased consistently since the content migration of Transform to the main website and the implementation of the paywall.
We have continued to develop the Transform section with the addition of advertising, which helps support the continuity of the Transform project. IEMA can now publish six issues of Transform every year, helping their members to stay informed about the latest news and issues in sustainability. Finally, due to this content migration work, IEMA has been able to stop printing the physical Transform magazine, whilst still providing it as member exclusive content, which supports its work as a Sustainability organisation.
