The Dramatists Guild of America is a national, membership-based trade association of theatre writers including playwrights, composers, lyricists and librettists that was founded in 1919. For over 100 years, the Guild has provided its members aid in protecting both the artistic and economic integrity of their work. Their online platform, which is critical to the success of the membership, provides access for members to retrieve an immense library of resources. Members are able to communicate directly with Guild staff and Guild members, they can obtain legal guidance on contracts or other legal questions, and the site facilitates as a hub for industry news and events. The challenge was to build an enterprise platform that is directly integrated with Zoho CRM, capable of streamlining membership applications, digitizing the Resource Directory (which had previously been a printed publication), and introducing new and engaging features meant to aid the member along their career path. The previous membership platform was antiquated, had scalability issues that resulted in poor performance, and experienced server crashes from time to time with only minimal load.
THE DRAMATISTS GUILD OF AMERICA
Creating an Enterprise Membership Platform for a 100 Year Old Company
PROJECT BREAKDOWN
This was a large project, broken down into phases which required an agile methodology to iterate sprint after sprint, supported via test-driven development that was shared with the client for review.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Ecommerce Platform
Custom API Development
Membership Platform
Content Management System (CMS)
Variable Data Printing (VDP)
RESULTS
This was a project that required extensive technical research and planning to architect a solution that hit on all the objectives, and was to be scalable for years to come for their thousands of active members. Some early challenges to overcome were looking for ways to improve and consolidate membership classifications and statuses. Previous legacy applications were built upon unstructured data, and quickly became a focal point to the project, to normalize the data in a scalable way, but yet also made sense to an already established member base and trained staff. We needed to maintain old norms, while improving the data relationships at the same time. Once the use cases were defined and an architecture strategy was formed, we set off to writing code and developing in an iterative, agile process, using Test Driven Development (TDD) where we were quickly able to do client reviews for milestones and deliverables on schedule.
QUOTE
"I can't say enough about the excellent work that Visual Identity Group has done for our organization. The Dramatists Guild website is complex in functionality and deep in scope, that really required an enterprise solution to support our growing membership. Our partnership with them has led to a re-invention of the website that has not only grown in scope and functionality for our members, but has also transformed the way we manage content and support, which saves us valuable time and money. They have been professional throughout the process, staying on task, on target, and I look forward to continue working with them in the future."
Emmanuel Wilson
Managing Director/Interim Executive Director of Creative Affairs
Member Dashboard
A major element of the website, the all-new member dashboard would be the central hub of the membership platform, allowing the member to view events and resources near them, view saved articles and blog posts that they favorited during a previous visit, quick shortcuts to business resources and guides, view their member benefits and manage their membership...all in one convenient location. The Member Dashboard is also critical in that it allows the member to create and manage their online member profile that acts as a resume for their careers, allowing the member to highlight their experience and accolades, as well as provide links to their websites and other social & industry channels.
Resource Directory
The Resource Directory was a huge undertaking, not only for us, but also for the Guild. The purpose of the directory was to take the printed publication of organizations that had been printed annually for decades, and digitize the data into a searchable directory. This online directory now allowed the Guild to feature and maintain organizations for members in real time, and provide members with Submissions deadlines for upcoming performances. The process was a big effort for both as there was a tremendous amount of data, and normalization was important. Search and filter performance were key, so to improve search query and results we utilized Solr and Redis caches to index and maintain performant data. The result was a query that was extremely performant for the user, and allowed them to choose any combination of the many filterable options to hone down the exact organization they're looking for, anywhere in the world.
In order to query data and have performant cache, we must also have good User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX). Working with the Guild we analyzed many directory listings, examining what worked and what didn’t, and carefully wireframed and mocked up user experiences which were reviewed with the client before work was done. This work, while part of our normal development process, helped Guild management visualize the process before even a single line of code was written, so we could ensure a good user experience that was both easy to navigate, and what the client expected."
Variable Data Printing (VDP)
Once all the organization and directory data had been normalized and data schema set for the Resource Directory, the next step was to automate the printed version of the Resource Directory. Prior to this work, the directory was assembled in-house by Guild staff using a manual, tedious process that took many months to assemble into a 800+ page booklet in Adobe InDesign. Having a strong background in print and fulfillment and after pioneering some VDP technologies still used today, we envisioned a process that would allow the Guild to cut this process down to minutes. The data was there, all that was needed was to establish rules and templates that allowed for automated flow page by page to assemble the massive booklet. After this process was realized and the templates and data tested, we created a feature to automatically export this into a print-ready PDF the client could download to provide to their printer, but also provide to both members and non-members on request. The result was a cost savings of $65,000 annually.
Calendar
Another integral component of the Resource Directory, was the calendar which featured events and submissions. Each contained information for the event and/or calls to action to register with the event organizing or save to the member dashboard as a future reminder. The challenge with the calendar was “how do you showcase several events in a single day, while also maintaining the calendar look that people are accustomed to?” The solution was a JavaScript- and AJAX-based calendar that allowed expansion of a single day instantly, to view multiple events in the calendar/date view, but also in a list view. This allowed us to load future and past months in a “lazy loading” method to improve performance during initial page load, and make the user experience of skipping through the weeks and months very fast.
Business Affairs Helpdesk
Key to the project was creating an interface to help members with support issues by creating and managing tickets. Leveraging Zoho Desk (a customer service portal), single sign-on (SSO) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) to make the user experience seamless, members are able to create support tickets and manage communications with DG staff members, as well as view archived tickets and articles. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a mechanism used for exchanging authentication and authorization data between applications, in particular, an identity provider (IdP) such as Zoho Desk. You can configure SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) for end users so they can access the Help Center without being prompted to enter separate login credentials.
Member Directory
Getting what you need or finding a member quickly was important to the user experience. To make sure that search was done correctly, we utilized Apache Solr, an enterprise search platform built on apache that is highly reliable, scalable, fault tolerant, and provides distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying. Solr is blazing-fast and has performed admirably as the database comprises thousands and thousands or profiles, organizations, nodes, blocks, media and orders. Benchmarking our results was important during development to maintain a threshold for performance. The results were dramatically improved search that scans site wide and returns relevant content organized by content types.
Find A Collaborator
Are you a composer and looking for a lyricist? Perhaps you’re a playwright and need help and looking for a librettist? Find A Collaborator is the solution that helps to put members together based on a bulletin post amongst the community. All listings are created by members, and are approved and moderated by a DG staff member.
Forums
In order to expand and strengthen the Guild community, Forum was created to connect their members together to communicate, share and build new relationships.
Highlights
QUOTE
"Visual Identity Group not only rebuilt our website,
they changed our understanding of what was possible. Working with VIG has led to breakthroughs in engagement,
data management, member service and ease of use - for everyone on both sides of our site."
Tina Fallon
Executive Director, Creative Affairs
INDUSTRY RECOGNITION
We’re proud to anounce that The Dramatists Guild of America project received industry recognition by the W3 Awards, The Davey Awards, The Communicator Awards, AVA Digital Awards, and Hermes Creative Awards.
We’re proud to have partnered with The Dramatists Guild on this project and watch our maintenance and optimizations show improvements month over month.
