Introduction
The Association of Insurance and Risk Managers (Airmic) is the leading membership organisation for the insurance and risk management industry. Their membership is composed of senior executives who control an annual insurance spend of ?5bn and represent most of the FTSE 100 companies.
Airmic exist to benefit their members. They do this through organising conferences, seminars and distributing research and best practices over the web. Fulfilling this mission had become increasingly difficult and time consuming due to an inflexible proprietary CMS. After evaluating several options Airmic decided that Drupal was the best platform to enable them to achieve their current and future objectives.
Cameron & Wilding were selected in a competitive tendering process for their strong track record of Drupal implementation. Cameron & Wilding worked with Airmic in a series of half day workshops to create a thorough requirements document. Airmic then engaged a third party design company to create a set of designs to be used across the site.
Content
The information architecture workshops also helped to create a site wide taxonomy. Cameron & Wilding's experience of effective taxonomies for the web, combined with Airmic's domain expertise, ensured that a system of categorisation was created which enables users to quickly find and identify relevant content.Search
One of the main methods to allow users to find content is search. Cameron & Wilding recommended implementing Apache Solr Search, to provide a more powerful, drill down search. Apache Solr is an open source, enterprise search package that integrates closely with drupal. Using Apache Solr allows users to narrow down their search based on existing taxonomy terms, content types and dates.
Power Search
Airmic work with a range of partners, mostly large insurance companies such as AXA, Lloyd's and Zurich. These organisations have large amounts of high value content such as white papers, reports and blog posts which are all publicly available. Airmic wanted to create a single point of contact to search through this content.
Cameron & Wilding chose to use Nutch, an open source web crawler, to build "Power Search", a "mini google" within airmic.com where Airmic's users can easily access this partner content. Nutch regularly crawls partner websties, is indexed and exposed to Apache Solr. Users can then search both Airmic and partner sites.
Social Networking
How do you make a social network for people who do not use Facebook and have little interest in technology or the web? This was the challenge Airmic put to Cameron & Wilding. Airmic host twelve Special Interest Groups (SIGs), many of whom have regular and successful offline meetings. One of the main aims of the new site was to foster greater online networking and knowledge sharing between members.
After several workshops with Airmic members and staff, Cameron & Wilding created specifications and wireframes for eSIGs, Airmic's new online community. This consists of a Q&A platform, document sharing and events.
eSIGs is undergoing final testing and will be deployed soon. We will post a new case study to cover this when it goes live.
Summary
Airmic's new website provides a much improved way of finding content through both search and information architecture. This benefits members by helping them quickly find specialised content. The content management capabilities of Drupal allow Airmic staff to quickly create and edit content without external assistance. Finally, Drupal has provided a solid platform for growth and innovation so that in future phases new functionality such as a community, mobile apps or online surveys can be added to Airmic's offering.
Image credit: francisco_osorio
