Building a Recommendation Engine for National Associations

This session will examine Drupal’s potential to deliver highly customized donation workflows for large associations. The main players at the heart of the story are the American Library Association and its numerous sub-divisions. The sprawling family tree of ALA membership types was causing much confusion when a new member attempted to join the association or renew an ALA membership online. Products lived in various places, sometimes completely offline, and in some cases the sign up process was actually easier to complete offline rather than on the website. Thousands of memberships and millions of dollars of revenue were on the line.

The world’s oldest association for professional librarians needed a complete rethinking of its product recommendation engine and improved user experience for the main ALA site. The ALA turned to Drupal, the iMIS association management platform, and many hours of detailed interviews with usability experts to reveal the most efficient path to bring ALA’s website into the modern era and make it a relevant fundraising force.

The project tackled issues with usability on ALA’s main site by approaching the purchase workflow from a localized perspective. The redesigned site gives more agency to local chapter leaders and takes into account specific user interests when guiding members through the donation and purchase process.

National associations have specific challenges when it comes to granular content delivery. A large association with thousands of members may not have a strategy in place to communicate targeted initiatives to local chapters. Beyond organizational measures, such as appointing a membership director for each local chapter, how can national associations bridge the gap between the "big picture" initiatives and localized ones?

Drupal integrates with a healthy ecosystem of third party AMS software products, iMIS being one of the more widely used systems among associations. Building off of the rich data stores in ALA’s iMIS instance, the overhauled Drupal site became a delivery vehicle for targeted and ultra-specific products at the local chapter level. How? By building a recommendation engine that calls back to the AMS records of past purchases, interest categories and membership history.

Obliterating clunky workflows and a scattered array of PDF documents, the revised ALA site shows brand new and renewing members the most relevant products in a clean, user-friendly layout.

This session will detail: 

• stakeholder interviews which preceded the project’s design and building phase
• incorporating user experience design into the redesigned Drupal site for ALA
• key Drupal integrations powering the revised membership/purchase workflow