The challenge

A not-for-profit membership organization, the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) brings together the global laboratory community for a common cause: fostering excellence in laboratory medicine. They do so by facilitating a unique process of developing clinical laboratory testing standards based on input from and consensus among industry, government, and health care professionals.

CLSI needed a new association management system (AMS). Their current platform was a WordPress site without proper integration with their AMS service provider, NetSuite. They were in the midst of moving from NetSuite to Abila netFORUM, which needed to be integrated with the new public web platform.

CLSI wanted to give their members the ability to view and manage their profiles, subscriptions, membership renewals, and more, also supporting complex organization membership types with delegates and child organizations. The delegates needed to be able to control the entire organization’s membership and user access to all the great Standards information CLSI creates in partnership with the lab community. In addition to the enhanced membership features, CLSI also needed a complete storefront so members and non-members could find and purchase Standards materials and webinar registrations. And it all needed to be deployed within 10 weeks.

Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute

Industry

  • Laboratories and research

Project timeline

  • 10 weeks

Blue Sequoyah Technologies services

  • AMS development
  • API integrations
  • CMS development
  • Github source code repository management
  • Responsive markup with SCSS
  • Server security audit
  • Technical research, consulting
  • Web app hosting

The result

We worked with CLSI and their marketing partner, Arc Intermedia, to identify a minimum viable product (MVP) for release within their time constraints. We then discussed features to be added in later phases. Once the requirements were ironed out, we recommended Umbraco CMS as the core platform, with custom integrations for RealMagnet member email subscriptions, and for Abila netFORUM, using Catalyst Fire Flashpoint and Ignition as the middleware.

Source code would be stored in a private GitHub repository, and Blue Sequoyah Technologies would host the development and staging sites in our Amazon Web Services (AWS) Electronic Cloud Compute (EC2) environment.

We built out the integrations with Catalyst Fire Flashpoint/Ignition and netFORUM first, to ensure that the base data structures were in near final form. We then built out the rest of the Umbraco platform. We also assisted with a security audit for their Microsoft Azure environment.

The launch of the new platform was a big success, and there were no major hiccups to speak of. As CLSI used the back office tools and gained experience in how the system worked and what was possible, it was clear that they needed a road map for improvements and enhancements. We've partnered with CLSI to manage and fulfill that roadmap and provide the best possible experience for both members and the CLSI marketing team.

Summary

  • ASP.NET MVC and Umbraco CMS, hosted on Microsoft Azure.
  • Responsive HTML5 framework.
  • Full integration with Abila netFORUM AMS, including product data and membership management, commerce, SSO.
  • Single sign-on (SSO) with Higher Logic (community)
  • Integration with Real Magnet (email marketing)
  • Membership management, product sales, blog, news, videos, maps, slideshows, and more.
  • Organization management features
  • Non-destructive product data sync keeps the site online even if netFORUM is not.

ROI

  • Launched MVP on-time and within budget
  • 8% increase in overall traffic
  • 15% increase in user engagement
  • Happy members and staff!