Royal Geographical Society: A New Website and Payment System Integration for RGS
- 1000+
- App Innovation
- Not for Profit
About the Royal Geographical Society
The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) is the UK’s learned society and professional body for geography, founded in 1830. The RGS a world leader in advancing geography and supporting its practitioners in the UK and across the world.
The challenge
As a charity, the RGS serves an exceptionally wide range of public and professional audiences, including 16,500 members across a diverse range of age groups and interests, and their work reaches millions of people each year.
Their website must meet the needs of these members – from log-in and registration to news and daily features. It must also serve an annual conference attracting thousands.
A change to the back office members’ registration, payment and booking systems necessitated a change to the society’s website to enable a flexible way to deal with rolling renewals and provide the quick and simple-to-use online administrational service expected by members.
The solution
The RGS contacted Transparity – their trusted Microsoft partner – to reengineer their CMS based website to enable full and seamless integration with the new back-office system.
The CMS provided page templates and content editing for multiple concurrent users. The process from initial editing to approval was fully automated to speed up each stage.
It was imperative that the new CMS also incorporate the registration, payment and booking modules. The old back engine was replaced with the new engine to service members to deliver a seamless interface.
Microsoft Application Platform technology including SQL Server was selected and utilised to deliver the customised software solution.
The outcome
To gather the investment and resource for overhauling the website took dedication and trust that has been built up over a long-standing relationship and Transparity has been a trusted partner to the RGS for almost a decade now.
Roll-out of the new website was delivered on time and in budget, with members switching easily to the new system.
Together with the designers, customer relationship management and event booking providers, we formed a responsive and creative working group that met the needs of the Society and its members.
"Transparity did an excellent job of knitting together the front end and back engines of our website. They worked well with our external consultants and I would thoroughly recommend them.”