Transforming Member Engagement with Advanced Personalization

Overview

Urban Land Institute (ULI) is the world's oldest and largest network of cross-disciplinary real estate and land use experts. Previously, Velir redesigned ULI’s gated membership site, Knowledge Finder to make content more accessible to their members and easier for ULI to manage. We also configured more robust analytics for Knowledge Finder to track member actions, so ULI could better tailor their content to member interests. Since then, ULI asked us to take Knowledge Finder’s member engagement to the next level by helping them deploy advanced personalization.

URL

knowledge.uli.org

Challenge

When Velir redesigned Knowledge Finder, we collaborated with ULI to reduce the site’s scope so they could quickly launch a minimum viable product (MVP). ULI had ideas for expanding the site and increasing member engagement through initiatives like personalization, but those were slated for future iterations.

We launched Knowledge Finder with basic personalization like geotargeting that displayed the correct member support number based on where the user accessed the site. Then after launch, we traveled to the client’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. to discuss what ULI hoped to accomplish with personalization on Knowledge Finder and develop a plan for implementing those ideas with ULI’s technology stack, which included Sitecore, their content management system (CMS) and Coveo, their AI-powered site search provider.

ULI’s challenges included:

• Expanding on the MVP version of Knowledge Finder with advanced personalization
• Developing a strategy for personalization and a plan for implementing it
• Leveraging the personalization capabilities of Sitecore and Coveo to their fullest

Our third path to personalization was “For You,” a component based on interests that a member selects in their profile. Since the profile isn’t managed in Sitecore, we built a connection from Sitecore to ULI’s account management system (AMS) to sync data for each user. There is a mapping between user browsing interests and the topics they say they’re interested in. The “For You” component displays pages with the most overlap between the two areas and that have been published most recently. We ported this functionality to Knowledge Finder newsletters, which show a “For You” component with similar logic. We created additional rules to ensure we don’t send the same recommendations in two successive newsletters.

Finally, to encourage members to update their interests to receive recommendations tailored to those interests, we added personalization rules on the component to show a banner with a link to the interests page if members don’t have interests selected or haven’t updated them in over a year. There’s also a modal that appears on a member’s first visit to Knowledge Finder, prompting them to set up interests, and a different one in the bottom corner for subsequent visits to remind them if they still haven’t selected interests.