Lean Enterprise Institute

Rebuilding and Repurposing a Massive Website

Services

Copywriting, SEO, User Experience, Web Development, Website Design, Content, UI Design

Credits

The Lean Enterprise Institute’s website needed a top-to-bottom overhaul to meet the evolving needs of users and the organization itself. We re-thought the enormous site’s entire structure, realigned its functionality to reflect current user practices, and helped them launch new marketing automation, fulfillment, and accounting systems.

The nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) needed a complete overhaul of its 20+ year old website to better serve its members, partners and clients. LEI relied heavily on the site to manage event promotion and book sales, its primary revenue streams, but the browsing experience was outdated. And the site’s code base could not integrate with newer automated functionalities for transactions and marketing.

We had already worked with LEI on event promotion, marketing strategy and change management, so we were a logical choice for the website rebuild.

Primary Objectives

Our review of LEI’s situation and vision for a different future led us to set three key goals for the website:

Completely update the user experience, especially the capability to search for LEI events, books and the library of 2000+ articles written by some of the foremost Lean thinkers.

Fully support LEI transition from in-person interaction model to remote education, seminars and conferences in response to Covid 19.

Streamline management of the site and its complex functions for the LEI staff tasked with administration.

Improving Content Discovery and Search

It was difficult for users to discover and search for relevant content from the thousands of offerings on the previous site. We re-thought the way articles, books, and events were tagged so that relevant content could be easily provided to interested users and search results could be far more useful. We also added improved search tools to the LEI site and built custom relevancy weights to help show the types of content the Lean Enterprise Institute wanted to promote.

CRM and Marketing Integration with HubSpot

LEI needed better ways to manage user relationships and market to them more effectively, so we linked the website with HubSpot to take advantage of the platform’s CRM and marketing automation capabilities. With that in place, we helped the Lean Enterprise Institute build strategy around email and communication workflows that integrated with the new website. We built bi-directional feeds that update user accounts and sync purchase history as well as intelligently place users into new communication workflows for LEI’s 75,000+ members.

Enabling Virtual Learning and Interactions

One of the core tenets of Lean as a practice is the Gemba Walk, “going to where the work is” to gain firsthand knowledge of problems and potential solutions.
So, the arrival of Covid-19 meant a seismic shift for LEI. We helped them with a new set of structures and tagging for virtual events, workshops, and summits that were seamlessly integrated into the new website and the third party event platforms to maintain momentum for LEI through the challenges of the pandemic.

Full Integration of E-commerce and Accounting

LEI’s prior approach to transactions for event attendance, books and other resources was semi-manual and required considerable staff resources. We built full E-commerce capability into the site, including tools for customizing transactions across LEI’s user base with custom discount rules for user groups and organizations. We also implemented QuickBooks accounting integration with user-based transaction and invoicing rules, as well as full order shipping integration with LEI’s 3^rd party fulfillment partner.

Designed to Deliver Results

The new website stands apart for its sheer size and scope of capabilities. LEI has seen remarkable improvements and time savings in internal workflow, a much-improved image in the eyes of users, far more intuitive functionality, and huge improvements in all SEO scores and rankings.

Meaningful Results

+4,500

Pages Migrated

+35%

Site Performance