A SHARP FOCUS ON CUSTOMER VALUE: UPGRADING THE CEC EXCHANGE FOR THE CIO EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, A PROJECT OF THE INTERNATIONAL DATA GROUP (IDG)
We’d like to sincerely congratulate our partners at the CIO Executive council for the successful relaunch of the CEC Exchange this week. We’re proud to have worked with your team, and even more excited about what we’ve built together!
The CIO Executive Council is a community of Chief Information Officers and other high-level IT professionals from corporate, nonprofit, education and government backgrounds, gathered together by the International Data Group, a giant technology media, data, and marketing firm responsible for such well known brands as PCWorld, MacWorld, and CIO Magazine.
The CIO Executive Council created the CEC Exchange, which had originally been envisioned as a community space for their CIO members to share things of mutual interest. Two years in, the log-in only service was largely unused by the incredibly busy C-Level executives who were members of the Council.
Last Call Media helped the CIO Council team rethink their strategic approach. The CEC Exchange needed to be rebranded and transformed from a place where very few people logged in to one that showcased the key benefits of membership in the Council - media placements, personalized leadership development, and exclusive access to unique content, events and peer matching services.
Last Call Media designed a much simpler and more attractive interface built around the most compelling products and services that the CIO Exchange has to offer. A CIO visitor to the site can now see how the resources there can help them further their own career, stay on top of the ever changing trends in technology, reach out to peers facing similar challenges, and access the CIO Exchange’s team of expert concierge staff to answer any questions they may have.
From the artistic to the technical, the Last Call team knows their craft. More than that, their flexibility has allowed me to interact with them as an ad-hoc branch of my own IT department, responding to projects and help-desk issues with equal competency.
Steve Wills, Sr. Manager, Applications Development at the CIO Executive Council at IDG
CEC Exchange uses Salesforce to manage information about each user in their membership pipeline. On the Drupal side, the site contains several main sections that each have their own exclusive resources and content. These sections require a subscription to access. Using a combination of the Salesforce Suite and the Organic Groups module, the site regularly retrieves updated information from Salesforce and syncs it with the Drupal user list, tracking their subscriptions by assigning them to the appropriate organic groups. The site’s dashboard displays specialized tiles that administrators have full control over, allowing them to highlight featured content and the most sought after resources within each section for subscribed users. Site visitors and users without a subscription can still see the content that is available from each subscription package, but receive an admin-customizable call to action specific to the content they are attempting to access when they click on a tile from the dashboard.
Through a mix of branding and design, Last Call Media re-made the site, which was recently relaunched to incredibly positive initial feedback.
