Gladwell Academy

The Challenge

Multisite Platform: Standardization in Branding, Customer Journeys, and E-commerce

Gladwell Academy has grown rapidly and operates worldwide with a focus on growth in Europe, Asia, and America. For this, there are 5 different websites focusing on different regions and therefore different content and language. The digital channels needed to be renewed to facilitate current and future growth. The main goal was to bring the websites of the different regions into a multisite platform with standardization in branding, customer journeys, and e-commerce.

Important goals included:

• Increasing the number of leads
• E-commerce sales via the platform distributed across multiple countries
• Servicing customers who book a training

Our approach

Research during the discovery phase

All new projects at Digital Natives start with a discovery process to better understand the organization and their users. For Gladwell Academy, this process consisted of the following components:

• Digital strategy building blocks workshop
• Audience & Customer Journey workshops
• Data analysis of existing website
• Key insights brainstorm

A new brand essence and platform concept

We translated the insights from the discovery phase into a brand essence and concept directions for the new platform. We made adjustments to the existing corporate identity and devised a new structure for how courses and schedules for training function. This formed the basis to enter the scrum process.

Full scrum approach: design & development

As a market leader in agile training, it was evident that we would be scrumming at a high pace with Gladwell. Within the scrum team, all disciplines were represented, and close collaboration was established to deliver the first version of the new multisite platform within 3 months.

Scrum training from agile guru Eelco Rustenburg

As a kickoff, the team received an advanced scrum training under the guidance of agile guru Eelco Rustenburg to quickly get started. We then continued to work in two-week sprints with a strong focus on the biweekly sprint retrospectives.

Further development after the delivery of the MVP

After the initial launch, we ensure further enhancement of the platform with follow-up sprints. Improvements to the platform are implemented based on data research and a measurement plan.

Result

Multi-site platform based on Craft CMS

Based on the technical research, we chose to implement Craft CMS: ideal for managing multiple websites for different countries. Multilingual is built-in as standard, and the ingenious structure of components allows all countries to easily build their own pages.

Branding translated into design system

We made a new step based on the existing corporate identity of Gladwell Academy. We then translated the corporate identity and branding into a design system consisting of functional components that can be used within Craft CMS to modularly build pages and websites. This way, all countries can use the same corporate identity but still fill in the content differently.

Improved User Experience flow

Based on the customer journeys and existing data, we created a new layout for the website. A more prominent setup was chosen around courses and the schedule since the main journey revolves around this. Other content has been processed behind the menu and is accessible through other entrances. Registering and checking out for training has also been developed to consist of a minimal number of pages and clicks.

Booking module and international payment system based on Laravel

In addition to the CMS, we developed an API and booking module that manages all courses and schedules. We developed this as a separate service layer in the Laravel framework. It communicates directly with the ERP software where the courses are managed. The payment system works in collaboration with Adyen and Avenue CC.

Hubspot integration for inbound marketing

By creating a connection between Freeform in Craft and Hubspot, all countries have the freedom to properly implement lead generation within the various websites.