Overview

The Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA) represents the global alternative investment industry. They have over 1,800 members across 50 countries and aim to positively inform the media and other stakeholders about the investment industry.

When a re-branding exercise required AIMA’s website to be overhauled, the organisation had no qualms about appointing their long-term website partner, Pixl8, to improve the site’s regional personalisation functionality and consolidate all the association’s global sites into one.

The Challenge

The designs and wireframes for the new site were produced by a third party agency but this caused no issues for Pixl8. “They worked closely with the agency to come up with designs that would work within the framework and Preside, whilst in-keeping with our new brand,” explains Kirk Taylor, Chief Administrative Officer for AIMA.

“We wanted to continue working with Pixl8 as we’ve worked with them for almost a decade and are very happy with how they work. It also reduced the risk in terms of data and content migration as there is already a relationship between us, Pixl8 and our CRM agency, SmartImpact.”

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration

AIMA’s CRM system, Microsoft Dynamics, was already integrated, via contacts and organisations, with the existing website and managed by AIMA’s CRM consultancy. “The two companies have a number of clients in common and, because of this, the integration works as smoothly as possible,” continues Kirk.

This project increased the level of integration to provide better event management capabilities for administrators and the ability for users to personalise the website according to the geographic region they are based in.

“We hold events in numerous locations around the world, which means differing time zones as well as administrators in the UK, Canada and APAC all adding events,” explains Kirk. “All this had to be taken into account in the new Preside CMS, which was new functionality built from scratch. Now, events are set up in CRM and then the event detail added in Preside.”

“Also, event bookings were previously stored purely in Preside,” continues Kirk. “We’ve changed this so that event bookings are now fed from the website into CRM. Having CRM as the central repository for data allows us to build up a picture of what events appeal to what delegates.”

Mobile Responsive

It (almost) goes without saying that the new website had to be fully mobile responsive. The old AIMA hadn’t had this functionality but it was important to bring the site within current standards whilst all the other functionality was being developed.

Outcome

There is now a lot more personalisation available to website visitors, whether a member or not. Users can get a tailored view of AIMA by regionally filtering content, making it easier and clearer to find relevant information and events.

“Not just that,” describes Kirk. “Members can set their personal preferences for communications, topics of interest and select what newsletters they want to receive. They can also see what events they’ve attended and what’s coming up.”

In addition, activating the login process for members is now fully automated. “As soon as they are added to CRM, they are sent login details for the website within five minutes. Similarly, when they are removed, they are updated in Preside immediately.”

Kirk goes on to say, “from an AIMA point of view, the website is now much more visual and clearly reflects the new branding with more graphics and videos and less text. Content is much easier to find, which is important to us as the investment industry is often seen as quite secretive. We wanted our site to counter this as it’s not just members who use it - policy makers, regulators and the general public also visit it.”

“We’ve also been able to consolidate all our other sites into one, making it feel a lot more like the corporate and seamless global website we were after. Prior to this, APAC and Canada ran separate sites.”

On working with Pixl8 overall, Kirk says, “We’ve continued to use Pixl8 to enhance our web presence for ten years and we proactively recommend them to other organisations. They understand how member organisations work.”