DC Lindy Exchange

To improve the overall digital experience for DCLX and keep in touch with our audience during the pandemic, we began to optimize our use of the website as a tool to engage with their audience. As a hub for event registration, and our source of truth for all event content and policies, it was more important than ever to have a website that was informative, engaging, and up-to-date.

Assessment Inputs

We sought to identify some quick wins we could implement on the site to make the site initially more usable while we implemented our VOC program. These ideas came from:

• Usability Audit of the current website accounting for three key user flows, registering for the main event, finding out about our other events, and finding information about specific dances, including location
• Event feedback form data from recent years, including website specific feedback and any feedback about information that was hard to find/manage.
• Comparative website analysis of other events, including other swing dancing organization websites, websites of other annual social events, and major conferences to get a varied view of the available technology.

Implementing Quick Wins

Coming out of our assessment, we developed a short presentation for the rest of the board of recommendations for some of the larger efforts to undertake and immediately began work on improving some of the easier Some of the fixes we implemented on the website were:

• Improved brand recognition on the website by using a logo for the home button in the main navigation.
• Increased the overall scannability of content by increasing the line width to ~65 characters on the main page template.
• Built an off-season state for many of the main event pages to display prior year highlights and build interest in the next year's event.

Beginning a User Centered Approach

To begin taking a user-centered approach to updating the website, we prepared a brief presentation for the DCLX board that included brief personas and a journey map as a way for socializing the necessary content and website enhancements.

We set up custom data analytics dashboards to analyze acquisition and conversion funnels, visualize customer feedback in real-time, and learn from our prior performance to optimize our digital marketing activities for each event.

Measuring Digital Footprint

To learn the most about our website's audience and theire needs, we installed Tools for more insights from users and creating a cadence for review

• We installed Google Analytics to better understand website performance and collect insights about how visitors navigate through the website
• We installed Fullstory to collect heatmapping and session recording data for a better understanding of how visitors interact with each page and identify major pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• We collect all relevant registration data in Google Sheets to visualize how visitors interact with our events and link registration data to website performance.
• We installed Google Optimize to test content updates before implementation and begin personalizing the website based on the user's geography.

Reporting

We report about the digital activities in both monthly and event-recap reports. Our monthly reports are specificallly website focused, while recaps are a more holistic CX.

• Data Studio allows us to create dashboards that are highly visible and interactive for the entire committee to see the latest website and registration data.
• Tag Manager helps us track button clicks throughout the website and off the site to our social channels to more closely measure engagement.

Through our initial usability audit, we reviewed each page of current site content for recommendations to include in the pattern library.

Website Style Guide

To update the overall content layouts and standardize header and button styles and understand the current styles and utilities, we imported the current website's CSS stylesheet into our home-built style guide tool. Previous content authors had not utilized header and button styles in their content, deferring to bold tags for headings and text links for all calls to action within the page body.

Our style guide is intended to build consistency into the component selection and copy and provide a framework to onboard other authors to the website team.

Build a Pattern Library

We augmented our web style guide to include a pattern library that included 5 new components. The current website includes an open HTML text editor, so our pattern library can only currently be used by someone with HTML expertise. Once we completed each component within the pattern library, we staged the component(s) on a test page and added the CSS required into Wordpress to style the new components for QA and internal review. As components were approved, the CSS was pushed to production and the component was now available for use in preparation for the next event.

Adding Brand Guidelines

We are currently adding brand guidelines to our style guide to build a more cohesive set of brand standards throughout our entire customer experience. These brand standards should guide the website design, social media designs and copy, and newsletter design.

Content Audit

Our content audit informed determine what information needs to be updated on the website for our upcoming event. We used the new components we've built as a test of the new design system.

Spring 2022 Project Plan

To plan for our 2022 main event, we made a project plan for the website refresh that included updating the site to include typical event details, such as schedule and implementing some of proposed updates from the design system.

Registration Form Updates

We added pre-registration forms for our smaller events to plan better for large crowds, ensure that all attendees have read our policies, and minimize the overall length of the check-in process, given the new vaccination requirements. We improved our main event registration form to include an opt-in option for volunteering and newsletter sign-up, added a donation option, and improved the visibility of our policies on the checkout form to ensure

We are currently in the planning phases of rebuilding the entire website to allow for more dynamic content and easier management of the website content by team members with no HTML experience in hopes of scaling the team and decreasing the time required to make site updates.

In this website replatforming project, we intend to:

1. Archive previous years' content to keep records of old content instead of relying on the version control within Wordpress.
2. Use the recently developed design system as a starting point for the website redesign.
3. Improve e-commerce functionality for event registration and apparel purchases
4. Display highlights for past events to redirect website visitors to social media for more info.
5. Show empty states for when no events are upcoming.
6. Improve storytelling around the DCLX brand: who are we, what is our mission?
7. Implement a site-wide taxonomy that

We're currently considering using a headless API-first CMS so that we can anchor the website to our other processes and documents, such as our editorial calendar, any event planning documents, and event pre-registration forms.

A few other initiatives are in the works:

• Media Buying Strategy – In 2023, we plan to identify a budget for ad spending, once appropriate link tracking and attribution modeling is in place.
• Geo-personalization – Our 2022 event will likely be smaller and more intimate, with a focus on our local community, so efforts to personalize the website for audiences outside of driving distance have been put on hold. For 2023, we plan to use geo-personalization to reach potential attendees who might have to fly in for the event.