Calibrate
Contact
Open monumenten banner

Digital heritage multisite platform

"The Calibrate team enthusiastically set to work on this great challenge. Both during the preliminary phase (wireframes, UX and design) and during the various development phases, they were always open for discussion, new suggestions or changes. Moreover, they were always looking for feasible solutions taking into account the budget and tight timing. Excellent project management and transparent communication ensured a pleasant collaboration".
Margit Bal
 /
General Director Herita
Margit Bal

Challenges and goals

Herita was faced with a tough assignment: the websites were technically very outdated and because of this the platforms were not reliable to cope with high visitor numbers.

More important was the assignment to build a website platform that is better able to communicate and convert to a very diverse target audience.

  • Clear separation of B2C and B2B communication. Herita needs to communicate to the general public, both in terms of tourist offerings and communication about the social role Herita fulfils. On the other hand, Herita provides a specific B2B offer for professionals and companies working in the heritage sector.
  • Interweaving of tourist info with specialized information. The aim is to activate as many citizens as possible to visit the offer (visits of monuments, museums, events) but at the same time to play an informative role.

  • Member recruitment. Herita is and will remain a member organization, and the success of the website strongly depends on the conversion of visitors to members. In the old platform this was very cumbersome and had to improve significantly in order to reach the set goals. The member recruitment had to shift up a gear.

The intended result was a digital platform consisting of a single CMS and CRM backend system, which can offer information to visitors via multiple domains and where members can log in and perform actions. The realized domains are:

Open monumenten pages

Our approach for the new website

In this project, we started the strategic phase by drawing up a well thought-out information architecture, in which we determine the structure of the new website with a focus on the top tasks. We also defined the backlog (an overview of all desired functionalities) and the user stories (a concrete description, per functionality, what the usefulness will be split per role, such as editors and website visitors). After this, our UX-designer created the wireframes, in order to assign each top task the right place, without going into full detail in terms of design. Only after approval of the wireframes, we converted them into designs with the necessary graphical elements.

This was followed by the development phase, in which we proceed to the technical development of the new website. We divided the development phase over development sprints, based on the backlogs.

Results achieved

When the new platform went live, it was immediately clear that the new platform would bring about the big change Herita wanted.

Qualitative growth

After one year a growth of 65% in visitor traffic was achieved. Moreover, those visitors spend an average of 2 minutes on the website. In other words, we see a qualitative audience that finds the information they are looking for. In addition, we also see that this audience clearly interacts on the site: more than 80,000 unique conversions are measured in one year.  

The most important conversion for OpenMonuments is of course the membership. After 2 years we see an increase in membership of more than 16%. The other interactions are clicking on an email address (1.665 times) and clicking through to partner sites where in September an absolute peak of 77.232 clicks was measured to the website of openmonumentendag.be.  

High performance

Open Monuments Day is a unique event that attracts many visitors. It causes a large peak load on the website. In the run-up to the event, this caused moments where more than 3,500 users were present on the website at the same time. On Open Monumentendag itself this resulted in more than 1 million pageviews, a record. The digital platform dealt with this without any problems, just like a high-performance website should!

Open monumenten mobile

Technical highlights of the new website

For the website visitors:

  • Overview of all events and monuments in map or list view. 
    Extensive search module for events, monuments and thematic discovery pages.

  • Online registration and payment of membership

  • A fast website even with a high number of visitors

  • Inspiration based on the location. On detail pages of events/monuments other possibilities in the neighborhood are presented. 

For professionals and partners:

  • Provide knowledge center with tailored articles on heritage management

  • Offer for service providers, suppliers and knowledge partners in the specific heritage sector :
    -Vacancies 
    -Calendar of events by the sector
    -Promote project accounts 

For the administrators:

  • An advanced CRM system with CiviCRM for the management of members, events and monuments. 

  • Synchronization via API of events, the activities of partners etc. from UiT in Flanders to the three Herita websites. 

  • Multi domain: the possibility to have additional websites developed on the same codebase. 

  • A reliable and stable website, thanks to our favourite CMS system: Drupal.

Herita img
Herita img 2

Herita launch

The technologies used:

CMS: Drupal 8

For realizing a demanding website with high visitor numbers Drupal is the ideal open source CMS.

CRM-system: CiviCRM

For the management of the monuments, events, communication and memberships the link with a CRM system was necessary. For this we chose CiviCRM, an open source CRM system of which Calibrate is an official partner. 

Some specific applications of CiviCRM on the new website:

  • The link with CiviCRM made it possible to store events and monuments in CiviCRM via a sync of UiT in Flanders. This data is then retrieved, via migrations, in Drupal, where the administrator can enrich the content with photos and additional information. This ensures that Herita's partners can enter the information in UiT and that it flows smoothly to the website.

  • Visitors can become a member of Herita via the website. The information comes through the website first in CiviCRM, is passed on to Drupal to create an account, and forwarded to UiT for the UiTPas.

Open monumenten mobile

Payments: Mollie

When buying a membership, website visitors must also make a payment. To make this possible, we integrated 'Mollie Payments' on the website. Mollie is installed on the website via a plugin or API, in order to be able to offer all important payment methods (Bancontact, Mastercard, Visa...). When making a payment, the bank transfer is exported and then imported into CiviCRM via the CiviBanking Extension. As mentioned before Calibrate is official partner of CiviCRM, but also of Mollie.

Open monumenten map

Search API

We get the information shown on the map from both Drupal and CiviCRM. Something that is not by default possible in Drupal. To realize this we have integrated the Search API module. Search API allows us to collect information from both CRM and CMS and then merge it into one large search index. 

Optimized hosting

In order to accommodate peak moments during Open Monumentendag (Open Monument Day), we came up with a custom auto-scaling architecture. Depending on the number of active users on the website and their actions, Drupal and CiviCRM containers are automatically and independently scaled when needed.