Case study · Technology alliance
RAIN RFID Alliance
Event Registration and Member Site for a Tech Alliance
The RAIN RFID Alliance runs meetings around the world for about 160 member companies and keeps every contact in Zoho CRM. We built the registration system for its meetings, gated its document library, redesigned and rebuilt its site, and added a store for its first market report.
Overview
The RAIN RFID Alliance is a global industry group that promotes the adoption of RAIN, the UHF RFID technology that connects billions of everyday items to the internet. Its roughly 160 member companies include makers of the chips, tags, readers and software, and businesses that use them. The Alliance's site at rainrfid.org is where members and the wider market find meetings, documents, news and the member directory.
We took the site over at the end of 2017 and ran it until early 2021. In that time we built its event registration system, gated its document library, redesigned and rebuilt the site, and added an online store and a classifieds section.
The Challenge
When the Alliance came to us, the site had already been through three rounds of builders. Plugins had piled up, and events lived on a separate subdomain built on a template that could only handle one event at a time. The Alliance runs multi-day meetings around the world, with a members-only day, an open day and optional evening events, and needed members to register and pay online before its next meeting.
Its staff also kept every member, prospect and contact in Zoho CRM. Anything the site collected had to land there.
What We Built
An events system built around each meeting
We moved events onto the main site and built the admin behind them. Staff create an event, add sessions and speakers to a day-by-day agenda, and set its ticket types, attendee types, registration questions, coupon codes and sponsor levels. Each event gets its own overview, agenda, registration, and hotel and travel pages, and registration opens on a date staff set.
Registration that lands in Zoho
Attendees pick their company from the member list or type in their own, answer the event's questions, and either pay through PayPal or choose to pay offline. Each registration is matched to a Zoho contact by email, tied to the company's account (or a new one if the company is not a member), and saved as a registration record with the answers and payment status. Staff report from Zoho on who is coming and what they chose. We kept it working when Zoho retired its version 1 API.
A document library that grows the mailing list
Anyone can browse the Alliance's white papers, case studies and presentations. The first download asks for a name, email and company, adds the visitor to Zoho with an opt-in tag, and opens every document for the rest of the visit. An admin tracker logs who downloaded what, with a CSV export. In 2018 we added cookie consent and consent language to every form for GDPR.
A 2019 redesign and rebuild
In 2019 we redesigned the site and rebuilt it on WordPress, starting from a style guide and a new two-tier navigation. The new site has a home page with an e-book download, market pages, a filterable and searchable resources library, a member directory with search and filters by category and country, and an events calendar with grid and calendar views for Alliance meetings and partner events.
An online store for the Alliance's first market report
In 2020 the Alliance published its first market research report and wanted to sell it from the site. We built the store on WooCommerce with a landing page for the report. Each PDF is watermarked with the buyer's details, buyers get a reminder every three days until they download it, and orders and contacts sync to Zoho. Buyers can pay by PayPal or ask for an invoice.
Classifieds and ongoing support
We added a classifieds section where users post ads by category and pay a listing fee. We also moved the site off its old shared host onto our hosting, set up Git-based deploys, and kept it patched, backed up and monitored, with a steady stream of content and form changes.
Results
- One site for everything: events moved off a separate subdomain, with any number of meetings running at once.
- Meeting registrations, document downloads and store orders all land in Zoho CRM, the Alliance's system of record.
- A document library that turns readers into opt-in contacts, with a download log staff can export.
- A redesigned site with a searchable resources library and member directory.
- A new way to sell research: the Alliance's first report sold and delivered from its own site.
- More than three years of development and support, from December 2017 to early 2021.