IDA, The Danish Society of Engineers, is a professional organisation and trade union
supporting over 150,000 members in STEM across Denmark. It provides resources to engineers, scientists, IT professionals and students ranging from career advice and skill advancement to legal assistance and insurance. Members receive many benefits from IDA and can access trainings, resources, networking, podcasts and more online.
Kim Elmose has worked for IDA for over 14 years and currently serves as its webmaster, with a focus on redesigning, relaunching and optimising the IDA website.
One of Kim’s primary goals is to ensure members find the resources they need when they need it.
“If members run into a problem in their work life or if they want advice in their career, or need to understand benefits, they should be able to easily find it on the website,” says Kim.
Unfortunately, IDAs old search solution was very basic and unable to deliver the results members were looking for. IDA didn’t have the internal resources to build a search, so they began evaluating search providers. The search needed to be:
- user-friendly for employees,
- provide rich analytics,
- give control to the web team,
- leverage machine learning, and
- ultimately be a better resource for IDA’s members.
After assessing a few other search providers, IDA decided to implement Cludo search.
“Cludo was by far the best search engine, both on how the results were provided and the usability,” shares Kim.
Connecting members to content through reimagined search
After implementing Cludo a few years ago, IDA recently underwent a redesign to positively impact its members experience on the website.
Its range of members means they must support a range of needs. IDA works to connect with members when they need information most – from gaining more knowledge in their field to navigating a career change. However, IDA also wanted to make sure members were aware of all the organisation has to offer.
“We wanted to do the redesign of the search result page because we are an organisation with a lot of different value propositions,” says Kim. “It can sometimes be challenging to provide that overview to people and show them a glimpse of what we have.”
IDA leaned on the Cludo team to review data, understand member needs, and leverage industry insights to create a new custom search design. This meant adding facets within the search to guide members and encourage exploration. Through this experience, engagement has increased on the IDA site.
“We can see we have gained more traffic to our pages and to some of our categories on the website that beforehand didn’t get much traffic from the search results page,” says Kim. “That was what we wanted, to give a broader view of all things we have.”
Encouraging engagement through intelligent search features
One of the many benefits IDA provides its members with is events, such as webinars, courses and conferences. However, before Cludo, searching for events didn’t always guarantee results near the top. Kim wanted to ensure that people searching for a term related to the conference were also being shown the corresponding events.
For example, IDA hosts a conference called Diversity in Tech and Science. With Cludo, IDA simply creates a banner to promote the conference when someone searches for terms such as diversity, women or tech. With the redesign, it is also distinct which results are events and visitors can filter through categories to find their desired information or explore related content.
“The boostings and banners make it possible to guide people when they come in and start searching to say ‘Hey, we actually have information on our website to gain some insights,” says Kim. “We had increased traffic to our page by 25% from search and that is really good.”
Instilling confidence through search
With intelligent search and the new redesign, Kim is confident members can easily find what they need when they head to IDA’s website. From a machine learning-backed solution to the team of search experts, IDA couldn’t be more pleased with the results they’ve received with Cludo and ultimately providing for and supporting its members.
“We are an organisation that helps people when they are in need, and we help our members. Search helps people find what they are looking for.”