Brief
The Re-Brand
NetworkingKnoWho helps people and organisations network smarter. From one-to-one coaching and workshops to bespoke strategies and curated event listings, their services are informed by academic research and over 16 years’ experience in networking strategy. The new brand needs to be friendly approachable and bring a fresh energy to networking. It’s only stale and boring if you let it be and certainly don’t fear it, embrace it!
Objectives
The aim of this project was to:
- Create a fresh new brand, that is iconic and flexible
- Design a website that houses the various content and destination pages
- Ensure all data can be updated and edited by the founder and admins
- Streamline the onboarding process for new users on the platform
- Explore and Improve the events features for paid subscribers
- Improve the general usability of the site
The Online Platform
The platform will curate all of the networking events across the North East, all locations, all venues and all hosting organisations. It will allow for self curated lists, based on your interests and memberships, un cluttered with non Networking events, for clear planning of your networking strategy. A seamless user experience, for non paying members and premium subscribers (features to be worked on).
The Challenge
The Branding
The branding needs to feel professional but fun. Be versatile enough to cover more than just an online platform. As a business there are multiple target markets. Jeni Smith, founder, delivers workshops to businesses and large corporate teams, offers workshops and bootcamps to individual business people as well as delivering online courses. Jeni has a great vision of where she is taking the business and the brand needs to be flexible as it goes through its development.
The Platform
As a UX team, we were assigned the responsibility of enhancing the platform, with a specific focus on streamlining the onboarding process exploring the events feature for paid subscribers and improving the usability of the whole site.
Solution
Rebranding
First up was the name, Networkingknowho, had a couple of issues. While it was descriptive in a creative way, it was a long word, hard to read, and difficult to guess whether there was a ‘double-double-you’!
Naming – NetKno
We knew however that there was going to be the different deliverables from the brand; Training on how to get the most out of the Networking events you attend, Strategic Development for businesses who want to understand why they are networking so as to create a focussed approach and finally, where those strategic events are.
Identity
The overarching brand mark was designed to be simple and iconic on its own, but importantly, to be paired with the 3 pillar sub brands. The Why, How and Why elements of the business, are offerings in their own right and deserve their own designated reference mark. This allows us to not only differentiated between sections of the site, printed materials and merchandise – but to build a brand mark that is stronger as part of a trinity.
The inspiration for the brand marks was of-course, Networking. Specifically, name badges, with a friendly and personal feel they were the perfect reference to give the brand the approachable and fun feel without risking a feeling of irrelevance or triviality. We designed the identity to work boxed in, or fee, so as to allow for the bold colours to make as much impact as possible.
Brand Colours
Typefaces
Colour Palette
The brand palette is bold but quite simple. As there are many elements to NetKno, in general we keep things quiet neutral – while using Colours and the brand mark variations to differentiate between the various offerings. As a general rule, if content is promoting more than one thing, we use the neutral background as the base, and allow the brand colours to be used as highlights. When we are going all out for a single message however, the colours are there to be maximised.
Visual Tone
The visual tone of the brand is very inline with it’s founder. It’s bright, bold, friendly – but always professional. We knew that the client would be very much reliant on themselves for producing a lot of content. Ambitious and driven to keep their content timely, frequent and relevant. Therefore we wanted to design a look and feel that allowed them to create ‘candid’ artwork to backup their messages and content, that still felt like NetKno.
To do this we recommended a set of illustrations that would give a complementary look and feel, when sat side by side or even on top of candid images.
Typography
The main typeface is a clean san serif, Roboto. This precise and technically sound font has a wide range of weights, allowing for flexibility in all copy uses. It’s important that the primary typeface is, dare we say it, a little boring, when paring it with such a expressive display font. Brighter is the perfect handwritten font for Netkno. When used sparingly to highlight key elements or add a personal touch, it really stands out.
Solution
Online Platform & Website
Design and build a subscription platform, where users discover networking events curated to their needs and interests. Aggregating all networking events from across the North East (initially), collected by the NetKno team and regularly added to the web platform’s database.
UX Process
We were tasked with taking our v1 build that was focused on tailoring events based off of a lengthy onboarding process requiring manual review by staff, and turning it into a more complex but efficient ‘self-serve’ system. Working with the client, we worked on the business offering and the experience simultaneously. This allowed free thinking from the get go, where ideas were shared around how the platforms paid and not paid features would work.
Clear onboarding
To ensure users get the most out of the platform and continue to keep their subscription after their free trial, it is vital that the onboarding facilitates users to get the most out of the platform.
Maximising Data Output
We also ensured we structured the data to maximise the usage across variables. This means introducing event listings by host and by venue as well as directories. These come in the form of Host Directories and Venue Lists that can be used by hosts for event planning.
Development
We were tasked with creating a bespoke solution for an events strategy platform within the restrictions of WordPress and with integrations with the likes of WooCommerce and SendGrid.
The requirements of the platform was the ability to create events, hosts and venues. Where events could be categorised by topic and hosts could be followed/subscribed to in order to create a tailored event dashboard for a subscribed user.
We created multiple bespoke WordPress plugins for the project, the main one being responsible for the onboarding process and tailored dashboard overview, another for integrating the SendGrid API with Gravity Forms to enable us to setup automated follow-up sequences for specific users who interacted with the website in certain ways.
Further to this the client wanted to offer additional incentive to subscribe annually, that came in the form of a free product fulfilled by Amazon FBA after the first payment for the subscription had been taken after the 30 day free trial. We managed to set this up by integrating with a custom CRON job to ensure the order was placed in WooCommerce and sent to Amazon for fulfilment.
Finally, the client’s previous platform had thousands of expired events that bore little use going forward. In order to optimise server space and website size we create code that would draft and delete expired events after a set period of time, keeping both server space and database size low.
The Result
A brand new website and online platform that clearly markets 3 offerings from NetKno in one place. The brand and website phase 1 launched with an increase of 180% business in the first 12 months. The second phase of the Online Platform launched in January 2023, integrates directly with Sendgrid for automated onboarding and marketing campaigns. Currently it has already successfully increased its user base and improved onboarding completions as we move towards the end of the free trial period for the early adopters this February.
