Community Based Social Marketing
Changing the world one issue at a time
Community-Based Social Marketing, cbsm.com, is a thriving community of practitioners seeking guidance and resources to help better encourage sustainable behavioral practices. Its founder, Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr, literally wrote the book on Community-Based Social Marketing.
Over a span of several years we’ve helped CBSM move the needle on engagement and revenue so that more organizations and programs across the globe can benefit from community-based social marketing.
The challenge
While Community-Based Social Marketing had a growing community-base, their site was slowing down their progress. They needed to take over their legacy codebase and address areas of the site that were underperforming.
In doing this, they hoped to revitalize community engagement, expand into new recurring revenue models, and grow their existing revenue channels.
They needed a site that would empower organizations worldwide to eschew traditional — and outdated — marketing practices in favor of adopting community-based social marketing that could better convince audiences to make important behavior changes.
What we did
We carefully analyzed what was causing the bottlenecks and addressed these performance issues, greatly improving response times.
Using Netsign’s in-house infrastructure automation tools for Ruby on Rails provided a software stack on AWS that was cheaper and more performant than the previous Heroku setup.
We gradually overhauled much of the site to make it simpler and easier to work with. We wrapped all our work with tests, so that we could continue to move fast as we made big changes; we also switched services out to best-of-breed providers for email, mailing list, and payments.
As an extension of the CBSM team, we met on a recurring basis to review how things were working and discuss what would move the needle further on engagement and revenue. From there, we acted fast on our findings to continuously improve the site.
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Ruby on Rails
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Stimulus
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Stripe
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AWS
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Ansible
How it turned out
Our attention to detail paid off in unexpected ways: a number of our small feature changes resulted in big payoffs.
For instance, CBSM workshop registrations were sometimes failing due to credit card verification issues in Australia and New Zealand. Switching payment providers to Stripe led to an immediate improvement in completed registrations.
We also added an abandoned shopping cart notification for incomplete workshop registrations. This simple addition increased registrations substantially. The metrics speak for themselves:
- 522%
- Faster response time
- 13%
- Increase in revenue
- 12%
- Code quality improvement
