SHOWCASING ELITE-LEVEL SUCCESS
Through its strategic investment, UK Sport has been influential in Great Britain's medal success at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
For it to continue driving performance at the highest level, UK Sport required a new digital presence catering for the needs of its audience of sports industry bodies and professionals, athletes and sports fans. Reading Room repositioned the role of digital within the organisation, creating a website that tells the story of UK Sport and the contribution it makes.
With a growing audience, UK Sport's next investment was to drive elite performance in its own digital presence.
The Olympic and Paralympic success contributed to by the organisation meant its profile was at an all-time high. It was not only a name well-known to professional bodies and athletes; it was becoming a recognisable brand amongst sports fans throughout the country. It wanted to maximise the opportunities this brought, whilst continuing to educate and inspire its core audience with details of its ongoing contributions to medal success and the staging of major sporting events in the UK.
The UK Sport team needed a website that made it easier to create, manage and share its content and which represented all departments within the organisation. Its content needed to be better organised and easier for users to find, with the opportunity to cross-promote relevant pages.
The new site needed to tell the UK Sport story in a more compelling way, which required a change in approach.
UK Sport's old site was largely built to share news about the athletes it supports, but that was only telling a small part of the organisation's story. Content created by various departments was buried deep into the site, meaning it wasn't being reached by the majority of visitors. With outlets like BBC and Sky being the preferred destination for sports news, the UK Sport website was failing to fulfil its purpose.
Instead of developing another news-based website, our strategy focused on creating a digital showcase of UK Sport's excellent work and important contributions. It would tell the organisation's story through content from different departments and make that information easier for users to find.
"For UK Sport to fulfil its objectives and secure the funding to invest in elite athletes, it needed to better illustrate its successes. We shifted the focus of its digital presence away from news, creating an engaging showcase of its essential contributions."
Nicola Docking Head of Strategy
We implemented a new and intuitive ontology focused on bringing content from different departments to the fore.
We introduced a deep-level connection between that content, allowing for greater cross-promotion and more relevant user journeys. This meant that all users - not just those directly involved in sports funding - would find content relevant to their needs and discover more about the organisation's impact. In addition, each department can now create content knowing it will now be seen by the people who need or want it.
UK Sport's brand identity was used as the foundation for the site's design.
We worked closely with the organisation's in-house team to create a stylish new look-and-feel. Taking inspiration from the UK Sport logo and its bank of illustrated icons for each sport - known as 'victors' - we introduced curved lines and incorporated its three main colours; red, white and blue. Featuring throughout the site are high-impact images of the athletes who have benefited from the organisation's work and achieved success at sport's highest level.
"A major focus for the new site is its campaigns such as Gold Event Series and Road to Rio. The design allows UK Sport to keep its identity while key areas are easy to rebrand and generate interest for new campaigns."
Ben Siwoku Head Designer
"The powerful nature of Sitecore ensures that all sports and departments can be represented and efficiently maintained. The scalable nature of the CMS is ready for when new features, functionality or integrations are required to help UK Sport fulfil its long-term ambitions."
Paul Murphy Technical Team Lead
As an ambitious team that creates fresh content regularly, we needed a CMS with the scope to scale up in the future and which offered flexible workflows for publishing.
The Sitecore platform was identified as the ideal platform. As well as offering the opportunity to extend and expand the site, it provides the high levels of security that UK Sport had requested as part of its brief. It gives the organisation greater control over its content too, with each department now able to create, edit and publish their own pages and allowing the in-house communications team to manage the site more efficiently.
An example of Sitecore's efficient content management workflows can be found with one of the newest features of the site, the Jobs area. This has been programmed to allow general users to upload relevant jobs to dedicated parts of the site (Basketball Coach, for example). The job appears in the CMS, where site administrators can choose whether to publish to the front-end.
increase in page views
drop in desktop bounces
drop in mobile bounces
"The website provides our audience with a more engaging experience using all of the assets at our disposal to tell the story of what UK Sport does and the wider impacts of delivering world class success."
Vanessa Wilson, Director of Commercial and Communications UK Sport
uksport.gov.uk