Challenge

The Commonwealth Lawyers Association (CLA) works across the Commonwealth countries, who all share a substantial common ground in their legal systems.

With an ambition to increase individual and institutional memberships, CLA approached Compel. Through a collaborative briefing process, we agreed the need to define a new digital direction, in order to transform the association into a profitable organisation.

We focused on re-positioning CLA as a pro-active, knowledgeable, category-leading association, demonstrating the added-value of membership, the impact of supporting key projects and the positive benefits of improving outreach to the regional hubs.

Delivery

The first priority was to address the digital presence and legacy systems. This was broken down into three parts:

• Association website
• Membership administration
• Membership portal

A ground-up project, this revitalised end-to-end digital platform now offers full back-end membership management & administration, an all-public association website and a members-only portal where lawyers from around the Commonwealth can share thinking & best practice and collaborate on projects.

In addition, we have created a compelling and consistent brand visual & verbal suite that spans the breadth of member and partner touch-points:

• Alignment of the membership, offering more value-add, to be more competitive in the industry
• Regular membership contact strategy, including social media
• Lapsed members contact strategy
• Implementation of free-newsletter-to-paid-membership upgrade strategy
• Creation of partnership packs to support the growth of sponsorship as a revenue stream
• A complimentary microsite to communicate the bi-annual Conference, as well as brand identity and all collateral touchpoints

Effectiveness

• 200% increase in direct web traffic
• 60% increase in newsletter engagement
• 30% increase in paid membership
• 43% increase in search engine appearance
• 22.8% increase in users visiting the site from search engines
• Hero partner sponsorship secured

Testimonial

“From the first meeting I knew Compel would be able to help. They spent time finding out about CLA and our business challenges - not trying to sell me a product. The team are bright, enthusiastic, all round lovely people, full of exciting and creative ideas and strong technical know-how. The CLA brand has been transformed and I feel we are now equipped for the future. I couldn’t be more delighted – thanks guys, grateful to have you on the journey with us!”

Brigid Watson, Secretary General