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SGI is a community-based Buddhist organisation present in 192 countries. It promotes peace, culture and education centred on respect for the dignity of life. Its members transform their inner lives, bring about personal fulfilment and contribute to positive developments of society through Buddhism.

Goals

The main business goal of this project was to raise the organisation's profile. The elements targeted were:

  • Enhanced user experience
  • Increase in Traffic
  • Increase in the number of enquires received
  • Rise in services provided via the website such as an online shop, subscriptions to the monthly magazine, registration to courses and making  donations online

Compliance in current and latest regulations, as well as information security, has always been at the centre of the client's requirements and goals.

Challenges

SGI-UK has transitioned to Discover IT from another Kentico partner who had developed their subscription management system in Kentico. At the time of the transition, there were also several websites (public, member, shop, meeting room bookings, discussion meetings) developed in various platforms that needed to be migrated to Kentico.

The organisation supports 620 local groups across the UK and a membership of over 16,000. The website is the main repository all of member’s data. The organisation's members management system that has been developed into Kentico from the previous vendor had heavy customisations and complex architecture. The challenge has been to utilise more Kentico native functionality and simplify the architecture where possible. It has also been critical to ensuring that the website is fully GDPR compliant.

The websites migrated to Kentico had to user-centric, functional, modern but at the same time, retain the organisation's identity.  

Solution

The compliance and security concerns and challenges have been well handled by Kentico’s native functionality.

Migrating the multiple websites and applications into Kentico has been achieved via creating a Kentico Multi-Purpose E-commerce module. Utilising various Kentico Components and complementing with customisation Discover IT has developed a multi-purpose e-commerce component that allows a number of transactional activities to take place via the website. These are:

  • SGI-UK Shop where visitors can purchase merchandise online
  • Courses where visitors can register and buy various courses
  • Subscriptions. Visitors across the globe can purchase various subscriptions of the SGI-UK Magazine
  • Donations. Donations to the organisation can be fulfilled fully online.

The member's management has been enhanced via re-architecting the Kentico developed management system. Re architecting allowed for members to be managed more accessible by the administration staff but also provided the much-needed performance improvements.

SGI-UK required custom-built modules to deal with their organisational structure. Custom modules were heavily used to respond to the needs of the organisation.

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