PCMA
The PCMA is the Public CCTV Managers Association.
Client Objectives
Through a new community portal and client-facing website, PCMA was looking to achieve the following:
- Increase the PCMA's online presence and visibility
- Improve communication and engagement with stakeholders
- Provide information about the PCMA mission and activities
- Promote best practices in CCTV control rooms
- Conduct surveys to enable benchmarking
- Create a private community for communication and information sharing
Website Design
The team at PCMA were recommended to us by an existing client in their search for a specific type of membership website that required a rigorous security protocol and a bundle of functional requirements for members to experience and admins/stakeholders to deliver an improved service to their community.
A high degree of security, encryption and secure UK-based hosting were key aspects of the project
The Solution
Our team have taken PCMA's requirements and made them a reality in a fully bespoke CMS membership-style website. Based on our UK servers, their new website provides their growing community a safe and secure environment to share resources, build rapport, ask fellow members questions in an online forum, and register for events.
At the same time, they are allowing admins/stakeholders to manage memberships, create online training courses, monitor discussions and take care of the admin tasks required to keep their users safe and engaged.
Administration
A small admin team needed to be able to maintain the site internally, this includes providing downloadable materials for members, offering training programmes, administering the discussion forum and managing memberships. The admin panel provided allows easy access to all site content, and allows all deliverables to be managed easily without relying on outside intervention.
Engagement
PCMA wanted to be able to promote and offer placements at upcoming events. Rather than depending on an outside integration (such as Eventbrite), this is all handled internally through an events system. New events are advertised to members, whereby they can indicate their attendance.
Part of the roadmap is to offer training for new members, this is delivered via a LifterLMS component. Our integration provides access to the training platform alongside the rest of the membership features, with data sharing and tight coupling with this and other sections of the user portal.
Interactivity, benchmarking and research
The platform is designed very much with collaboration in mind. Interactive surveys are built into the user portal and allow the management team to get insights and feedback from members. This data can be visualised via charts or graphs.
Members can also contribute their own downloadable materials, documents, which can then be included in a resource section for other members to benefit from. Information and opinions are shared through the closed members-only moderated forum feature. To boost engagement we built in an email notification feature whereby members are kept up to date with new items made available on the site, helping with the community aspect and ongoing engagement.
Security
As the site content can be of a sensitive nature, having a secure and well maintain hosting environment is particularly important. Our UK based dedicated hosting solution has multiple levels of firewalling to keep out intruders and all files are scanned on a schedule using our automated virus scanning. Our strict security policy will keep this site secure, as well as being quick, responsive and performant to use for its members.
Results and feedback
The existing member base of 250 members have all been migrated over to the new platform within weeks of the site launch. The site now boasts a busy community forum and a library of resources to support members.
As the site expands we expect to see an increasingly large number of training options, courses and accreditation offered. Membership can be managed through the site itself, Stripe integration is available for automated payments and recurring memberships, this will help the group grow and make funding available for future expansion.