CEATI fosters collaboration and community with Contentstack

CEATI is a membership association for professionals in the Energy and Utilities industry. To support this community, CEATI has a member portal, my.ceati.com, which was previously hosted on dated technology. 

“It looked like an experience from the 90s,” Akbar Naqvi, VP of Product Strategy, CEATI, said. “It had become a repository of information more than any kind of management system or portal, and it couldn’t facilitate an engaging member experience or help people to find the answers they were looking for. Members had to leave the portal to register for events which added friction, and if they wanted to participate in the collaborative parts of research — that was managed by email!”

By updating its technology stack, CEATI aimed to achieve greater flexibility for managing the member experience, and provide a single entry point for members to access the events, research activities, and connect with each other. Participation in in-person events was incredibly strong, and CEATI wanted to replicate that feeling, providing the same member benefits via its digital channels as at live events.

As a part of improving content architecture, the team was also hoping to future-proof its technology stack, adding integrations to events platforms and data tools, and making it seamless to adopt future solutions that they may want to incorporate, even five years or more down the road. 

CEATI knew that headless technology was the way to achieve the growth and long-term flexibility that the business was looking for.

Today, Contentstack powers the CEATI website, my.ceati.com, which has hosted thousands of events and is a hub for more than 2,500 research studies for the power industry. The portal allows members to receive interim updates on research, collaborate on projects, and sign up for events. It has become the content backbone for all information that members need to access. 

“We only have about 35 full-time employees at CEATI, so efficiency is extremely important,” Naqvi said. “We manage 400 events across the year, across 20 different programs, and then there are conferences as well. We have between 60 and 80 active projects that are ongoing at any given time. Contentstack means people aren’t spending time managing registration lists and cross-referencing those with attendee lists, or manually signing members up for events. Contentstack integrates fully with our CRM, with Webex for events, and Pheedloop for live event management. We integrate with Auth0 which has boosted our level of security and authentication. Altogether it means we can stay on top of everything, even with a small team.”

From a research catalog perspective, the member portal is home to 2,500 reports, and on its previous CMS, CEATI could only allow members to search the abstract, pre-specified keywords, and the title of any given report. As reports are regularly between 150-400 pages, this was a common point of complaint for members, who were often unable to find the technical information they needed. By embedding Algolia into the member portal, members can now surface the information they want quickly.

The updated portal has also provided an added level of transparency and collaboration. “Contentstack has helped us to manage open projects and their milestones, so that members can follow along with progress. Members can now open a research page and immediately see the scope, the next steps, and any interim deliverables,” Naqvi said. “And because Contentstack is so good at object relationship management, we can assign a subset of members as reviewers for any project, (connecting) the wider community with who they should reach out to for access and support. Previously, visibility into that was almost zero.”

For CEATI, Contentstack has continuously delivered benefits, starting with a straightforward implementation, and allowing the team to complete increasingly complex rollouts and make the user experience easier over time. “We seldom have to lean on support, but when we have it’s always been a good experience and we've received the right solution for what we've been trying to tackle. The access and responsiveness has been great.”

Next on the roadmap for CEATI is to pursue personalization to create more targeted journeys within the member portal for individual users, so that members can log in and immediately see relevant information related to their focus areas. CEATI also plans to leverage Taxonomy to classify and organize content with greater versatility. 

Key wins for CEATI with Contentstack include: 

• Amplified member engagement: Active monthly users on the platform are now at an all-time high of 3,000 per month, with 4,000 members registered overall. 

• Transparency and collaboration: Members can now surface exactly the content they need from 2,500+ reports and contact the right stakeholders for queries, access and support. 

• A future-proof tech stack: By leveraging headless technology, CEATI can now experiment with its digital experience and benefit from the latest innovations and integrations at any time.