Operational Research Society

The OR Society is a charity set up to advance knowledge, interest and education in OR. Their goal is to see operational research used and acknowledged widely in all areas of industry, business, government, the community and the third sector.

The website provides information and functionality for multiple audiences, including; OR professionals, Schools and Student interested in careers in OR, Individual Members, Corporate Partners, OR accreditation panellists and OR Administrators.

The site has a tiered access to content, based on User status, including publications, events and conferences, training courses, pro-bono OR, OR in schools and research.

Everything is designed to make joining as simple as possible, with the User having the ability to select their membership category, payment method, special interest groups and regional societies.

The public can access a wide variety of content. They can also sign-up for access to Special Interest and Regional Society groups and certain free publications. There are business case studies and filtered news. All Users have access to publications, journals and documents, with access to extended content restricted to members.

All membership categories have full access to restricted content. Student members can join for free, as long as they can validate their status. Members’ dashboards and Special interest group pages have filtered content based on the section and the User’s preferences. Members are shown events listing based on these preferences.

Certain members have the ability to apply for accreditations. There is a full end-to-end application process, with workflows including referees, application panel assessments and voting, final decision and notifications. All this is automated within the member area for designated Accreditation panellists and Administrators.

Members have the ability to manage their Subscription renewals online, select additional packages, and switch from annual card payments to direct debit if they prefer.

For OR Administrators, the site was designed to be fully flexible, using an extended grid. Content editors can create sections, set filters, add various taxonomy filterable widgets.

Here's what they said:

"The project was split into several stages, or ‘sprints’, and each contained a section of the project to work on, eg sprint 4 - link to our publications; sprints 5 & 6 - member log in and functionality. Each sprint was specified with our developers at Crumpled Dog and they suggested improvements or features of Umbraco that could be utilised. Each individual task was then worked on, and whenever something could not be achieved, which was usually down to our CRM, then some other way of achieving the end result was worked out. The website now is very clean and fresh, very easy to keep up to date, and we have had a lot of complements from our members about how much easier it is for them to navigate compared to our old website. The accreditation application process, which was the most difficult part of the project, is successfully running and we’ve had several applications within weeks of launching. We set out to create a website with many external integrations that need to relay up to date information to our members, and this is what we have."