Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

At the heart of The CPA is the CPA Headquarters Secretariat who support and facilitate the administration of the organisation. Serving as the initial public-facing platform for the organisation, the website is a key tool for the Secretariat to engage with its membership and the wider international community.

The Secretariat team had identified several problems with their previous website; it was dated from a design perspective, clunky, and complicated to navigate. In addition to remedying these issues, the CPA required several pieces of functionality including a Learning Management System, Event Management, and integration with a Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM).

Following a competitive tendering process, CPA appointed CSI Media to design and develop the new solution.

As the initial public-facing platform for CPA, we focused on designing a modern website that represented the prestige and officiality of the organisation. Usability was integral to our design approach, whilst maintaining a high-level of accessibility was crucial to the diverse membership.

We designed custom UIs for key landing pages, and a set of 15 components including a slideshow, a video block, and event teasers.

Our choice of Content Management System (CMS) was Umbraco, a powerful, easy-to-use CMS where the Secretariat manage the content on their website. Umbraco incorporates a Page Builder tool that enables CPA to build custom landing pages by adding any combination of components, helping the Secretariat to effectively engage and communicate with its wide-reaching audience.

The website includes a Directory Listing where users can search for parliamentary members via several criteria including name, country, and parliaments/legislatures. When a search is conducted, records are retrieved from the integrated CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365.

CPA provide a curriculum of online training courses to support Parliamentarians and parliamentary officials in fulfilling their constitutional and statutory obligations. We developed a Learning Management System, incorporating functionality that enables the Secretariat to create custom modular courses in Umbraco. Parliamentarians can access these courses via an integrated portal and complete the associated assessments and exams.

The Secretariat can set up events for members and parliamentarians to attend including committee meetings, conferences, and workshops. CPA can specify the details of the event (event name, description, date & time), mark each event as either ‘public’ - which are displayed to all users on the event listing page - or ‘private’, which are invite-only, and accept/decline event-registration requests. Finally, events are either paid or free and, therefore, we integrated the website with Worldpay and PayPal to enable online payments.