Global Events - A Reliable Directory of Events Worldwide

Global Events is a comprehensive, user-friendly, and reliable directory of events worldwide, by ABS-CBN (Alto Broadcasting System-Chronicle Broadcasting Network). It gives information about various events taking place globally. Users can view information about where events are taking place, performers in the event, vendors, coupons associated with that event, and an event map.

ABS-CBN Corporation is the largest entertainment and media conglomerate in the Philippines. It is one of the core businesses of the Lopez Holdings Corporation, which is headed by an influential Filipino family.

Goals

The main goal for ABS-CBN & Global Events was to enhance user experience and ease of use to provide events information. The main features of the sites to update are:

• Menu
• Event Performers
• Vendors
• Event map
• Coupons and Redemption
• Geo-targeting

Challenges

• Integrating Gigya sign-on and Edit connections with Kentico membership
• Redirection of users to the event, based on their geo-locations
• Getting photos of the most recent event from external site and displaying them in EMEA
• Implementation with Kentico Azure and hosting multiple sites on the same instance
• Manage media files in Azure Blob
• Selective Auto Sync for content staging

Solution

• Used Agile methodology. Delivered Minimum Viable Product (MVP) initially and added remaining features in the next sprint
• The events were geo-targeted and only certain events were available for certain countries: used Max Mind database for geo-targeting implementation
• Provided a Form for content editor to upload event map with annotations and the uploaded document is converted to Image map
• Content editors have the ability to upload event coupons. The coupon redemptions are validated against the coupon database
• Had design discussions with the Kentico team where the approach was decided after several meetings and prototyping - this kind of implementation being the first of its kind
• Media files stored on Azure Blob storage are divided into folders for better scalability
• Implemented custom sync functionality, to sync selected types of object in a certain scope and ignore other changes

Results

The new website has enabled the client to manage its marketing and customer engagement programs with a much greater degree of sophistication, and to fine tune content and functionality to drive lead conversion and better user engagement.

The new website built with Kentico, provides great user experience and has served to further strengthen the position of the client as the leader in events:

• Increase in traffic
• Increase in average visit duration
• Increase in unique visitors on the website
• Kentico Implementation saved an estimated four weeks on development
• Increase in sales, online bookings, and donations
• Improvement in social media engagement by 20%

Key Criteria for choosing Kentico

• Faster development—we could build the site faster with fewer resources
• Kentico CMS 8.2.x offers all of the required modules that other CMS' on the market don
• Kentico 8.2.x supports all the latest Microsoft technologies, including Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, Windows Server 2012, Microsoft SQL Server 2014, Windows 8.1, and Azure SDK 2.5
• Content staging option while working with different environments/versions of the hosted site
• Kentico application can run in multiple instances of one web role on Microsoft Azure.
• Single instance supports multiple websites
• Ease of use by content administrators
• Easily maintainable document management system with workflows