“ Sitecore turned out to be the best CMS to meet our needs. Not only did it make is very secure to see that other similar organizations had chosen Sitecore, but we also felt that Sitecore’s position in the market was proof of stability and progress for many years to come. Finally, the Online Marketing Suite seemed for us to be the most impressive example of a dynamic engine to automatically show different target groups relevant content. „

- Michael Tandrup, Dansk Boldspil Union

Challenge

The Danish Football Association (DBU) is the governing board of football in Denmark, with the purpose of promoting and developing of the game amongst all ages from the play itself to the national team. The association spans across six local unions and represents more than 1,600 football clubs and over 300,000 members.

The DBU wanted to replace their existing CMS- and web-solution, which was outdated and out of line with the needs of the end users. Some goals for the site included:

• Online community: DBU wanted to engage users with an online community promoting personal and social relations.
• Targeted, organized content: DBU wanted to communicate more targeted information, as well as making it easier for users to find the content they are looking for.
• Merge 7 sites into 1: DBU wanted to go from seven separate sites (DBU and the six local unions) to one site.

These goals are to be met over a 3-year period. Thus, the launch of the new website right before the World Cup in South Africa in July is only the beginning and the latter phases of the strategy have yet to be met.

Solution

DBU decided that their own self-built CMS could no longer meet their demands. Working with Netcompany, a Sitecore partner, they went through a thorough evaluation process and saw many systems. According to Michael Tandrup, Dansk Boldspil Union, “Sitecore turned out to be the best CMS to meet our needs. Not only did it make is very secure to see that other similar organizations had chosen Sitecore, but we also felt that Sitecore’s position in the market was proof of stability and progress for many years to come. Finally, the Online Marketing Suite seemed for us to be the most impressive example of a dynamic engine to automatically show different target groups relevant content.”

Netcompany integrated Sitecore, and some details of the project include:

• Content organization – The content organization is designed as an extended multisite model solution, called the sub-site model. The model provides a homogeneous centralized information architecture, while still preserving the local union’s ability to make localized content areas and variations to effectively meet the needs of the local users. The model not only ensures a common brand expression and appearance across the sites though shared and dynamic sub-layouts, but also provides valuable content reusability by allowing editors to share content across sites, by linking items to each site from a common non-published content area. The latter ensures that investments placed into content creation can be effectively reused and maintained in one place.
• Modules – a flexible template-based module component was made to allow non-technical editors to easily customize pages. Using this module, editors are able to choose among a variety of different pre-defined modules and dynamically create, customize, insert and arrange these into predefined column areas on each page. This not only ensures a consistent look-and-fell and flexible appearance setup, both also a toolset for consistently improving the ROI and meeting the users expectations.
• Integration – A configurable integration template was developed to maximize the investment in using existing legacy applications and user controls in conjunction with the new Sitecore solution. The integration template allows non-technical users to easily setup pages, which reuse existing user controls and integrations modules to present information from existing back-end system.
• Web Forms for Marketers – to give local editors an easy and user-friendly way to create forms with powerful functionality quickly. Through OMS these are thought also to be extended to link the forms with marketing and behavioral information which allows the editors to analyze and act on the success and failures of the forms.
• Mailing list – to provide a Newsletter module containing mailing list functionality with interest groups. This allows local editors to create a mailing lists and users, that can be administrated through Sitecore, which has been extended wit custom newsletter sub layouts and sign-up pages.

Result

The new site was successfully launched.

According to Tandrup, “We love the fact that the new site much better represents who we are and how we would like to be looked upon. The old site was text-based and one-way communication. Now, we have a much more visual site that signalizes movement, happiness and people –things we as the largest sports organization in Denmark would like to be connected to. In that way, the site is already much more inviting than the old one and we think we have the perfect base to move on to the next steps in our strategic process.”

Integrations include:

• Legacy System Integration - a key feature of the solution was getting the most from existing IT resources while taking advantage of next generation CMS technology. Tight system integration was therefore established to maintain critical business and operational processes to existing legacy systems, such as FODA, which is a result, tournament and team administration system. The integration also provided Enterprise SSO, with single user accounts, password mapping and password synchronization to simplify account administration.
• 23Video – was utilized to create the foundation of social media, which was introduced to engage users and give value by untraditional means. The videos range from corporate branded and controlled interview and presentation videos to user uploaded video sharing and how-to guides on soccer and training exercises.
• Facebook – the solution was extended by Facebook integration and an application aimed to support the Danish national team during the World Cup tournament. By leveraging Facebook's integration points the solution achieved massive exposure, which fell natively into to vision of the site and created a seamless social media experience.

Technical Description

Solution Special Ingredients

• Sitecore CMS
• Sitecore Online Marketing Suite
• Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers
• 23Video