Digital low threshold for associations

Introduction

The Norwegian Association of Hunters and Anglers (NJFF) was established way back in 1871 and is Norway's only nationwide interest organization for hunters and sports fishermen. The association has 121,000 members spread across 550 local associations and 19 regional teams, and is an important meeting place for sharing knowledge about hunting and fishing in Norway.

After sitting on an outdated and costly solution for several years, NJFF decided to switch to a new and more future-oriented digital solution. The process began in 2017, with thorough analyses, project management, and tendering. From start to finish with preliminary projects, development, and various delays, it took a total of four years, and the choice finally fell on Enonic as the platform, with Bouvet as the implementation partner. The rollout of the new website began in 2021.

Challenge

In NJFF's existing solution, both the interface and technology were outdated. It also ran on an old environment with physical servers, and they had accumulated technical debt over a handful of years, making it both difficult to use and expensive to operate. The original main idea was to incorporate all services and functionality, including the archive, in one service—but this solution covered too much on the system side.

NJFF is an association with many local associations and users with a large variation of competence in publishing systems. With so many inexperienced users, it was therefore crucial that Enonic is a user-friendly and intuitive system that works well for publishing online. The expectations of NJFF's many editors were that it should be as easy to publish concise content with Enonic as it is to publish posts on Facebook.

While the technical situation placed restrictions on functionality and usability, the situation among the volunteers and non-technical end users on the editor and reader side was a challenge in itself. It was therefore necessary to find both a modern and user-friendly solution.

Solution

Enonic's publishing interface, Content Studio, organizes all content in a tree structure. From here, all local associations can see interactive previews of their content, as well as create and publish new content. News articles are handled, for example, by filling out fields for title, lead text, image, author, and body text, while publishing takes place in a clear process from "draft" and "ready" to "published".

As part of the process of helping the many volunteers and non-technical contributors in NJFF, the association produced a number of training videos for Content Studio. The videos cover everything from login and templates to publishing and best practice, and give both inexperienced and experienced users useful knowledge about the publishing system.

Among the specific technical solutions that have been created for NJFF is an activity calendar. The calendar is handled at each local level, and is administered by the local team's volunteer editors and contributors. Here, all local members get useful and timely information about upcoming events, date and time, duration, location, price, and more.