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Part funded by the Cabinet Office, CSSC is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1921 which now has over 160,000 members and a £7million turn over. The Civil Service Sports Council's website needs to be the primary touch point for their members and the organisation, letting members access their account details and all of the benefits of membership. With all those members, we host the site on AWS with autoscaling set up so that the site can grow it's resource as it needs to.
With thousands of Member Benefits - from free entry into English Heritage properties to cheap cinema tickets - CSSC needed a very easy to use CMS that could ensure the site stayed onbrand, easy to use and visually appealing for all visitors whilst being very quick and easy for admins tp update. The Laravel based CMS therefore also features things like user submitted approval processes, a form builder and a link shortener, as well as various user level permissions.
Search is very important on this site so that people can find what they're looking for quickly and easily, so we devised an algorithm that allows CSSC to control the priority of items in the results and applies different weightings to different elements of the Benefit's description. Search result also need to include events pulled from CSSC's external events system and money saving retail offers from CSSC's partner provider all via APIs and hooked up for visitors of the site via SSOs.
Many of the Benefits Members can access are purchased directly from CSSC - meaning they have a very busy shop. However, the fact that not all Benefits work in this way, and that they're not a typical shop as subsidies and membership fees are taken into account, and members have allocations as to how many of certain benefits they're allowed to buy within set timeframes, means they needed a bespoke ecommerce solution and shopping basket.
The complex Join process needs to flow effortlessly for new members, so as to quickly and easily check eligibility and ensure that they are set up in the organisation's Microsoft Dynamics CRM via an API, and then handle payments with Global Payments. GDPR was considered throughout the design and build process.
Historically, CSSC have issued credit card sized membership cards each year. In 2020 we were very excited to launch their first ever DigiCard app so that people no longer need to keep the card in their wallet, and CSSC no longer need to spend such a big outlay each year on plastic cards which go to waste after 12 months. The hybrid app appears in the App Store and Google Play store but is built using Cordova meaning it's the same code base for both Apple and Android operating systems, making the build even more cost effective to build and then maintain than a typical native app.