Advocating for Environmentally-Friendly Natural Gas

The American Gas Association (AGA) represents more than 200 member companies delivering natural gas nationwide and serves as a resource for local, state and federal policymakers when it comes to regulating the natural gas industry.

They came to WDG in search of a new website platform that would allow them to better speak directly to the public, policy makers, and their members about the importance of this energy supply and their efforts to make their operations safer, more efficient and more environmentally-friendly.

WDG and AGA engaged in a robust technical discovery process prior to jumping into our typical user experience strategy engagement. AGA had multiple external member database and event management systems, none of which were being effectively utilized on, or integrated with, the public facing website. WDG engineers and project managers facilitated multiple sessions with internal stakeholders, vendors, and AGA’s core team to untangle the web of services and develop a roadmap for how these services might come together to power a more streamlined user experience for AGA’s members and public users.

After gathering the user stories for how these 3rd party services might be leveraged WDG then dug in on “proof of concept” prototypes in order to validate that the systems, documentation, and data sets were capable of delivering as promised. This took a lot of collaboration with 3rd party vendors to work through issues and find alternative solutions when expected functionality was unavailable. This intensive discovery and validation process allowed the technical team to provide clear direction to the user experience and creative teams on the technical opportunities available for them to leverage for the newly designed site.

AGA came to the table with a broad suite of third party databases and tools and were looking for direction on how best to leverage them in a cohesive way on the site. We worked with AGA stakeholders and AGA vendors to develop an integration strategy that included:

Building the account creation flow in WordPress so AGA’s AMS vendor could connect the X-Web SSO to the website. This allows the website to seamlessly integrate content and data from the Netforum CRM and allows AGA to gate and provide personalized content on the public facing site by member type, interests, etc.

Connecting AGA’s Mutual Assistance Database (MAD) to WordPress so users can update their records seamlessly on the new site.

Integrating directly with Cvent, AGA’s event management platform, to dynamically pull in and update event info on the WordPress site, pre-fill registration details, and ensure that non-public event types were only accessible by the appropriate member types.

Content migration was another key technical challenge. AGA was moving on from an old (and unsupported) Episerver Database that lacked structural consistency between versions and content types. WDG developers had to manually find and map both data anomalies and commonalities in order to customize a script capable of bringing the content into WordPress in a workable format.

And finally WDG was able to standardize a data structure for AGA’s State Profile Database into an excel spreadsheet that the AGA content team can simply upload to WordPress to update profile data for all 50 states.

This project has been a great case study in how to approach WordPress at enterprise scale. WDG is well versed in how to leverage and customize WordPress as framework for content creation and curation. However, a robust technical discovery – where we learn as much as we can about the 3rd party databases, use cases, and business objectives for your organization is key to extending the WordPress framework into a true hub for a 360 degree digital strategy.

And it should be noted that customization at this scale can be perilous in the wrong hands. Do the customizations play well with the WordPress infrastructure? Will performance or security suffer? Is there additional technical debt that will make maintaining the site more difficult? There are all concerns that our developers keep top of mind and factor into every technical decision. Our goal is to provide a stable product that will continue to perform well with whatever new features and updates the WordPress product team have up their sleeves into the future.