COFFEY: LOCAL CONTENT WITH GLOBAL REACH
Coffey is an international infrastructure consultancy located in more than 80 countries. With more than 50 years’ experience, their expertise covers physical and social infrastructure from railways and mines to sports grounds. They bring international best practice to the challenges facing local communities. The Queensland Floods response is just one example. Coffey established the Program Management Office to oversee flood recovery activities for the City of Ipswich.
The challenge
Coffey’s global reach was also a communications challenge. How do they tell each community about the services available in that area? Coffey’s existing website was not meeting this challenge.
When they came to us with this problem, Coffey had received feedback from their teams in various countries that the content on the global coffey.com website wasn’t relevant to the local markets in which they operate. Clients had to navigate through a complex menu structure to find local information.
Our approach
Rocksolid’s business analysts tackled Coffey’s communications challenge by breaking it down into two core issues.
The localisation issue: We helped Coffey target content to a region by building country detection (based on each visitor’s IP address) into their new websites. This feature identifies the user’s location, then delivers web content tailored to that location. A potential client in America who clicks on ‘Our Offices’ will go directly to a list of Coffey’s American offices. Of course, the user still has control over their browsing experience. They can use the website menu to browse to information about other regions.
For each region, we custom-designed pages, taking into account unique characteristics of each language, from Arabic to Polish. We made this feature more accessible by displaying the language options in that language. While this was straight-forward to implement, it is an essential part of highlighting Coffey’s global identity.
The content management issue: We tackled the logistical challenge of managing so many different websites by pulling them all together through RockSolid’s CMS. Each language has a parent Customised Management System (for example, English), with regional sites sitting underneath.
Coffey’s web administrators can choose to post content to a website in one region, or to all websites at once. Not only is this more efficient to use, RockSolid’s CMS gives an ‘at a glance’ view of all Coffey’s online content. It is now far easier to integrate all of Coffey's websites into a global marketing strategy.
The results
Coffey’s communication team has seen major efficiency gains since the new websites were introduced. Now, content only has to be updated once to make sure that each website displays up-to-date and accurate information. Coffey’s websites better reflect the company’s ethos of being engaged with the needs of the communities they work in – starting with seamlessly presenting content that’s relevant to the communities’ needs.