Understand how the PRI community platform supports over 30,000 members to forge a sustainable future

Supported by the United Nations, the PRI is a member organisation representing over 10,000 of the world's leading financial institutions, asset managers, and investors collaborating in order to achieve responsible investment.

The PRI's name comes from a set of six key "principles for responsible investment" developed by investors, for investors. In implementing them, "signatories" (member organisations) contribute to developing a more sustainable global financial system. They have attracted a global signatory base representing the majority of the world’s professionally managed investments.

With over 30,000 individual members the PRI needed a social network platform to support the work of this global community. The platform needed to allow members to collaborate on sustainability efforts such as working towards key documents including shareholder resolutions, to enact permanent changes in how many of the world's largest multinational companies are run.

How could member financial institutions, asset managers, and investors from across the globe collaborate in a secure and sustainable way? The team at Compuco found the solution.

‍“Our members needed a collaborative platform that could enable the sharing of valuable information and encourage collaboration among members, whilst at the same time being flexible enough to support our unique business needs. It was a difficult technical challenge as the project also needed us to migrate data from our old system and integrate this into our suite of enterprise applications without adding too much administrative burden to our staff. Compuco approached this project with years of practical experience, a data-driven mindset and user-centric design philosophy. The team exceeded our expectations in delivering a truly integrated, intuitive platform that thousands of our members rely on and that we continue to evolve together since.”

‍Tatenda Kupara, Head of IT

On a path of discovery:

Working closely with PRI, the Compuco team conducted a series of discovery workshops with internal and external stakeholders to understand the needs for the new platform.

As always, we used a data driven approach, analysing existing metrics before mapping the outcomes and Key Performance Indicators "KPI"s that the platform would need to achieve in the future. This allowed us to align all the stakeholders in the project and agree a pathway forward.

At the next stage of discovery we delved a little deeper, exploring the day-to-day collaborative activities of the PRI members. We identified the feature needs of the new platform and worked with the PRI team to rigorously prioritise those needs using a MOSCOW matrix.

These workshops identified a variety of use cases and processes that needed to be explored further. Compuco used our extensive business process engineering experience to analyse and document those workflows ready for UX research.

A great UX, the easy way

The success of a platform of this scale would depend completely on its usability. The adoption targets would only be achieved if the system was instantly intuitive to new members joining.

The Compuco design team understood this and worked to build an experience that would make users feel at home, with a "social network" like feel but functionality designed for a collaborative working context. Groups take the form of social spaces, but with powerful features like calendars, tasks and document management members can work together to achieve their goals. The social features also allow users to post, share and comment within those workspaces, with all of that information being summarised in a users news feed.

To achieve this impressive result the Compuco team identified the key user stories in the platform which would make up a users initial experience. We created interactive clickable prototype designs and ran a series of UX research sessions with volunteer users from around the world. Based on feedback, designs were refined and retested until all parties were satisfied.

The results speak for themselves, with thousands of signatories worldwide now using the platform daily, with little or no training required.

Complex integrations, made simple

The PRI community platform wasn't the only new system coming online for the PRI during that period. A new website and Single Sign On "SSO" platform were also being developed, and the PRI had a Salesforce CRM that needed to be integrated.

Whilst new to working with Salesforce at the time, Compuco's extensive CRM experience from years of work with CiviCRM allowed us to ideate and deliver a robust integration for the PRI. The SSO platform was fully integrated so that members could signup to "PRI" and get instant access to all platforms, including the community platform, based on applicable permissions held within the Salesforce CRM.

Data flows seamlessly from the SSO, Community platform and CRM in order to give members a smooth experience from whichever platform they interact with.

Outcomes

The Compuco team delivered a dynamic and intuitive community platform that supports the collaboration efforts of over 30,000 of PRI’s members.

The enterprise grade platform gives members the ability to collaborate on initiatives, communicate with each other daily and most importantly, to drive impactful social change on a global scale.

• 30,000 users on the collaboration platform
• Portal hosts over 750 online collaboration spaces
• Around 9,000 organisations registered