New FIPP.COM Website Includes Membership Management and E-Commerce

SubHub, the leading builder of membership websites for publishers, associations and organisations, has rebuilt the website for FIPP, the worldwide magazine media association. FIPP.com is the online hub for more than 700 FIPP member companies, including more than 6,000 member magazine titles. The new website, which includes a sophisticated member contact management database, provides FIPP members with easier and faster navigation to more news and information on what’s happening in the magazine media industry, more searchable access to its database of international publishing contacts as well as content from its monthly magazine and research reports. A new e-commerce facility makes it easier for members to purchase its specialist reports.

FIPP’s old website was based on proprietary and legacy technology that was becoming cumbersome to maintain. Amy Duffin is Communications Manager at FIPP. She says, “Our website is our most important communications tool because it’s the hub for our members. But we weren’t investing in it. We’d had the same website platform for more than 10 years. We were just adding in new functionality onto a proprietary platform. This meant that it was slow to navigate and time consuming to update and manage. We wanted to make it fit for the future and an example of best practice in online publishing for our digitally savvy members.”

SubHub used an open-source software foundation to create the next-generation FIPP website. It built a process to carefully manage the migration of FIPP’s legacy database onto the new platform, preserving 10 years of valuable historical data. Features of the new site include:

• Sophisticated ecommerce system where users can purchase and access reports;
• Searchable database of contacts from the more than 700 FIPP member companies;
• Searchable data from market reports on the advertising and media landscape (Using M&M Global’s Media Passport resource), the FIPP member magazine, Magazine World and an online newsletter;
• More functionality for members to manage their profiles;
• Integration of FIPP’s social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

“SubHub is an expert at building robust back-end databases that support complex member management systems, but it also understands the publishing industry,” concludes Duffin. “This was a big investment, so we wanted to get it right. Working with SubHub, we have a more dynamic, effective and usable website that will save us money and ensure that we have the best platform for growth.”

Miles Galliford, co-founder of SubHub said: “Many publishers and media firms are working with legacy websites and simply building new functionality on top of old code. As FIPP itself found, it is often cheaper and smarter, even in the short-term, to migrate to an open platform that fully leverages social digital functionality. A website is the shopfront to an organisation and as such it deserves investment to keep members engaged. There’s a wealth of information at the back-end of most websites that is never leveraged. We want to make websites more dynamic, efficient and useable.”