Driving online learning and collaboration for a leading global research-based organization.

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The Client

World Resource Institution (WRI) is a global research organization that spans more than 60 countries, with offices in the United States, China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, and more. They have more than 700 experts and staff who work closely with leaders to turn big ideas into action to sustain our natural resources—the foundation of economic opportunity and human well-being.

Ebizon is a Technology Partner with the World Resources Institute, a global research organization that works in the nexus of environment, sustainable transportation, and economic socio development.

We have been helping them with their multiple programs for design, development, cloud hosting, and maintenance of respective program websites in Drupal CMS.

  1. WRI The City Fix Learn – https://thecityfixlearn.org
  2. WRI ROSS Center for Sustainable Cities – https://wrirosscities.org
  3. WRI Cities New Mobility – https://wricitieshub.org/newmobility/
  4. WRI Cities India Knowledge Hub – https://wricitieshub.org/

Challenges

WRI has a unique set of the target audience with unique challenges. The audience on the WRI website includes some of the most influential people from all over the world like policymakers in various national governments, researchers, and civil society organizations working for sustainable and socio-economic development.

The majority of this audience preferred the old school way of research and knowledge gathering partly because of the higher age bracket that they belong to and partly because of not being overly impressed by technology alone.

Now the challenge for WRI was to capture this audience’s interest and even get them hooked to the online way of getting information. WRI and Ebizon had to present the information on the website in a way that was easy to understand, interesting, and gave the audience an incentive to stick to online reading.

Our Solution

We designed and implemented an interactive online learning platform TheCityFix Learn to drive learning and collaboration among city officials, practitioners, and stakeholders through a catalog of learning products designed by WRI Ross Center of Sustainable Cities.

TheCityFix Learn was envisioned and developed as a website that would showcase important information, solutions, and papers in the form of various learning products.

The website has 4 learning products:

  • Tools: this learning product is an elegant way to direct users to knowledge tools and provide the relevant references (websites containing the complete information needed on the subject).
  • Webinar: this learning product lets website users subscribe to online seminars where they can gain knowledge and also share their experience, views, and get answers from other people in similar positions.
  • Training: the training is a way to keep the audience updated and informed about the upcoming workshops, study tours, allows the users to subscribe to this training, and attend them in person.
    Since the website gives an option to filter all the learning products by language and geographic region, therefore, anyone can easily look for relevant training.
  • Learning Guides: this is probably one of the most important learning products, a few of the reasons for which are listed below:
    • This guide is basically a collection of multiple webpages that contain all the information that you would see on a report or publication of 100 pages but in a concise and easy presentation that doesn’t overwhelm the reader.
    • The learning guides are created by authors in the WRI team. These authors have the freedom to include text, hyperlinks, references, media (images and videos) within each webpage of the learning guide.
    • Each webpage of the learning guide contains a small amount of text but a huge amount of information (this is achieved by using all the various forms of media).
    • The reader of the learning guide can navigate from one webpage to another smoothly as one would typically do while reading a book.
    • The transition between pages is made smooth by using the best technology available.
    • Each webpage of the learning guide also has the advantage of showing the meaning of jargon by implementing a vocabulary pool at the backend.
    • The website also has the ability to analyze audience behavior. The WRI team can track things like what content is most popular, how much of the learning guide has been read by the user, and more.
    • The WRI team also has an ability to capture audience interests and ask them to subscribe to relevant updates when they finish a particular guide.

TheCityFix learn is a platform that lets the audience engage and interact with the site, register, and bookmark their favorite content for future reference and see and track their upcoming events in their dashboards. This is not a website but a full-fledged knowledge portal.

Conclusion

EbizOn helped WRI India to build this platform and promote learning products and reach new audiences. The learning products on the site includes a lot of visual cards, videos, infographics to improve the audience interaction with the content, and increase engagement. This helped them to increase customer retention as well.

This platform also assists in the work of different teams and Centers allowing the city staff to avoid duplication and streamline ongoing efforts to Educate, Inform, and Train them.