Visit Flanders

The fragmented website architecture of Tourism Flanders

Over the years, different teams and departments had each created a wide variety of websites and web services (front-ends), providing all kinds of information (from different back-end systems) in different formats (some middleware) to a wide range of stakeholders. This made Visit Flanders struggle with a fragmented website architecture consisting of different systems with no overarching structure.

An inconsistent visitor experience and a suboptimal decentralized management

Because of the fragmented architecture, the visitor experience on their platforms was highly inconsistent. Next to that, there was the high cost on the total organization in terms of subscription and hosting costs, staff training, maintenance, and security. Visit Flanders decided to start a search for a flexible and scalable system that: 

is visitor-centric while serving a wide variety of stakeholders,
offers consistent digital experiences to all stakeholders on multiple channels,
allows different departments to create and maintain their own websites and email campaigns without depending too much on developers.

The evolution of Visit Flanders

Such organizational challenges can’t be solved by just introducing another new tool. It requires strong governance, great teamwork, and efficient tooling to support the teams in meeting their goals.

• One team
  There is no business vs. IT anymore. They are one coherent team of Visit Flanders.
• Budget
  From centralized IT budgets for different departments into a company-wide budget overviewed by IT.
• Ownership
  The business teams now keep the ownership on their websites. They are responsible whether a website is delivered, approved and how this is filled with content.
• Keeping it simple
  We limited the number of solutions used throughout the organization. The different teams define their goals. IT provides adequate solutions so the teams can meet their goals.
• Integrated IT ecosystem
  We’ve built an integrated IT ecosystem that leverages data from different backends towards different front-ends serving a wide variety of stakeholders and services. Internally and externally.
• Governance model
  We built a governance model where: 
  - each business department defines their goals, challenges and ambitions.
  - a central team is defining and discussing business ambitions, goals, and acceptance criteria for solutions.
  For each problem, there are different solutions. Instead of endless discussions about the better solution, it’s key that the organization is aligned on the actual goals, so they have a clear framework to evaluate any possible solution.

Dropsolid Experience Cloud as preferred DXP

Visit Flanders selected Dropsolid Experience Cloud as their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that teams can use to build, maintain and evolve their digital experiences for external stakeholders on one central infrastructure.

It is integrated in the digital ecosystem of Visit Flanders via a middleware that allows for the internal applications to use the same back-end systems such as the CRM.

A multi-brand platform with Dropsolid Experience Cloud

The team of Visit Flanders, together with Dropsolid Digital Agency, launched www.toerismevlaanderen.be as the first of many websites on the platform. We also migrated the entire multi-brand email marketing programs to Dropsolid Experience Cloud’s marketing automation tool, Mautic, using rebranded and responsive email templates in just 9 weeks time.

A centralized IT management while teams grow at their own speed

At Visit Flanders, the different teams now grow their digital maturity at their own speed, without losing the centralized IT management. Since they’re working with Dropsolid Experience Cloud, different teams are creating sites, landing pages, lead funnels, and email campaigns. While one team is just building informative websites on the Drupal CMS, another team is experimenting with personalized digital experiences across multiple sites and email campaigns.

We can speed up our time to value with new sites, site evolutions, and campaigns. All teams can benefit from the re-usable components and templates, a central email marketing platform, personalization engine and Digital Asset Management solution, etc.

The result after 3 months in the project?

• 200.000+ emails were sent in the first months.
• 50+ content editors are collaborating on the platform.
• Visit Flanders is now in control of all its websites running on a secure central platform, allowing them to control, optimize and forecast IT budgets.