PLANNING OFFICERS SOCIETY CASE STUDY

- Act as an advocate and promoter of Local Government planning
- Assist and advise the Government and the Local Government Association on planning matters and any related issues
- Act as a centre of excellence, undertake research and promote best practice in planning matters
- Promote all aspects of the built and green environment by working closely with other organisations and professions

Brief
To produce a redesigned public website for POS allowing them to promote the society to both their members and the public.  The structure of the system had to be such to allow for the development of independent sites for the different regions the POS covers (England, Wales and Scotland) with only one site being deployed initially.

For public users they needed a look and feel adhering to their current design outlines that would simply and efficiently explain their purpose and provide a resource for planning matters.

For their members the goal was to develop a community driven site with a high degree of personalisation aiming to assist their members in communicating with each other, sharing their knowledge and expertise.

Solution
WORKSsitebuilder allows POS to manage the main POS England web site from a centralised administration system.

WORKSsitebuilder allows them to keep the entire site up to date with event details, news features, articles, publications, link resources and planning guides.

To achieve their goal of building a real membership community the system allows them to easily manage their membership process as well as allowing them to create community groups, assign members to these groups and create members as moderators of their groups.

For the members themselves the community is built around the groups.  Each member can request to become part of any of the existing community groups.  The moderators (themselves members) can accept or reject such applications without the administrators of the site having to get involved.

Each group can have discussion forums that are solely for their use, or forums can be created for general access. The number of forums and topics is unlimited.

Each member has complete control over their preferences as well as the information they share about themselves in the member directory.  This directory allows members to find each others details quickly and easily via a simple or complex search.

In addition to this the moderators can edit all the content that belongs to their group. They can add/edit/publish web site pages for their group as well as uploading documents and images. All this is achieved on the front end of the site.  They do not require a separate login nor do they need to go to the central administration site to achieve this.

Visit the Planning Officers Society Website