When Gibe Digital took over as Rugby Europe’s digital partner in September 2020, we were entrusted with a comprehensive redesign of their existing website and the integration of various third-party platforms. This selection followed a competitive pitch process, with Gibe standing out for the quality of our proposal and creative approach.
RUGBY EUROPE'S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
The primary focus of the new development was to understand user behaviour, placing significant emphasis on mobile and video experiences to bolster Rugby Europe's growing fan base. Our agile development processes ensured the client's close involvement throughout the project, with regular updates as new features were seamlessly integrated into the site. We adopted a minimum viable product (MVP) approach, initially incorporating essential features, templates, and content, followed by incremental layers to enhance the site's functionality.
INTEGRATIONS AND BRANDING
The revamped site seamlessly integrates with the Sports Alliance Single Sign-On system, providing a smooth transition for fans between website and video platforms without the need for multiple logins. A complete brand refresh showcases Rugby Europe's new branding and competition graphics. The multilingual capabilities, a core feature of the MVP site, enable the editorial team to expand the site into numerous languages, catering to a global fan base.
PARTNER COLLABORATION
In collaborating with Rugby Europe, we've partnered with key third-party providers such as Umbraco for the CMS platform, Microsoft Azure for website hosting, and Sports Alliance for CRM integration, SSO, and MyPage functionality. This collective effort has contributed to the site's massive success, particularly in terms of the mobile experience and video integrations, resulting in significant growth in registered fans following tournaments and matches. The site's stability on the new platform and its ability to scale seamlessly during match days have resulted in further success, meeting the demands of Rugby Europe's growing fanbase.
SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH AND ONGOING DEVELOPMENTS
Following an intensive build cycle, the new site went live in January 2021. Since then, we've implemented automatic data feeds for tournaments, matches, and tables using RugbyPass, Rugby Europe's stats partner. Specialised Rugby 7s templates have also been introduced for multi-day tournaments with pool/table and knockout elements.
"We selected Gibe after a competitive pitch process for several reasons; they're knowledge and expertise in bespoke development with third-party platform integrations and secondly, for the rave reviews we got from a couple of their existing clients. We knew we could work effectively with them and indeed, within months we were getting results and hitting goals we needed to achieve quickly."