Apr 29

Case Study: rebuilding IOIC's membership experience and website for the next stage of growth

Dave Campbell
Membership consultant
"Today is a momentous day in IoIC’s history. We have a crisp, focused and striking new identity and a stunning, accessible website - both of which give us the best possible springboard to demonstrate the massive value of internal communication and our role as the professional body for IC practitioners."
Dom Walters, President
Institute of Internal Communication
"For an organisation at our stage of growth, the digital experience had become a barrier rather than an enabler. Layercake helped us understand why, and then set about fixing it. Decluttering, restructuring and rebuilding around what our members actually need. The result is a platform we can genuinely grow from."
Jen Sproul, CEO
Institute of Internal Communication

Context & Objective

Client : Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC)
ioic.org.uk
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IoIC had grown strongly over the previous decade. But growth had slowed, and the question Jen Sproul, IoIC’s CEO, was wrestling with was why.

When we started looking at the data alongside her, a pattern emerged. Members were joining for professional development, training and community. Engagement with those areas was lower than it should have been. And where members did engage - particularly around professional development - renewal rates were measurably higher. The value was there. Members who found it stayed. The problem was that most weren’t finding it.

Member feedback told the same story in different language. The experience felt cluttered and hard to navigate. It wasn’t obvious what to do next. The website, in particular, had grown organically over a decade and had come to reflect how IoIC was organised internally rather than what members were actually trying to do. It was a visible metaphor for a broader plateau: an organisation that had outgrown its own infrastructure without quite realising it.

Our recommendation to Jen was to address both dimensions simultaneously. A retention problem rooted in unclear positioning and a broken experience needed both things fixed - and fixed in a way that felt coherent rather than piecemeal. We recommended Why Projects to lead the brand and messaging work, and took on the member experience ourselves.

Rebuilding the experience around member intent

The experience work began where the insight had: in evidence. Engagement patterns, renewal correlations and member feedback were used to establish clear priorities before any design decisions were made. This kept the project anchored to what actually mattered rather than internal preferences about what the site should do or say.

Restructuring the information architecture was the foundation. Navigation was simplified, content was grouped around what members were trying to do rather than how IoIC was structured, and duplication was removed. The aim throughout was clarity over completeness - fewer decisions, stronger signals, clearer next steps.

From there, attention turned to the journeys most directly linked to value and renewal. Rather than attempting to redesign everything at once, we established a prioritised backlog and built the foundation to launch alongside the rebrand. The most important journeys are being worked through systematically, each redesigned to move members forward more directly, with the experience doing the work of guidance that had previously been left to the member to figure out for themselves.

The work was delivered within the constraints of an existing CMS platform. Rather than rebuilding from scratch, we introduced a UX framework and reusable component set applied through targeted CSS overrides and modular page structures. This allowed meaningful, lasting change without disrupting the systems underneath - and created a foundation for ongoing improvement rather than a one-time fix.

Landing together

The redesigned experience launched alongside Why Projects’ rebrand - which was the intention. A stronger positioning needed somewhere to live, and a cleaner experience needed something worth guiding members towards. The two workstreams were designed to reinforce each other, and the sequencing was deliberate.

IoIC now has a digital experience built around member intent, with priority journeys designed to move people into the areas most closely linked to staying.
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