GreenBiz

Challenge: Transform Website into an Agile Digital Platform

Several years ago, GreenBiz’s legacy website was struggling to maintain performance under the pressure of growing traffic and the popularity of sponsored webcasts. The organization reached out to Kalamuna, a sophisticated digital agency that provides strategy, design, and innovative technology solutions to its clients. 

Kalamuna immediately brought Pantheon into the project to transform the legacy website with its agile WebOps platform, while Kalamuna led the redesign and Drupal 8 upgrade and migration process. 

“We're huge fans of GreenBiz’s transformative sustainability work and we’re excited to help them create a website platform to support their activities. Being able to attend GreenBiz events and helping to build such an amazing community is, frankly, magical.” 

- Andrew Mallis, CEO and Co-Founder of Kalamuna

The partnership continued throughout the next several years. Kalamuna and Pantheon enabled GreenBiz to steadily scale their site for growing content, event marketing, and ever-increasing traffic. 

Then in 2020, the pandemic hit. Live multi-day events were the cornerstone of GreenBiz’s financial model, and an important venue to grow its influential executive community. Replacing live events overnight with virtual events of comparable quality would be difficult, to say the least. 

The website supported marketing campaigns, high user traffic, and content repositories, and was also the hub for linking to virtual event platforms and mission-critical cloud applications. Was the Pantheon core platform up to the urgent challenge?

Why Pantheon: Safe Development and Efficient Workflow

For an organization like GreenBiz that does not have in-house development, Pantheon makes it easy to work with agencies like Kalamuna and provides confidence and transparency in its technology space. Clients maintain complete control without being overwhelmed, and the platform enables developers to work in a very sophisticated and advanced environment. 

Pantheon's Deployment Pipeline helps GreenBiz deploy new digital experiences to Dev, Test, and Live environments without risk or guesswork. The development tool enables the team to safely experiment with new features and designs before going live. And Multidev helps development teams to work on separate features efficiently and safely. 

Pantheon support is also valuable. Stamos said, “Support is another fantastic Pantheon feature. For instance, if we notice some system latency, instead of having to troubleshoot the whole application ourselves we simply reach out to Pantheon, and they immediately respond and help us solve the problem.” 

Kalamuna also benefits from Pantheon’s workflows, which free up agency time to provide even more value to clients like GreenBiz. Mallis said, “Because so many of our workflows are standardized on Pantheon, it makes it much easier to onboard new developers to the platform. These individuals quickly understand the process of testing and deployment. We also use the native New Relic integration to pinpoint performance degradation and improvements automatically. That is hugely useful.” 

Results: Soaring Revenue and Reputation 

GreenBiz’s redesign improved its website performance and reliability while protecting its excellent reputation with its high-powered community.

The website also supports the GreenBiz Executive Network, a membership-based, peer-to-peer learning forum for sustainability executives from the world’s largest companies. GreenBiz had always viewed in-person meetings as essential to network members, and the team was initially concerned about losing members and momentum. However, the company successfully replaced in-person meetings with virtual ones and protected the community by scheduling high-level member discussions and offering educational perspectives with climate experts. 

Strong website performance also encouraged GreenBiz to update its monetization model. For the first time, they charged for the premium virtual events. Stamos added, “We were able to monetize our online events and grow them from three a year to six. This strategy turned out to be wildly popular and amplified the reach of our climate change and sustainability efforts.” 

Shorter webcast offerings also brought in more participants and revenue. The sponsored webcasts attracted more visitors with less marketing spend, and GreenBiz went from producing one or two webcasts a month to one or two a week. 

Another post-pandemic improvement will be to extend the use of Google Data Studio (GDS) for deep traffic analysis and insights. Website metrics already enable GreenBiz to analyze SEO and user behavior results, which are critical to optimizing digital marketing. Kalamuna deployed GDS, a comprehensive data visualization tool that will allow GreenBiz to easily track key user metrics. These key user metrics include which media channels convert more registrations for any given campaign and larger data trends, as well as turning results into actionable reports. 

Success for us is growing our events and content offerings and nurturing our executive network to drive more awareness and understanding of a clean economy transition. All of this depends on enriching our excellent offering and reputation — so that the executives of influential corporations want to participate in our exclusive sustainability group. The website is our window to that world, and thanks to Pantheon and Kalamuna, we are exceeding our goals.

- Isa Stamos, Director of Systems and Technology at GreenBiz