Destinations International Gets 55% More Engagement with Higher Logic Thrive Community

This case study is a summary of the customer story Destinations International shared at Super Forum 2024. Watch the whole session here.

Destinations International, the trade association for destination organizations in the tourism industry, wanted to turn their online community into a destination of its own. They picked Higher Logic Thrive Community to create a customized and personalized experience for their 8,000 members, working with the Arritt Group on implementation. Thanks to these changes, they’re engaging more members than ever. Joanna Hammond, marketing and communications manager at Destinations International, has seen a 55% increase in engaged users and a 27% increase in engagement from non-staff contributors.

Destinations International wanted to use their community to enable organic and natural member connections, so that members can get the relevant answers and information they need to succeed in their work.

But to create these kinds of relationships, Joanna and the team knew they had to increase member presence and participation in the community. They chose Higher Logic Thrive to develop their revitalized community.

Creating an inviting user experience

Using Higher Logic Thrive, Joanna and the Arritt Group implemented a new homepage format for logged-in members. The new format enabled a dynamic, social media-like feed that displayed discussions and other content so that members could continuously consume and engage in the community.

The homepage also features discussions at the top of members’ feeds, which gets their attention as soon as they login. Members can also interact with discussions without having to navigate to a new page by viewing replies, liking, or recommending posts directly from the feed.

The new homepage format provides a quick links feature, where Joanna can select the most popular resources by community user type. For example, she can make sure members see different quick links than industry partners. This personalization makes it easy for any user to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Higher Logic Thrive also enabled Destinations International to create a new community homepage for any user who is not logged in, which includes any non-members exploring the association.

This custom page has allowed Joanna to showcase the community and all it has to offer as a significant member benefit. It features timely and useful items, such as upcoming events and webinars, featured links to members-only resources like the RFP portal, a speakers bureau, and membership program—all of which are new resources Joanna and team added to the Thrive community.

An added benefit of this new home page is that it intrigues existing members to login and start engaging with new content.

Although the new user experience and look of their Thrive community got the trade association closer to where it wanted to be, Joanna and the Arritt Group also developed a strategy to increase adoption.

Job description, RFP, and speaker libraries

Their first project was to create three new resources for community members, which included a job description library, an RFP library, and a speaker directory. Each of these resources relies on Thrive’s tagging functionality to ensure members can find the most relevant content quickly.

	In the job description library, members can share job descriptions they’ve created. Any members who are hiring for a similar role can use these descriptions like templates. Tags help the members identify the most relevant content.
	The RFP library is a portal where members post their RFPs for partner proposals. The Thrive tagging feature helps organize the RFPs so that open requests remain at the top.
	The speaker directory enables members to find speakers for upcoming events, tagged by things like topic area and location.

New community how-to resources for members

Joanna and the Arritt Group also created a series of videos in Canva to help members navigate the new community. They aimed to make these videos short, simple, and exciting to encourage members to use the new features.

Once the videos were complete, it was easy to embed them via HTML into the Thrive community. They also paired the videos with PDFs for members who prefer to read the how-to instructions.

Through their new software and strategy, Destinations International is seeing more and more member participation. The new user experience, personalization, and resources the team has created has helped the trade association create a space that’s truly enabling member connections and providing them with the support they need to do their jobs. Joanna calls it their community “glow-up.” And it is truly glowing! Year over year, Joanna has tracked a 55% increase in engaged users, and a 27% increase in engagement by non-staff contributors.

Destinations International is the global association for destination professionals. They believe that destination organizations positively impact local communities as a dynamic place to visit, live and work. As such, Destinations International elevates tourism by educating, equipping, empowering and connecting its members to better fulfill their missions and achieve positive results around the world.