Learn from Others
Transportation Research Board
An Online Knowledge Center to Reach a Wider Audience
Annual Meeting with 11,000 attendees and over 3,500 presenters. Domestic and International representatives of federal, state and local government agencies, universities, and industry professionals come together in Washington D.C. to engage in the world's largest exchange of information among transportation researchers and practitioners.
Solution: Online Knowledge Center
Bottom line: Created a knowledge center to house more content making it accessible to a larger audience.
How to reach a wider audience?
With a vast amount of Annual Meeting content (2,250 technical papers and 3,500 oral and poster presentations), the Transportation Research Board (TRB) wanted to find a way to deliver more content to a larger audience in a more convenient way. TRB had previously been providing attendees and sponsors with a compendium DVD of only the technical papers. But what they weren't doing was making all of their content accessible to a travel-restricted, worldwide audience in an ecological way.
Making more content more accessible to more people
TRB needed to find a new way to present their content. They needed a place where they could not only share technical papers, but also oral and poster presentations and audio/video recorded sessions to their attendees, sponsoring organizations, and those professionals from public agencies who were suffering drastic budget cuts making traveling to the meeting not feasible.
Partnering with Omnipress to create a centralized hub of knowledge
TRB came to Omnipress and together we established an online knowledge center that contains all of their 2011 Annual Meeting content (technical papers, presentations, and recorded sessions). The site offers various levels of access and price points for users while providing content in a variety of segments. With ecological concerns in mind, a minimal number of DVDs were produced for sponsors and those interested in purchasing them, and a DVD download image was placed on the website for others who still wished to receive the technical papers in DVD format.
Knowledge Centers - The home base for content and new marketing strategy
With the knowledge center, TRB was able to visibly track access to content and further understand which content bundles were appealing to their audience. Here's what they found out:
- In three months, their knowledge center averaged 11,440 visits/month in four different continents (98 countries).
- The average knowledge center visitor spent nearly 8.5 minutes visiting an average of over 11 pages!
- TRB found that some audience members (primarily researchers) still needed the tangible DVD as it was downloaded 2,100 times off of the knowledge center.
Not only was the new knowledge center allowing content to be more searchable and accessible, but it now serves as a huge marketing tool for their Annual Meeting which is the place to be for those involved with transportation. Establishing the knowledge center laid the foundation for making content available by fee in the future.
