CLC-Report-Final

Centre Analysis
4th Semester Exam Project
Written by David Hirst
2016
Visit the website at:
meditateincopenhagen.org/2016

Abstract
The Clear Light Kadampa Buddhist Centre is located in inner Copenhagen.
Being one of a number of similar Buddhist centres in and around
Copenhagen it has problems attracting and retaining attendees
The purpose of this report is to investigate ways to address their core
problem of attracting more people through a multimedia solution. To
achieve this, I looked at various aspects of the Centres online presence and
how it could be better utilized to attract more people. I researched the way
their website was currently used, looked at their social media situation and
conducted surveys to gather insight into potential users.
Alongside this I worked on developing a new responsive website, designed
to make it easier for people to quickly and easily access information and
book classes and events using any device.

Table of Contents
Subject 4
The Plan 5
Problem area 6
Problem Formulation 6
Method 7
Delimitations 7
Development Process 8
The Clear Light Centre 9
Website Analysis 11
Analysis of other centres and groups 14
BERT 23
Survey 26
Centre Membership 29
Search Engine Optimisation 30
Experience economy 32
SWOT 32
Technical documentation 34
Social media communication Plan 40
Future development 44
Conclusion 45
Reference List 46
Appendix 49

4
Subject
The focus of my project is to help the Clear Light Kadampa Buddhist
Centre improve its online presence and to develop communication
strategies that will help to create awareness of the Clear Light centre
amongst the general public which is a challenge they are keen to
address. Ihaveworkedwiththecentreastheirwebsiteadministrator
since 2011 and helped develop their first WordPress website. I am
keen to use the skills I have developed studying Multimedia Design
and Communication at KEA to further develop the centre online
presence and guide them in all these areas.
My main area of focus will be the development of a new website.
The centre’s current website is out of date and not responsive. It is
difficult to use on a mobile phone and they are concerned that as a
result they are losing potential customers. I will also focus on their
marketing and communication strategies in order to find the best
solutions for improving the online conversion.

5
Prior to starting with this project, I had an extensive meeting with
thecentresadministrator Tim Larcombe and, thepersonresponsible
for coordinating the website, social media and publicity, Sam Barnes.
The meeting allowed us to discuss the requirements for my project
and what the centre hoped to get out of it. We also created the
problem formulation and laid the groundwork for my investigation.
Part of our meeting involved preliminary investigations into Google
Analytics to get an idea how people were accessing the website and
what they were looking for on it. It was decided i would investigate
this further to make recommendations for the new website.
We also established a development plan for me to follow. However
due to various constraints and other problems this quickly fell
apart and instead I simply worked on things in the most logical
order. Unfortunately I ended up having to develop the new website
alongside my research. Obviously in a perfect world the research
and suggestions would be completed long before the website was
developed, however due to time constraints and the goals of the
Clear Light Centre this wasn't possible.
The Plan
The planning meeting

6
Problem area
Throughanalysisofexistingdata,prepareandstructurearesponsive
website and social media strategy to address the top five business
problems of the CLKBC.
• Visitors - limited number of Danes attending and difficulty
attracting Danes.
• Low conversion – high number of site/social media visits, but few
of them actually attend courses.
• Discussion on-line - how to get more discussion about the Centre
online
• Insight into on and offline behaviour - We need to know more
about what people think of the Centre and courses. What makes
people not return regularly?
• We also need better insight about usage of our website and social
media sites. We need tools to gather these insights regularly.
• Dialogue - how to get people more engaged on social media.
Problem Formulation
By working in direct cooperation with the Clear Light Centre, I aim to
redesign their website and improve their online presence in order to
more effectively attract and retain online visitors with the eventual
goal of converting that online presence to physical attendance at the
Centre.

7
Method
My research will use a wide range of tools and analyses to gather
information and offer recommendations and design advice to the Centre
relating to their website and their social media usage.
The Centre’s resident teacher already has a strong idea of the design
the new website will take so I will work closely with him throughout the
website development process and discuss any changes I feel I need to
make, using the results of my research, so as to develop the site into one
that is informative, attractive, easy to navigate and very user friendly.
A Bipolar Emotional Response Test ( BERT) will be used to gain insight
into public perception of both the current design of the Centre’s website
versus that of similar websites.
A general survey will also be carried out regarding people’s responses to
Buddhism and Meditation in general plus their perceptions of the Centre
and how it might serve them better.
Examination of the Centre’s Facebook Insight and Google Analytics will
hopefully provide insights into how people already use the page and
respond to the Centre’s current facebook activities.
Research will be done to make recommendations and suggestions as to
how the Centre might improve its SEO and also how they can go about
improving and expanding their online communication channels.
Finally once I have conducted my research and have a good overview
of the Centre I will conduct a SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weakness,
Opportunities and Threats) to get a clear overview of their strengths
and weaknesses.
Delimitations
As I am primarily working with the Centre’s website, online presence and
social media i will not be focusing so much on their general marketing
and business strategies. Furthermore as the Centre already has a visual
identity and a graphic designer responsible for this area of the Centre I
will not be going into the visual identity, however i will follow it carefully
in any design choices I make on the website to keep it consistent and
inline with the design. The Danish content for the website is also not
finished at the time of writing this report and hence why the website
is exclusively English at present. The Danish version of the website will
be implemented as soon as the content has been translated. Once the
Danish content is in place then I will work with the Centre to finalise
their SEO and work towards boosting their rankings in both English and
Danish search engine queries.

8
The Development
Process
The new website was developed in close
cooperation with the resident teacher Adam
Starr. Through a series of meetings we designed
the new website and adapted the site to suit the
Centre’sneeds.Thesemeetingsallowedmetoget
direct feedback and speed up the development
process. In between meetings I implemented
the more major changes and continued to
make minor tweaks. This process worked very
well for me, as in my previous experiences with
developing websites I have at times had to wait
days for the client to make decisions which leads
to delays and disruptions to the development
process.
Although the website was built upon Adam’s
design choices and vision he regularly sought
my expertise and listened to me if I presented a
valid argument as to why a particular choice was
unwise. The Centre also works with an external
Graphic Designer who is responsible for all the
graphic elements, including the logo, icons and
images used on the site.
Development Process
New visual identity
As part of the new website the Centre decided to
adopt a new visual style. This is a more minimalist
design focusing on large images, more colour
and a minimal amount of text. They also decided
to do away with both the image banners and
sliding banners based upon my suggestion that
they are ineffective because users do not pay
attention to them (ConversionXL / Peep Laja.
2016). This new style aimed to make the website
cleaner, fit more closely with the visual identity
of the centre and finally to make it more mobile
friendly. Adam also factored in the fact people do
not like reading online (Jakob Nielsen. 1997) and
therefore aimed to reduce the amount of text
on the website focusing on delivering the key
messages in the shortest possible way.
As part of this new visual style Adam took a
lot of inspiration from www.bentinhomassaro.
com including adopting the Futura-PT and Lato
typefaces.

9
The Clear Light Kadampa Buddhist Centre was
founded in 2006. It is often just referred to as
the Clear Light Centre. The centre is part of
the New Kadampa tradition (NKT), which is an
international network of Dharma centres spread
across the world. Venerable Geshe Kelsang
Gyatso Rinpoche founded the first centre in the
United Kingdom. The NKT has five centres in
the Nordic region with the head centre located
in Oslo Norway. The NKT promotes what it calls
Western Buddhism, which is Tibetan Buddhism
specially adapted to western cultures and
lifestyles. The Clear Light Centre is currently
the only centre representing this tradition in
Denmark.
The Centre began life in Nørrebro and was
located in Østerbro for a period of time before
moving to their current location which is in Inner
Copenhagen on Store Kongensgade at number
40 in Sankt Annæ Passage.
Throughout their years of operation, Clear
Light has experienced many changes and
challenges with attendance rising and falling. The
organisation and management of the centre has
changed over the years. Presently the centre’s
administration are all volunteers with the
Resident Teacher Adam Starr being the only paid
employee of the centre.
The Clear Light Centre
Introduction
The Centre offers a range of classes spread
throughout the week to broaden their appeal
and to give people multiple opportunities to
attend and fit in with their busy lives. They offer
weekly classes two nights a week and on Sunday
mornings plus an advanced study program on
Tuesday nights. In addition, they have chanted
meditations every Tuesday afternoon for an hour
and longer chanted meditations occasionally.
Once or twice a month they have workshops or
retreats on Saturdays which are usually 3+ hours
long and have a different theme each time. These
are usually held at the Centre, although some
take place at other locations.
Clear Light run a series of free talks at different
locations around Copenhagen and nearby cities.
( The latest took place in Roskilde.) These are,
as the name suggests, free and are open to
everyone, and are mostly used as a way to build
awareness.
They also have a workplace program (Clear Mind
at Work) where Adam visits a workplace and
holds special classes there.

10
Mission, vision and values
The Clear Light Centre does not have a mission
or vision statement or any listed values per say,
however they have a constitution that governs
how the centre should be run and this forms the
basis for their organisation and its management.
The constitution specifies that Clear Light are a
religious organisation which operates only for
religious purposes dedicated to public benefit.
It also defines exactly how the centre should
operate and what it aims to achieve through
these operations.
The constitution reinforces the ethos of Clear
Light which is to help people and promote good
valuesinsocietyandthattheirvisionistoachieve
a happier society in all regards.
Our aim is to provide a friendly, calm space in
the city of Copenhagen where anyone can find
greater inner peace, happiness and well-being.
Taken from What is the Clear Light Centre - In the
appendix
Visual identity
The Clear Light Centre already has a defined
visual identity and therefore I have not focused
much attention on this area in my project. In
2013 they developed a new visual identity as
An example of the publicty after the first
rebranding
Target audience
The centre already has a target audience
defined and therefore there is no need for me
to investigate this. They aim to target men
and women aged between 18 and 55 who are
interested in meditation, buddhism and the
benefits they can bring.
part of a major rebranding effort to broaden
their appeal and attract new people. The new
visual identity focused on Nordic nature and
moved away from using images of Buddha and
other buddhist icons. The hope of the rebranding
was to make the centre appear more secular and
hopefully appeal more to Danes. The texts and
promotional material was also slowly adapted to
reflect this new visual identity and the centre was
also redesigned to include more natural colours
and natural furniture. As part of the latest re-
design they plan another change in visual identity
focusing even more on minimalism.

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TheCentre’scurrentwebsiteisalready welldesigned
in many aspects. It’s clean and simple and avoids
clutter, making it easy to find what you are looking
for. However despite the high number of visitors to
the website, it still experiences low conversion. This is
something the new website aims to address.
The Centre has been utilizing Google Analytics
to analyse the website’s traffic for over a year
now, although they have not previously actually
analysed the data gathered. This data is invaluable
for establishing how people use the current website
and what they are looking for. At our first meeting
to discuss this project we assessed this data and
established that a mobile friendly website was vital
due to the high number of visitors on mobile devices.
The Google Analytic results for each of the below
sections is included in the appendix.
Visitors
During the time period of my analysis - January to
May 2016 - the centre’s website had 6,477 visitors.
Visitors reached the site in a variety of ways and from
arangeofbrowsersanddevices. Hereisabreakdown
of the key areas which I regard as relevant and
important for consideration when creating the new
website.
See Analytics Audience Overview.pdf
Desktop and Mobile
usage
Of the 6,477 visitors, 3,855 were from tablets and
desktops whereas 2,622 came via mobiles. However,
although in the period 1st of January to the 24th of
March there were 1,462 Tablet and desktop visitors
versus 799 mobile visitors, from the 25th of march
till the 3rd of May there were 1,364 tablet/PC versus
1,474 mobile visitors. This period includes the peak
when on the 31st of March there were 40 Tablet/PC
visitors versus 78 Mobile visitors. This indicates an
overall increase recently in mobile access to the site.
The operating system used by visitors also reflects
that visitors prefer mobiles when accessing the site
with the most popular operating system being iOS
Website Analysis
with 28.18% and Android coming in 4th at 18.43%.
PC’s(MacandWindowsandLinux)madeup53%with
the remainder coming from other devices including
blackberry and Windows phone.
See Analytics mobile vs table-desktop.pdf and Analytics
OS usage.pdf
Page views and session
time
On the whole, tablet/PC visitors spent a lot more
time on the website and viewed a wider range of
pages whereas mobile visitors only visited for a
short period of time. The average session time for a
tablet/PC visitor was 5:25 minutes whereas a mobile
visitor only stayed for 1.39 minutes. Furthermore,
mobile visitors visited less pages with an average of
1.88 pages as opposed to tablet/PC visitors with an
average of 3.85.
This doesn’t come as any huge surprise and reflects
general mobile usage trends. A mobile user is
normally seeking quick information (Ian Mills, 2014)
and therefore the most important information the
site aims to convey needs to be very easy to find and
access for a mobile device.
The bounce rate is also much higher for mobiles
66.29% as opposed to 44.40% for tablet/desktop
users and this may come down to the difficulties of
using the current site on a mobile. The centre has
received positive comments regarding the website
on PC’s.
See Analytics mobile vs table-desktop.pdf and Analytics
OS usage.pdf
Language
As the centre operates a dual language website, for
both English and Danish visitors, it’s important to
factor in the language. The current website is not
that well designed regarding Danish content, with
some content, especially relating to events, only
being available in English. Although Google Analytics
cannot tell you what languages the user can read, it
does clearly indicate that the majority of visitors are
most likely not native Danish speakers. The language

12
pluginusedonthesiteqTranslate-Xalsoautomatically
redirects people based on their browser language.
With 45.82% of people visiting the English version
of the site as opposed to only 17.68% visiting the
Danish. The language switching option does appear
to be frequently activated, although it’s unclear if this
is people getting re-directed to the wrong language
version or if people are switching languages as
the most commonly visited page on the site is the /
da/ (Danish version). The Centre has always been
very successful at attracting foreigners and has had
problems attracting Danes and this is reflected in the
website statistics as well.
See Analytics Audience Overview.pdf
Usage of the site
Note: Due to the way the website is designed these
results are slightly misleading. ‘Whats’s’ on and
‘Workplace Program’ share the same URL (courses-
events/#) - which is a mistake. As a result, both show
up as red, however as covered later on, ‘workplace
program’ has very few visitors and ‘Whats’s on’ has
the majority.
Google Analytics In-Page Analytics also provides
some insight into how the page is used. The red
colour indicates the highest number of clicks with
blue the lowest. They indicate that people access the
first 3 menu items the most, especially the ‘What’s
on’ and they are also keen on the ‘upcoming events’
and especially the ‘calendar’. It also suggests no one
has used the social media buttons or clicked the read
more button under ‘About us’. However that may be
a mistake.
Even though the menu items clash together (which is
a shortcoming of the design of In-Page Analytics) we
can see the results show that ‘What’s on’ is by far the
most popular menu item on the page at 28.9%. With
Workplace program coming in around 1.6%, ‘About
us’ at 4.4% and ‘Contact us’ at 2.9%.

13
The same data for the global navigation displayed in
percentages:
Traffic source
Looking at the way people arrived on the site is very
important, specifically to gauge the success of social
media and any other locations that backlink to the
Centre’s website. Google Analytic results show the
majority of visitors arrived at the site from Google
searches at 37% followed by Facebook at 31% (split
over 3 different versions of Facebook*), direct links
16.50% and meetup at 4.72%. This shows the site is
generating quite a bit of traffic via Facebook, even
though Facebook’s own analytics would suggest
there are few direct connections to the website.
However, this may only be factoring in people who
click the actual URL in the about section on Facebook
and not people who arrive at the page indirectly via
event posts for example. The high results for Google
searches suggest, in English at least, that the search
engineoptimisationisworkingwellandthenextstage
is to focus on retaining visitors and turning them into
customers.
See Analytics All Traffic.pdf
Conclusion
From these analyses of the data from Google
Analytics we can get a clear picture of how people
interact with the current website. There is a clear
trend towards visiting the website via mobile phones
and therefore responsive design is vital. There also
needs to be more focus placed upon keeping the
Danish and English content up to date and ensuring
that everything is available in both languages. Finally,
In-Page Analytics makes it clear what people are
looking for when they visit the website and therefore
thenewdesignneedstofactorthisintoconsideration
and make it as quick and easy to find the upcoming
events as possible. The simpler the process is for
a user to book a ticket to an event after arriving on
the website, the more likely they are to complete the
process and therefore attend the event. (Steve Krug
/ 2000)
Factoring these things into the new design will
hopefully improve conversion and make the website
even more user friendly.
*The three versions of Facebook listed by Google Analytics are
m.facebook.com (mobile Facebook) facebook.com regular Facebook
and lm.facebook.com which is Facebook using HTTPS to protect user’s
identities. All three are identical for the end user except for the size of
the screen and the layout of content being different on mobiles.

14
Introduction
In order to better understand the market and
get inspiration for suggestions to improve the
Centre’s website and communication strategies,
it is important to analyse what other Buddhist
meditation centres in Denmark offer. Buddhism
is growing in popularity in Denmark (Jørn Borup
2005/2007)andthereforearguablythereshould
be an increased demand for what The Centre has
to offer.
InmyanalysisoftheothercentresIregardedthem
as competitors, to the Centre, in the traditional
sense. GenerallyspeakingtheCentre,itself, does
not regard other centres as competitors as they
are also promoting Buddhism and meditation and
are engaged in the same goal of helping people.
In order to narrow the choice of centres down to
the most comparable, I only focused on places,
which offer Buddhist Meditation and are located
in or near to Copenhagen. I omitted other
meditation centres (Hindu, Christian etc) and
yoga centres and similar as this would make the
scope too large and I only have a limited amount
of time for this analysis.
The search terms I used in Google were:
Meditation, Buddhism and Meditation classes
and all three with the keyword Copenhagen
following them. In order to gather these results I
also looked at centres mentioned on Buddhanet.
info (Buddhanet.info 2016) which lists Buddhist
centres worldwide and also appears in the
Google results. I chose not to use any other
search engines other than Google because of its
dominant share of the Danish market (Clicky.com
2016).
As part of this analysis, I also looked into each
centres use of social media and their web
presence in general as this is the primary focus
on my report. This is not an in-depth analysis
and is instead an observation of what they are
doing on social media, how frequently and finally
which channels they are using. All information
Analysis of other centres and
groups
about likes and reviews are valid as of the time
of writing.
The centres I chose to review in this
analysis are
• Buddhistisk Center København
• Center for Wisdom & Compassion
• Phendeling - Center for Tibetan Buddhism
• Shambhala Meditation Center
• Copenhagen Buddhist Vihara
• Watpa Copenhagen
• Indsigtsmeditation Vipassana
• Tergar Meditation Group of Copenhagen
• Zenmind
• Buddhist Society
• One Drop

15
The Buddhist Centre Copenhagen is a Diamond
way Buddhist centre located in Osterbro in
Copenhagen. The centre is part of a network
of the Karma Kagyu School in Denmark (KKS
which operates centres across Denmark (with
11 in total). Diamond way Buddhism is the oldest
still operational series of Buddhist centres in
Denmark first founded in 1972 (Centre for
Samtidsreligion / 2015).
• Website: www.kbh.buddha.dk.
• The Karma Kagyu School in Denmark also
operate www.buddha.dk
• Appears on Buddhanet
• Thecentrealongwiththeparentorganisation
rank highly on Google.
• Limited English version, it’s there but not all
content is translated
• Website is responsive, however it has some
problems.
• They operate a separate web shop with a
wide range of products.
• Location: Østerbro, Copenhagen
Social media
The Copenhagen Branch of the Karma Kagyu
School has 2832 Facebook likes, 1212 Facebook
check-ins and also 125 reviews. Their Facebook
timeline tends to consist of posts of upcoming
events, photos from the centre, including events
and other activities, and the occasional article.
They use Facebook to promote upcoming events
directly.
They are also active on Instagram and the parent
organisation uses Twitter and YouTube as well.
Buddhistisk Center København

16
The Center for Wisdom and Compassion is a
Mahayana Tradition centre located in central
Copenhagen. They are part of the Foundation
for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition
(FPMT) and are the only centre of this tradition
in Denmark. They hold regular events in
Copenhagen.
• Website: www.fpmt.dk
• Website is only available in English.
• Website is responsive.
• Location: Inner City
• Range of membership options
• Easy newsletter signup
They offer membership benefits including
borrowing books from the centres library and
involvement in the centre’s annual meeting. They
also offer access to a lot of resources via their
website for both members and non-members.
Center for Wisdom & Compassion
Social media
The CWC has no obvious social media links on
their website, however they have a facebook
page and YouTube Channel. They use Facebook
to promote upcoming events at the centre and
they also share some content from international
Affiliates. They offer a member signup option
within Facebook - although it could use some
work. They also use the upcoming event option
within Facebook.
OnYouTubetheyhavearangeofvideosincluding
classes giving instructions, although this has not
been updated in over a year.

17
The Phendeling - Center for Tibetan Buddhism
is a Mahayana Tradition centre located in central
Copenhagen. They are not affiliated with any
international groups and follow the teachings
of a Tibetan called Lakha Lama. They operate
multiple classes a week including their open
temple concept where anyone can come and
meditate without teachings.
• Website: www.phendeling.dk
• Website is responsive
• The website is available in multiple languages;
although it is just automatically translated
by Google Translate, leading to some minor
problems.
• Location: Inner City
Phendeling Center for
Tibetan Buddhism
Social media
The Phendeling centre promote their Facebook
and YouTube channels directly on their website.
They use Facebook to promote upcoming events
at the centre where they also have reviews along
with photos and one video.
On YouTube they have 6 videos ranging in age
from5months to2yearsold.Theypredominately
show teachings at the centre.

18
The Shambhala Meditation Centre is located in
Vesterbro and is part of Shambhala Europe which
operates centres across Europe and the world.
They follow the Shambhala teachings which is a
branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The centre offers
regular classes.
• Website: www.copenhagen.shambhala.info
• No English information
• Website is not responsive.
• Location: Vesterbro
• Option to login to their website and access
additional features
Social media
The Shambhala centre in Copenhagen does not
appear to operate any social media channels
and they have no links to them on their website.
However, their parent organisation and other
centres operate Facebook and YouTube channels.
Copenhagen Buddhist Vahara is located in
Vallensbaek strand. The centre has very limited
amounts of information available on its website;
however, it appears to target/appeal to Asian
immigrants.
• Website: www.daham.dk
• The website is available in English
• Website is not responsive
• Location: Vallensbaek strand
Social media
TheCopenhagenBuddhistViharadoesnotappear
to operate any social media channels.
Shambhala Meditation Center
Copenhagen Buddhist Vihara

19
Watpa Copenhagen
Watpa Copenhagen is a centre located in Dragør.
The centre caters predominately to Asian
immigrants and is available in a mix of Thai and
English.
Website: www.watpa.dk
Responsive website
Location: Dragør
Social media
The Watpa centre operates an official Facebook
page with 272 likes and 9 check-ins They have
also received 8 reviews with a score of 4.9 stars.
They have only operated the page since 2015
and the majority of its content is in Thai.
They also operate a YouTube channel with a
range of videos from the centre.
The Indsigtsmeditation Vipassana centre is a
Theravada based centre located in Vesterbro. The
centre is run by a Danish psychologist and focuses
on secular teachings. The centre is part of the
Vipassana Society.
• Website: www.indsigtsmeditation.dk
• Danish and very limited English.
• Website not responsive.
• Location: Vesterbro
Social media
TheIndsigtsmeditationVipassanacentreoperates
aFacebookpagewithupcomingeventinformation
and related posts. They have 242 likes and have
been operating the page since 2012.
The owner/main teacher operates a YouTube
channel with lots of related videos.
Indsigtsmeditation Vipassana

20
The Tergar Meditation group of Copenhagen
is a meditation group based in Copenhagen.
They have regular visits from a visiting teacher
and host weekly classes. They are part of Tergar
International.
• Website:www.tergar.org/communities-and-
practice-groups/find-a-center-or-group/
copenhagen/
• Limited Danish and English information.
• Location: Copenhagen
Social media
The Tergar Meditation Group in Copenhagen
uses Facebook to promote upcoming events at
the Copenhagen group.
Tergar Meditation Group of
Copenhagen
Zenmind is a Zen meditation centre based
in Frederiksberg. They are more focused on
Meditation and have moved away from Buddhism
in general. They offer a range of courses including
free intro classes. They also operate a web shop.
• Website: www.zenmind.dk
• Limited English (it is there, it’s just hard to find)
• Responsive design
• Location: Frederiksberg
Social media
Zenmind use Facebook to promote their centre,
with upcoming events and information about Zen
Buddhism/meditation. They have 4644 likes and
138 check-ins and 41 reviews.
Zenmind

21
The Buddhist Society is a Zen Buddhist centre
with locations in Copenhagen NW and Aarhus.
They offer weekly classes at both locations.
• Website: www.buddhistisksamfund.dk/en
• Danish and English
• Location: Copenhagen NV
Social media
The Buddhist Society does not appear to operate
any social media channels.
Buddhist Society
One Drop is a Zen Meditation centre with
locations in Frederiksberg and Vig.
• Website: www.onedropzen.org
• Location: Frederiksberg
Social media
One Drop does not appear to use any social media
networks.
One Drop

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Other centres
There are a huge range of meditation options in Denmark especially due
to the popularity of yoga and meditation in Danish society. (Copenhagen
Post / 2014) Besides the many yoga centres there are also dedicated
meditation groups like Transcendental Meditation, which run classes all
over Denmark (transcendental-meditation.dk). I did not include them in
my analysis as they are not Buddhist.
There are also other similar activates like dancing meditation
(www.moving-meditation.dk) and martial arts like Aikido
(www.aikido-health.com/aikido-meditation).
Conclusion
From analysing the other centres operating in Copenhagen I was able to
find some useful ideas and suggestions for the Clear Light Centre and
I also got a clear idea of what centres there are and how they aim to
attract visitors.
The key suggestions for the centre that I gained from this analysis are:
A member’s area – This is mentioned in more detail later in this report.
The creation of a member’s area would add value to their membership
option.
A library – People may not be that keen to buy books and therefore,
to increase interest in the courses on offer, allowing people to borrow
books may attract more visitors. This could be tied into membership and
further enrich the membership options.
Donations – As a charitable organisation donations can be a key part
of financing. Therefore adding the option for visitors to donate to the
centre may help raise additional funds.
Opencentre–TheopentempleconceptfromthePhendlingcentrewould
hopefully get more people into the centre and increase the chances of
them attending classes. This could be used as an opportunity to talk to
people and promote interest in the benefits of attending courses.

23
The Bipolar Emotional Response Test (BERT)
is a type of user testing used to gauge users
reactions to a design. By asking them to rate the
design between two polar extremes, for example
clean to messy, you can quickly gauge how the
user feels towards the design without having to
ask lots of complicated questions. With enough
answers patterns emerge in the responses. (UX
for the Masses / Neil Turner)
The test was conducted on the two different
user groups in order to gain even further
insight into the different designs. I targeted two
different user groups with identical copies of
the survey. One user group was regular users,
people with no background in design and the
second group was people who work with design
related occupations , who understand design
principles and will hence observe the websites
with a degree of expertise. I split the test into two
copies to see if there were notable differences in
the responses received.
Websites compared
I picked 5 different websites for my analysis as
I felt each website offers a different approach
to the same overall topic. Each website aims to
promote Meditation/Buddhism. However, each
website has a different design and approach to
the topic.
Meditate in Copenhagen
http://meditateincopenhagen.org
The former website of the Clear Light Centre.
This is the base for my analysis as the core
objective of my project is to improve their online
presence. They have received lots of positive
feedback from people regarding the website and
therefore I thought it was useful to know exactly
how people perceived this website compared to
other similar sites.
The Kadampa Meditation Centre Barcelona
http://www.meditarabcn.org
The Kadampa Meditation Centre Barcelona was
chosen as the website was held up as an example
of a nice modern meditation centre website, and
one which the Centre aspired to follow. This was
one of the examples they showed me in our initial
discussions.
Meditate in Oslo
http://meditasjonioslo.no
The Nordic Kadampa Meditation centre in
Oslo’s website was chosen as they are the parent
centre and had completely redesigned their
website about a year ago. They are also a larger
organisation and more successful in attracting
attendees.
BERT

24
The Diamond Way Buddhist Centre
http://buddha.dk
was chosen as they are one of the main rivals to
the Clear Light Centre and they are one of the
largest network of centres across Denmark.
Meditate.io
http://www.meditate.io
Meditate.io was chosen because the design
is radically different. They were also used as
an example of clean design and a good way of
presenting online course options. The website is
radically different yet very effective at delivering
its intended message.
Results of BERT Test
After asking a select group of people from the two
different groups I gained the following results.
Friendly – Unfriendly
Welcoming – Unwelcoming
Appealing - Unappealing
Pretty – Ugly
Professional – Unprofessional
Clean – Cluttered
Organised – Disorganised
Simple – Complicated
Intuitive – Unintuitive
Modern – Old fashioned
All results are measured from 1 – 5 with the positive on the left and
the negative on the right.

25
These results are also available as a PDF in the appendix.
From my BERT analysis I gained some insight
into how people felt towards the five different
websites. There was a definite contrast between
people with a background in Web design
compared to those without a design background,
in their perception of the websites.
Designers tended to favour those websites
that are well designed, which is not surprising,
however even though they are well designed
the average users are not necessarily so positive
towards them. The notable example is meditate.
io which received generally positive feedback
from designers however was not nearly as well
received by other people. And on the other hand
thosewebsitesthatdesignersdislikedbecauseof
their poor design were generally more positively
received by those without a design background.
Another interesting result was the Meditate
Barcelona website, which was almost
unanimously considered very modern by the
designers, however it received very mixed
reviews by the non-designers.
The results of my test were not as conclusive as
I had hoped, although the choice of subjects for
the test and the limited number of respondents
may have influenced this. In retrospect it would
have been better to conduct this test at the very
beginningoftheprocess,sothattheresultscould
be used to influence the new website’s design.
Thatallsaid,itdidgivemesomeusefulinsightinto
how people view websites and upon completion
of the new website I plan to conduct another
BERT using the same questions to assess the
general feelings towards the new website.
I also asked people for their comments regarding
each site. Which varied dramatically, and i
generally received a lot more comments from the
designers than non designers.
These comments are available in the appendix with
the PDF of the results.
BERT Conclusion

26
I conducted a survey to find out how people felt
towards Buddhism and meditation and how they
viewed the Clear Light Centre and its offerings. The
aimwastoputforwardsomeoftheideasIhavehadfor
improvements and present their current membership
offering and see how people responded to these.
I split my survey into 4 sections each with a different
focal point. The first aimed to gather general
information about people’s age, gender, location etc.
The second section aimed to gather information
relating to how people feel towards Buddhism and
Meditation and find out what keywords and phrases
people associate with them. This could be used in
conjunctionwithDesignandCommunication,itisalso
important to know if a user, for example, dislikes both
subjects as this may then mean their other responses
will be biased.
The third section focused on opinions towards
courses and the centre. Here I focused on how people
would like to learn mediation to see how the centre
could better target people and also on how they felt
towards what the centre offers, to see if there are
any ways the centre could diversify. Here I also asked
about the membership costs and benefits.
The fourth section focuses on social media and
specifically on whether people would attend an event
they had signed up for on Facebook. The centre has
a lot of Facebook likes and reach, however very few
people show up to classes (especially compared to the
number of likes they have). Therefore I simply asked
if people actually attend events they sign up to on
Facebook and if not why not.
Unfortunatly due to the limitations of my time and
resources and people’s reluctance to answer surveys
(The New York Times / Megan Thee-Brenan ) I only
managed to get 39 responses (at the time of writing
this). However as I deliberately tried to get people in
the Centre’s defined target audience and who lived in
Denmark to boost the relevance of the responses, the
survey still gave some very useful insights.
The full results of my survey are available in the
appendix along with a list of the questions.
Survey
Survey results
The results of my survey gave me lots of valuable
insight into how people feel towards the Centre and
whatTheCentrehastoofferandalthoughIonlygota
limited number of responses I was generally pleased
with the results.
The first part of my survey, as mentioned previously,
focused on gathering general background
information about my respondents. This showed me
that I had a fairly good number of results from people
living in Denmark and that most of the respondents
were of within The Centres target audience.
How old are you?
Do you reside in Denmark or elsewhere?

27
InparttwoofmysurveyIgatheredusefulinformation
regarding people’s views towards Buddhism. I found
that the majority of people held positive views
towards Buddhism and Meditation and that 64.1%
had even considered learning one or both of them in
the future.
Buddhism
I also got interesting results from the questions
asking people what came to mind when Meditation
and Buddhism are mentioned.
Meditation
In the 3rd section i asked people how they would go
about learning about buddhism and meditation if
they were interested and what they thought about
the centres membership options and whether they
should be expanded.
Interestingly 73.7% of respondents were interested
intheideaofpre-eventcourses,whichwouldprepare
someone for an upcoming event and 56.4% of people
would be interested in other membership options
which I cover further in the Centre Membership
section.

28
Would you be interested in the idea of pre-
event courses online which would give you some
background information and prepare you for big
events/retreats?
Finally in the 4th section i aimed to find out about
social media habits, as much of this information is
already available, I focused on one core topic. Do
people attend events they sign up for on Facebook?
This was asked because the Centre has reported
many people showing interest on Facebook and then
not attending the event. The majority of respondents
said that if they sign up for an event they will most
likely attend it.
If you sign up for an event on Facebook how likely
are you to actually attend?
A full summary of the results of the survey are
available in the appendix - See the survey results and
Clear Light Centre Survey 2016 (Responses).
Conclusion to user
research
Both my survey and BERT test gave me useful ideas
and feedback regarding the design, and what the
centre could do to boost conversion. The results
helped me to develop various ideas presented in this
report. Once the new website is completed I plan to
conduct further tests on it to ensure that the new site
is simple to use and achieves what it set out to do;
making it easy for the user to easily book classes and
find information.

29
The Clear Light Centre currently offers
membership for 500kr a month which entitles
you to free entrance to almost all regular courses
and events and a 50% discount to events with
visiting teachers. It also gives you a discount
to the bookshop. (See the website for the full
details).
In order to attract more people I would
recommend expanding the membership offering
to include a members area within the website
to offer further benefits to having centre
membership and could be used as a basis for
different levels of membership too.
This member’s area would be a section of the
website which is only accessible by logging in
to the website. Although WordPress already
has a user roles system (See codex.wordpress.
org/Roles_and_Capabilities) this would not be
enitrely sutiable as its more focused on blogging.
There are other options, including a wide range
of plugins, that allow for the creation of members
areas and varying levels of membership.
In this member’s area the Centre could offer
exclusive videos and teachings along with
access to recordings of classes and possibly
special coupon codes etc. I have suggested some
membership benefits in my survey:
• Online courses: 38.5%
• Online material such as recordings, videos,
texts: 56.4%
• Exclusive member’s discounts: 25.6%
• Gift card to bring a friend: 30.8%
• Library (option to borrow books): 41%
• An online shop: 25.6%
• Other: 17.9%
You can see the full results in the Clear Light Centre
Survey 2016 (Responses) spreadsheet.
Levels of membership
As also suggested by the survey results different
levels of membership would make the centre
more appealing to a wider audience with 56.4%
of people saying they would be interested
(See Clear Light Centre Survey 2016 (Responses)) .
By offering a range of membership options with
different price brackets it would encourage
more people to take up membership and in
turn increase the chances of them returning by
building customer loyalty.
Pre-class online course
In order to encourage people to attend classes
at the Centre I recommend creating pre-class
courses which would be offered online as
preparatory information for upcoming events.
These might consist of a series of videos/
recordings or articles that help prepare people
and give insight into the upcoming course.
They could be used to get people engaged and
increase thechancesofthemattending theevent
and are essentially a Foot-in-the-Door Method
(Freedman and Fraser, JLF and SCF, 1966).
These pre-class courses could be offered to
everyone or only to members, however, in order
to attract the widest range of people, offering
these to everyone would be recommended.
Promotionoftheseclassesandexplainingexactly
what they are would also be important in order
to maximise awareness.
Conclusion to Centre
membership
A members area would be an effective way of
boosting the Centre’s membership offerings and
because they already use WordPress, setting it
up wouldn’t be a major technical challenge.
Survey results also indicated the idea of pre-
class courses to be quite popular, with 73% of
respondents showing interested in the idea so
the Centre should seriously consider producing
these for some if not all of their courses
A special members area would create added
value for the Centre’s membership. By giving
members access to exclusive online content and
creating further engagement opportunities.
Centre Membership

30
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process
of designing a website to improve its search
engine ranking. This is important to ensure people
can easily find your website out of the often
millions of results. Especially as people often don’t
look beyond the first few results (Search Engine
Watch / Jessica Lee). The Centre would benefit
from it by ensuring that people are easily able to
find the website and pick it over other centres and
organisations offering meditation and Buddhism
in Denmark.
The current website has only very basic search
engine optimisation with support from Yoast
SEO (See plugins analysis). They rank highly
for the keywords Meditation + Copenhagen
and Buddhism + Copenhagen however without
mentioning Copenhagen they rank poorly.
They have a natural advantage over some pages
already as WordPress is good for SEO (Queen
City Media / Jeseph Meyers. 2016) and elegant
themes have build some SEO features into Nimble
as well (www.elegantthemes.com/features).
ThroughcarefuluseofSEOanddesigntechniques
the Centre can boost its ranking across a range of
key search terms relevant to what they offer.
Suggestions to improve
the SEO
Keyword research
In order to effectively use keywords on the site
and to boost their effectiveness, more keyword
research is required and a clear structure and
list of the keywords, that will be used, is required.
Previously there has been no system to this and
they have been picked somewhat at random or
based on the content of the page. However, to use
them most effectively they need to be used as part
of an overall strategy and the pages should also be
optimised to fit into this strategy.
I conducted some limited research into the best
keywords to use and things like “Meditation
techniques”, “Guided meditation”, “mindfulness
meditation”, “meditation tips”, “how to meditate”,
Search Engine Optimisation
“what is meditation” and “meditation for
relaxation” popped up as suggested keywords
related to the topic of meditation. Mindfulness
in particular stood out as being a popular search
term in Denmark related to Meditation.
Most of the keywords listed above are actually
multiple words This is a common technique of
keyword optimisation and combining multiple
keywords together is known as Long Tail
Keyword. These can often be more effective
than single keywords because when a user
is searching for something specific they will
usually google a series of keywords not just a
single word. This also allows you to rank highly
for less common search terms instead of trying
to compete only on the most popular terms.
(Word Stream, 2016)
The results of the Google Keyword Planner are
available in the appendix: Keyword Planner
results for meditation.xlsx
Keyword distribution
spreadsheet
Once you have found the keywords you would
like to rank for it’s a good idea to organise them
into some kind of system and here a Keyword
distribution spreadsheet can be extremely
helpful (David Booth, 2014) . This allows you
organise exactly which keywords will be used
for each page and keep track of them all in one
central location. This ensures that you have the
widest range of keywords and are not using the
same one multiple times.
Content optimisation
The quality and type of content is also very
important for your SEO. Is your content related
to what your website claims to be about? In
this respect the Centre is doing quite well, their
content is always well written and relatable. The
only major improvement that could be made
here is ensuring that there are between 300
to 700 words on a page and that all pages have
headings, keywords and meta descriptions. Also
where images are used to ensure they have alt
tags. (Yoast / Marieke van de Rakt. 2015)

31
Domain/page Authority
A website’s authority is determined by a range
of things ; its age, the quality of internal links and
the quality of backlinks (links from other sites).
Authority is essentially trust ability. Search
engines consider what other sites link to yours as
a ranking of your credibility, if you have backlinks
from other respectable sites it will boost your
reputation and in turn SEO. On the other hand
if you have dodgy sites with no content linking to
you, you will be punished and your SEO will go
down.
The Centre’s main domain
“meditateincopenhagen.org” has been active
since 2005 and therefore has gained authority
for its age. They also have some internal links
between pages and some backlinks from social
media and other NKT centres.
Maintaining and improving these links is an
important step towards improving SEO. The
creation of a blog (as recommended in the
Communication Plan) will boost this because
they can then use this to link to their website
and likewise link the website to blog posts where
applicable. They can also ensure that all external
links are to appropriate websites and encourage
other affiliated centres to continue to link to
their website.
Another suggestion might be promoting events
occurring at affiliated centres and vice versa as
this would enable users to know about events in
nearby cities and in turn boost SEO.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a search engine optimisation plugin
for WordPress. It is one of the most downloaded
WordPress plugins (What WordPress Theme Is
That?. 2016. ) and is considered the best free
SEO plugins on the market (Shout Me Loud /
Harsh Agrawal. 2015). It provides a wide range
of features to boost your SEO in WordPress
and simplifies the process considerably. It also
assists with the creation of an XML sitemap
which further boosts SEO and removes the need
for other plugins to do this. I recommend the
Centre continues to use this plugin on the site
and if they need even more features to consider
the premium version.
Conclusion and suggestions
Through proper design, correct page layout
and use of html elements, a key word strategy
and taking full advantage of Yoast, the SEO of
the Centre’s website can easily be boosted on
the new website and in turn their search engine
ranking will also improve.
Their biggest shortcoming is the lack of proper
Danish content, therefore even more attention
should be paid to ensuring that all content is
available in both Danish and English across
all pages and page elements. They rank much
better in English than in Danish, and with one of
the key focus areas being to attract more Danes
,then ensuring correct Danish content is very
important.
They should also focus on cross promoting
affiliated centres to boost their SEO score and
domain authority. This would also assist the
other nordic centres in their efforts.

32
Traditional economics is based on commodities,
goods and services, but economists now
recognise that experiences can be sold and
traded and constitute a new distinct level of
economics (Harvard Business Review / B. Joseph
Pine and James H. Gilmore. 1998).
When considering the nature of what the
Centre has to offer it might traditionally be
considered as offering services, but their classes,
courses, events and teachings can more aptly
be considered as experiences. People do not
come to the Centre to simply learn to meditate,
they also seek out the experience and long term
benefits they expect it might bring to their lives
(Jyskebank.tv. (2010).
The Centre should therefore factor this into
their marketing efforts. They should promote
themselves as providing an experience which
itself contributes an opportunity for people to
improve their wellbeing. Special attention should
be paid to explaining what people can gain from
meditation and how it can give them tools to
improve their lives.
Experience
economy
Introduction to SWOT
A SWOT analysis is an analysis tool designed
to help in the research of an organisation’s
strengths,weaknesses,opportunitiesandthreats
(Fahy and Jobber, 2012). It’s used to quickly get
an overview of where they should focus their
energy, either to prevent the negatives or take
advantage of the positives.
Strengths
With good teachers, a nice location and lots of
events and classes on regularly the Centre has
a strong foundation to build upon, furthermore
with their good web presence including a good
website and regular use of social media channels
reinforce these strengths.
Weaknesses
The Centres biggest weakness is their lack
of Danish content and Danish classes, this is
probably the biggest obstacle to attracting
more Danes to the Centre. If they could more
effectively attract Danes this would also help to
remedy their other major weakness which is the
low number of attendees as classes.
Opportunities
The centre has a range of opportunities to grow
and expand, their efforts recently to run more
eventsinotherlocationswillbroadentheirappeal
further and the resident teacher has now began
learning Danish to expand his teaching options.
There is also increased interest in Meditation
and Buddhism, so though careful marketing and
greater awareness they should be able to attract
more people.
Threats
The biggest threat the Centre faces is financial
problemsfromlowattendanceoranyunforeseen
costs, they also run the risk of members of their
volunteer team leaving, which may impact the
running of the Centre. The competition from
other centres is also a threat, although this is
minorinthegrandschemeofthings,andgenerally
they do not regard other centres as Competitors
in the traditional business sense.
SWOT conclusion
The Centres generally in a strong position
moving forward with their biggest obstacle been
their low visitor numbers and difficulty attracting
Danes. However through careful promotion and
marketingandtheintroductionofDanishcontent
and teachings they should be able to remedy
these problems as they have many strengths and
opportunities.
SWOT

34
Introduction
A big part of project involved creating a new
responsive website for the Centre to make
it easier and more appealing to visitors and
enabling them to more easily sign up for classes.
The WordPress website was already setup from
a previous attempt at modernizing the website,
however it contained little content and was very
out of date. I proceeded to populate the site
using existing content from the current website
then cooperated with Adam Starr on the design.
WordPress
WordPress is a free open source content
management system (CMS). It is written in PHP
and provides the end user with an easy to use
visual interface to manage their website or blog.
WordPress allows real time updating of website
content from any web browser removing
the dependency on a specialised website
administrator to make changes.
The Centre's current site uses the Limon theme
which it adopted in 2012 but is now out of date,
as it is not responsive and the developers have no
plans to update it. So in order to support mobile
visitors it was decided it needed to be replaced.
As part of the transition to a new WordPress
theme, the Centre chose to use a responsive
theme known as Nimble developed by Elegant
themes. The Nordic KMC in Oslo (their head
centre) has a subscription to Elegant theme’s
theme collection and under the terms of use are
able to provide the theme to the Centre for free.
Child theme
WhencustomisingWordPressitisrecommended
to use a child theme (Elegant Themes / Nick
Roach. 2013). A child theme is a theme that
inherits the styling and functionality from the
parenttheme,inthiscasethechildthemeinherits
its styling from Nimble.
The reason for using a child theme over editing
Technical documentation
the styling (CSS) or functionality (PHP) of Nimble
directly is that when you update Nimble, you will
overwrite the changes. A child theme solves this
problem. The way a child theme works is that
it overrides the parent theme by being placed
higher in the file hierarchy than the parent.
WordPress uses the child theme and the child
borrows additional features and styling from the
parent theme.
In the Centre’s website I have used both a
custom style sheet and php files to override the
default features of Nimble. There are many built
in features of Nimble that the Centre wants to
remove or modify and this is the most effective
way of making lasting changes to the design.
These overrides, via the child theme, were also
used to customise the looks of various plugins,
especially Event Espresso.
Special WordPress
Pages
The Centre wanted to build a consistent feel
across all their pages and display multiple pages
on a single page so I created a series of special
templates (known as special pages) to achieve
this effect. A template in WordPress is a specific
file which tells WordPress how to render a page.
For example, the full-width template will apply
the full width styling to any pages with that
template applied. Traditionally a template file can
be applied to any number of pages, however only
one page Is displayed at a time.
Unlike traditional template files, these special
templates load multiple specific pages to be
displayed one after the other on a single page.
This allows for the easy creation of special full
width sections without complicated content
and styling overrides. The drawback being that
editing these pages is more difficult because
you need to know exactly which subpages are
displayed on each specific page. However once
this is known and a clear structure is defined, it is
just like editing any other WordPress page.

35
How it works
The above example shows a traditional full-width page template. This
one is the default Nimble template. However they all work basically
the same across all themes.
The special pages on the other hand behave differently.
(See Next page for example)

36
They tell the browser to load all the html and then to load a specific
page.
$query = new WP_query( ‘pagename=spec-aboutcentre’);
Here it tells WordPress that this page will use this template (which
is the full-width template) and display the spec-aboutcentre page.
Then in the next section it will repeat the process and this time load
the spec-aboutteachers page.

37
These special pages evolved during my website development to
be both a regular and special page in one template (reducing the
numberofpagesneededinWordPress). Soinsteadofjustloading
specific pages they load the content of the parent page first (the
first image) then in the next section it loads a specific page. This
came about as a result of experimenting whilst developing the
pages. It had soon become obvious that they were becoming a
bit too complicated, so by merging the two I made it simpler and
reduced the number of pages needed for the site.

38
In this example the about page loads its own content (the Centre)
followed by the about/aboutresidentteachers/ (note the nesting
under about/) and then the about/aboutteachers. To produce
what you see above.
Throughout the development I further refined the system to
include nesting of all the subpages under their relevant special
pages. This was to simplify the organisation and make it clear
which pages are associated with which.
For example, the ‘What’s On’ page has the classes, events and
studypagesnestedunderit.Andunderthesearetheirrespective
subpages including the special page which displays all the classes
and events pages.
This photo is my attempts at getting my head around the
complexity of this design and a way of keeping track of it as it
evolved.
In order to also keep track of these pages and the general design
I created a site map which is available in the appendix.
An explanation of the process is available in the appendix. special
page templates.docx

39
WordPress Plugins
In order to support many of the features of
WordPress that the Centre requires, a series of
WordPress plugins are used on the website.
A WordPress plugin is a program or set of
self contained functions written in PHP
which is designed to add specific features and
enhancements to the standard WordPress
website. Plugins vary hugely in functionality
and complexity with some adding entirely new
features to WordPress from E-Commerce
plugins, which enable the administrator to
manage an entire online shop, to very basic
plugins,whichjustdisableafeatureofWordPress
such as user comments on pages and posts.
Plugins should be used sparingly though and not
as a means of cutting corners. If something can
be coded into the theme, this is much better than
using a plugin and reduces the risk of problems
in the future with compatibility issues. (Shout me
Loud / Harsh Agrawal. 2016)
Plugins are a very important part of WordPress.
Therefore I reviewed the plugins used in the
current site and recommended some changes
for the new site, replacing some of the existing
plugins and introducing new ones.
A full list of the plugin’s used and their purpose is
available in the appendix - See plugin Analysis
Event manager analysis
Event management is the cornerstone of
the Centre’s website and basically the most
important function of the website. Therefore
the Centre needed the best event management
plugin available. As mentioned previously
the Centre will begin using Event Espresso
instead of Events Manager. This is based upon
a comprehensive analysis of all the major event
management plugins on the market. I analysed
the features offered by each plugin and came
to the conclusion that Event Espresso was far
superior to the others.
This analysis is available in the appendix.
Conclusion
Compared to a normal WordPress website, the
new design with the special pages is somewhat
complicated. Howeveritworkswellandachieves
the design the Centre wants. Importantly, once
someone understands the system, it is easy to
modify and update. The inclusion of a child theme
also future proofs the design, as it removes any
risk of the updates breaking the re-designed
theme.
I have also been careful to avoid using
unnecessary plugins to achieve design features
and I have aimed to minimize the number of
plugins used in the theme to reduce the risk of
compatibility problems in the future.

40
In order to attract people to the Centre and convert
them from website/social media users to actually
attending classes the correct communication is vital.
How and what the Centre says needs to be carefully
analysed in order to ensure their communication
has the maximum impact. The Centre already has
a communication plan, so I will only be offering
suggestions on how they can improve and expand it.
They need to carefully consider the way they are
communicating as communication has evolved
substantially in recent times from the traditional one-
way communication, as demonstrated by the Lasswell
model (Mcquail and Windahl, DM SW, 1993.) to the
two way communication, as demonstrated by the
Schramm's Model, that is common today and where
the reciver can also give feedback. (Business Topia.
2016).
Communication
channels
The Centre currently communicates in a series of
different ways and channels. Offline they only use
Posterstopromotemajorupcomingevents.Theyfocus
primarily on online communication mostly because
of the costs of traditional advertising. Alongside
the website they use their newsletter, Facebook,
Instagram, Meetup, Google+ and Pinterest. With the
main channels being the newsletter, Facebook and
Meetup.
More online discussion
The Centre could boost discussion across a range of
social media channels to build engagement and get
people more interested in them. The key to this is to
engage people in discussion and conversation and
breakawayfromthemonodirectionalcommunication
they presently engage in. Instead they need to focus
on getting users to reply and share their thoughts
and experiences. (Target Marketing / Larry Caretsky.
2014.)
This could be done in a range of ways across a range
of different social networks. Obviously, as this will
be time intensive, a time to benefits ratio must be
considered. Therefore I would recommend only
focusing on a couple of core social media networks
Social media communication Plan
and not trying to engage people across all of them
at present. It is also important to make sure they use
the media correctly. Different channels are suited to
different methods of communication and they should
be used accordingly. Finally, it’s important to ensure
their message is consistent and that they stick to the
plan.
Taking into account the limitations of the Centre’s
time and that that Facebook is shown, by far, to
be the most dominate social media network in
Denmark(Sociale medier / Mikael Danielsen. 2016.),
I will focus more on Facebook with a few suggestions
for the other channels.
Facebook
TheultimatepurposeofFacebookfortheCentreisto
attract new visitors to the site and build their online
presence. Although they have been fairly effective in
attracting people to their Facebook page they have
been less successful in turning these visitors into
actual customers.
Thismaybepartlydowntothenatureofthepostsand
the use of paid promotions to increase their visibility
and reach. Lots of their posts have high levels of paid
reach, yet significantly lower levels of engagement.
Take for example the below post which is typical of
most of their recent posts.

41
The reach is quite good, however very few of those people were
engaged by it with only 26 reactions.
Another interesting example is this post from the 1st of May:

42
Although like its predecessor it only attracted a small
number of likes, it attracted significantly larger user
engagement in terms of people viewing the photos.
The wording and lack of links in this post may be
part of the reason for the low number of link clicks.
However research suggests people like photos and
especially videos (Social Times / David Cohen. 2014)
Thesewouldbothbegreatwaystoboostengagement
in the future.
The deception that can be caused by post reach is
well demonstrated in the picture opposite. During
thetimeIwaswriting thisreportFacebooksuggested
9,871 people had been reached by their posts this
week with 227 engagements and not a single page
visit.
Post Reach is not necessarily a great measurement of
engagement as even if the person just scrolled past
your post it still counts as them having seen it. User
Engagement is much more effective as it means the
user took the time to like or share your post.
To address this problem and improve online
conversion and promote online discussion a range of
different approaches could be used.
Facebook reviews
Promoting and encouraging user reviews are a
great way of showing trustworthiness and showing
that people are actually engaged and enjoyed the
experience of the Centre enough to write a review
for everyone to see. Online reviews are generally
considered very trustworthy by users.(Econsultancy
/ Graham Charlton. 2015) and hence displaying
them might make people feel more comfortable
about attending classes and help change their
attitude towards the Centre. Online reviews could
be obtained after a big event by inviting people who
attended to write a review on Facebook or other
social media channels.
Facebook comments
and discussion
Encouraginguserstocommentonpostsisalsoagreat
way to generate discussion. Although you cannot
make people comment you can encourage them to by
asking questions and creating posts which provoke
discussion.
Videos and photos
Inordertoattractmorepeopleandboostengagement
I would recommend posting more photos from
courses and creating videos of things related to the
Centre (teaching’s, events, free course etc.). This
would be combined with the use of YouTube, which
I will touch on later. The use of these videos and
pictures will enable people to get more of a feel for
what the Centre offers and break down barriers
and preconceived notions towards Buddhism and
Meditation.
Instagram
On Instagram the Centre should focus on building
its brand by presenting a consistent visual identity
and the human face of the Centre (Wakefly /
Courtney Railing. 2016). Photos of attendee’s, the
administration and general day to day events will
help to show the human face of the Centre and break
down the barriers and stigma often associated with
Buddhism and Meditation.
In order to build their brand, having a consistent style
and type of images is important. (Wakefly / Courtney
Railing. 2016). To do this they should only use a small
range of filters and use these to create consistency
and connections between the photos. The same
applies to the use of hashtags, picking a series you
want to be known for and using them over and over
will build your brand.

43
New channels
The Centre should also diversify its online presence
with the creation of new social media channels. The
two I recommend further investigation into are
YouTube and a blog.
YouTube
Due to the success and popularity of YouTube
(TranslateMedia. 2016.) it would be beneficial for
the Centre to produce a series of videos, introducing
different aspects of the Centre along with key
members. This would serve to educate people about
what is on offer and make the Centre appear more
open and friendly. Also the ‘mere engagement’
theory suggests that the more familiar we are with
something the more likely we are to like it (Changing
Minds. 2016)
Blog
Blogging is a great tool for building engagement and
trust.Itisalsoexcellentforsearchengineoptimisation.
People are more trusting of blogs (Affilinet. 2015.)
and search engines love new original content (SEO
Site Checkup / Robin Burton. 2016) .
The Centre could use a blog to create discussion
about Meditation and Buddhism, promote upcoming
events and build interest in the Centre and what it
has to offer. Blog posts on meditation and Buddhism
could for example explain complex topics that people
may find challenging to understand. Through regular
blog posts on a range of topics (not just upcoming
events) they can drive more traffic to the website and
build interest in events by pointing out its benefits or
what people may gain. This is especially useful if it’s a
complex topic. They could also invite guest bloggers
from other centres and the NKT.
These blog posts would then also create additional
social media content as they could be shared onto
other channels.
As the Centre uses WordPress they do not need to
establish a third party blog because WordPress has
excellent built in blogging support. Also by using the
website to run the blog you will automatically pull
traffic to the website.
Other suggestions
Competitions
A good way of building engagement over social media
is by running competitions (Convert with Content /
Stephanie Frasco. 2013). By organising competitions,
in which users can win prizes, you can encourage
users to create content, comment or even just ‘like’
a post. In doing this you generate yourself more
publicity and build the engagement.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
IFTTT is a web service that can be used to link web
services together and save time and automate the
usage of these services. For example, IFTTT can
be used to automatically post a new blog post to
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram through the use of
custom scripts known as recipes. The use of IFTTT
could save the Centre a lot of time and coordinate the
various social media channels. (Business News Daily /
Sara Angeles. 2013)
Besides automating services IFTTT can also be used
for monitoring social media channels for certain
keywords or mentions of the Centre
Social media
conclusion
Although the Centre already has a communication
plan - as mentioned at the start of this section. My
research shows that they would probably benefit
by implementing various strategies to improve their
social media communication.
Because Facebook dominates social media in
Denmark and as Clear Light have limited resources
then they should primarily focus their attention
here. It’s important that they promote two way
discussion and get people to engage with the centre,
commenting, discussing and writing reviews. In doing
so they will build interest and improve the spread and
reach of their social media presence.
Meetup
The Centre is already using meetup quite effectively
and has been for years. My only recommendation for
meetup would be insuring there are nice high quality
and eye catching images of events. To give people an
idea of what to expect at events and encourage them
to come and try for themselves.

44
Aftercompletingthisprojectmycooperationwiththe
Clear Light Centre will carry on and I will continue to
improve the website in the future. In the immediate
future the focus will be on optimisation and ensuring
everythingfunctionscorrectly(thattherearenodead
pages, people can book events without problems etc).
The Danish version of the website will also be rolled
out as soon as possible once all the new content is
translated.
The new website will go live on the 21st of June, so
that Clear Light can begin promoting their autumn
program and ensure everything is functional before
the summer holidays. Anything not implemented by
this stage will be rolled out at a later date as part of
the ongoing improvement efforts.
These ongoing improvements will include a focus on
optimising the SEO and implementing a proper XML
sitemap and robots.txt file to ensure the site is as
search engine friendly as possible. The site currently
receives a score of 55/100 (Mobiles) and 69/100
(Desktops) on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This
should be improved, especially for mobiles, to make
the website load as quickly as possible to reduce the
risk of visitors being put off.
Once the design is completed I will also conduct a
series of user tests to ensure that we have created
the best possible solution for the Centre. I plan to
conduct an A/B test to see which approaches work
best and whether certain design choices would make
booking and accessing critical information easier. I
also plan to conduct another BERT test on the new
Future development
Also with the use of tools like IFTTT they can expand
that reach
The Centre should introduce a youtube channel and
start producing videos of classes and events. If people
can see what goes on without having to commit
themselves first then this will overcome the anxiety
and breakdown the barriers that many feel about
trying something new and it will in turn build trust in
the Centre.
The Centre should also consider creating a blog
which should be updated on at least a weekly basis.
This should include real time information, reports
into activities at the centre, insight into complex
topics and general discussion about Meditation,
Buddhism and what the Centre has to offer.
design and compare it to the results of the previous
test. Furthermore I would like to conduct something
between a ‘hallway test’ and a ‘think aloud test’ to see
how people get on using the website in its current
state. This is to assess how quickly and easily people
can access certain information on the site. Finally I
will also seek feedback from my fellow students at
KEA - an expert review, - as I have been working solo
and have had no feedback from other people with
web design/usability experience.
In the future I will also analyse the Google Analytic
results for the new website, however until the
website goes live this isn't really possible.

45
Conclusion
After research into a range of areas affecting the Clear Light Centre’s
online presence, I have formed a series of suggestions about the best
ways to tackle the problem of converting online visitors into a physical
presence at the Centre.
The central pillar of this will be their new website, with its focus on
being mobile phone friendly. It will improve the usability for mobile
visitors and increase the chances that they will book places at a class
or event. Of course, further analysis is needed to determine exactly
how effective the new website will be at this task. But my analysis of
the current website revealed this was what most visitors set out to
do. So having simplified the process of booking events and enabling
people to easily find information should aid in this.
Once the website is completed there should also be a focus on
improving the Danish language content and the SEO to attract even
more visitors.
However, simplifying the process of booking events is only one part of
the equation, the Centre also needs to try and make their offerings as
attractive as possible. Having analysed and compared other centres
in Copenhagen and gathered information about people’s perception
of the Centre’s current offering, I would recommend improving the
Centre’s offerings by introducing pre-class online courses (This
proved to be popular with respondents to my survey).
The Centre should offer more online material in general, alongside
setting up a library and improving their bookshop. Furthermore they
should aim to introduce different levels of membership (eg. Students)
and expand the number of options available to members to make it
even more attractive.
Finally, Social Media is an extremely important tool in promoting
the Centre. Clear Light needs to review the way they are currently
using Social media, which channels they are using and how much
these are being accessed. All of these areas could be optimized with
the introduction of more videos and images from the Centre along
with careful attention being paid to the effectiveness of the social
media content being produced in promoting discussion and two-
way communication. By asking users questions and gathering user
feedback it will engage people and make the centre appear more open
and accessible and also give the Centre instant feedback so that they
can refresh or enhance their classes and online appearance to make
themselves more appealing.
Overall the Centre is in a strong position with their new website
underway, their committed team of teachers, location and
marketing strategies. Hopefully by implementing some or all of the
recommendations in this report and further improving the website
they can continue to grow and attract new attendees.

46
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49
Appendix
1. Plugin Analysis
2. Event Manager Plugin Analysis
3. Special page templates
4. Survey questions
5. Survey results
6. Site map

50
Plugins used in the current
website
The Centre uses a range of plugins within their
WordPress website, as mentioned previously. Here
Is a list of the plugins currently used in the website
and a brief explanation of their purpose.
Custom Contact Forms – This is used to create the
contact form used on the ‘Contact us’ page.
Events Manager Pro – This is the event management
plugin used to handle event promotion and
registration.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – This provides
limited Google Analytics information on the
WordPress Dashboard.
Disable comments – This does exactly what the name
suggests. It removes all comment features from
WordPress.
Newsletter Sign-Up – This is used to handle
newsletter signups on the front page. The centre
produces a newsletter via ‘Mail chimp’ to promote
upcoming events.
Page Links To– This simple plugin provides the option
to force a page to redirect to another page.
qTranslate-X – This is the successor to qTranslate. It
provides the website’s language switching options
enabling both a Danish and English version of pages.
UberMenu 3 – This provides an alternative more
advanced menu to WordPress and is used to manage
the main navigation on the current website.
WP FullCalendar – This provides an extended
calendar feature to Events Manager. Providing a
nicer interface.
WP Smush – This is used to optimise all WordPress
images to improve performance.
WP Social Icons -This provides the social networking
icons located on the front page.
WP Super Cache – This provides enhanced cache
Plugin Analysis
features to WordPress to improve the website’s
speed and load time.
Yoast SEO – Yoast is an advanced SEO plugin for
WordPress. It provides features on each page to
improve the pages individual SEO and it also gives
you more control, of your SEO, site wide.
Yoast SEO & qTranslate-X – This creates a bridge
between Yoast SEO and qTranslate-X making it easier
to perform multi-lingual SEO.
Plugins to be used in the new
website
Although many of the plugins currently used in
the Centre’s website are very useful, I would still
recommend replacing some of them in the new
website with alternatives which would provide
enhancements and new features to further improve
the website. I would however advocate avoiding non-
essential plugins because it is recommended to not
use more plugins than necessary as they can cause
instability and reduce performance.
The following plugins should be replaced or removed
entirely. Any plugins not listed here will continue
as usual.
Events Manager Pro – This will be replaced by
Event Espresso as it will provide even better event
management features. (See the Event management
plugin analysis).
WP FullCalendar – This is linked to Events manager
and therefore is no longer needed.
UberMenu 3 – The decision to only use a very simple
menu has removed the need for this plugin.
WP Social Icons -This has been replaced by Ultimate
Social Media which offers even more functionality.
New Plugins to be introduced
Event Espresso – To replace Events Manager - (see
the events manager analysis for further details). –
N.B. This is the full version of Event Espresso which
includes all of the E4 add-ons which appear as

51
separate plugins on this list within WordPress.
WP Smush – Smush is an image optimisation plugin
that can further compress any images when they are
uploaded. It can be useful to prevent people from
uploading unnecessarily large images and it also
helps boost page load times by optimising all images.
MailChimp for WordPress – this replaces the
NewsletterSign-Upplugin,offeringabetterinterface
and more direct signups.
Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)
– This plugin is used to display the social media links
in the footer. It was decided to use a plugin rather
than hardcoding them to make them easier to change
and place elsewhere if required.
SolidCodeThemeEditor–Thisisacodeeditingplugin
that provides similar functionality to a text (source
code) editor used on your desktop. It’s designed to
make it simpler to edit WordPress files from within
WordPress. AlthoughWordPresshasabuiltineditor,
this is a pure text editor and is comparable to trying to
make a website in notepad.

52
Introduction
Event management is a major part of the CLKBC’s
website and they therefore need an event
management plugin that will make the process of
creating, promoting and managing events as easy as
possible.
Currently the centre uses Events Manager which
has worked well for 2+ years, although they have
experienced some problems with the plugin’s PayPal
integration with people unable to pay. They did
attempt to replace Events Manager with Eventbrite
to allow them greater control and easier bookings,
but after some months this proved unsuccessful
and they went back to using Events Manager. This
was partly because of technical problems and partly
because they didn’t want people leaving the centres
domain. And by directing them to Event Brite you are
taking them away from the centre’s web presence not
towards it.
I have therefore analysed the different event
management plugins available for WordPress and
come up with recommendations on how to best
manage their events and sale of tickets.
The list of plugins I chose to analyse is based upon
three reviews of the top event management plugins.
The 5 best Event Management plugins for
WordPress - www.tribalcafe.co.uk
Events Management On WordPress: The Top 5
Plugins – www.ivycat.com
Spread The Word: 8 of the Best WordPress Events
Plugins - www.elegantthemes.com/blog
NB: All prices are in USD.
Event management
plugin criteria
The following criteria were used when picking a
plugin:
Event management
plugin analysis
• Price
• Calendar support
• Payment options including PayPal, credit card and
mobile pay.
• Coupon options
• ICal & Gcal Export
• Responsive Design
• Social media integration
• Learning curve and ease of use.
Events Manager
Events Manager offers a wide range of features out
of the box and its premium version supports some
payment options without any additional costs. As
the Centre currently use this plugin, there would
obviously be no learning curve to get used to it.
However, the main drawback of Events Manager is
the difficult learning curve to begin with making it
harder for someone else to take over.
Price: 75 USD one off (1 year of premium support)
+ Currently used – no learning curve.
+ Calendar support + additional free plugin with
improved calendar.
+ Coupon options
+ iCal&Gcal Export
+ Confirmation emails
÷ Challenging for beginners.
÷ Lacks social media integration
Event Espresso
Event Espresso is a feature rich event management
plugin with an easy to use user interface, which aims
to make the process simpler and more intuitive. This
inturnsreducesthelearningcurveandmakesiteasier
for beginners. This functionality can be dramatically
expanded with a wide range of add-ons for the plugin.
Priced from $69.95 (basic) to $279.95 (for all the
features). Both include 1 year of support.
+ Calendar support
+ Many payment options via add-ons
+ Social media integration + extra social media
options via add-on.

53
+ Offers discount for non-for profit. https://
eventespresso.com/contact/non-profit-discounts/
+ iCal&Gcal Export
+ Easy to use
+ Confirmation emails
Events Planner
Events Planner has many great features, however they
offer no free version. The pro version does not include
all the features they offer which are only available in
the advanced version. Events Planner does however
offer features not seen in other plugins like Mail chimp
integration.
Prices from $59 ( basic version) to $99 ( advanced
version). Both include 1 year of support.
+ Calendar support
+Payment options
+Coupon options
÷ Lacks social media integration
The Events Calendar
The Event Calendar (by Modern Tribe) offers all the
standard features of an event management plugin with
a slightly higher price tag than its main competitors. It
also has a range of premium add-ons to further extend
functionality. Modern Tribe also offer free pro versions
to approved non for profit organisations.
Prices from $89 (basic version) to $399 (pro version with
all plugins included).
+ Payment options via premium add-on
+ Calendar support
+ Improved calendar via premium add-on.
+ Facebook integration via premium add-on
+ iCal&Gcal Export
÷ Expensive
Core Calendar - Timely
Timely is also more calendar focused than Event
Management; however, it supports all the necessary
features. It also offers one thing that the others do not.
It offers a free version with the option to buy only the
premium features you require, although due to their high
price tags it would not make sense if you wanted more
than one.
The price is $94 per year for the full version.
+ Calendar support
+ iCal&Gcal Export
+ Social media integration
÷ It’s more focused on Calendar than event
management meaning it lacks some features.
÷ No built in payment options.
Others
As there is a vast range of plugins available for
WordPress event management I do not have
time to look into all of them and compare features
and weigh up the pros and cons. Therefore, I
only choose to review the most feature filled
and relevant plugins. There are however some
others that maybe useful in support of the event
management plugins mentioned above or as an
alternative way of managing this aspect of the
site.
Google Calendar Events
This simple Google Calendar plugin has excellent
Google Calendar integration (as the name
suggests) it is able to automatically display events
from one or more Google calendars onto your
page. This could be useful as the suggestion has
been raised in the past of using Google Calendar
to manage the calendar instead of a WordPress
plugin. This plugin therefore would bridge the
gap.
Ticket Tailor
This plugin, unlike the event management plugins
listed above, is purely focused on ticket sales. This
might be useful if it was decided to use Google
Calendar instead of an event management plugin
because this plugin then could handle all the
ticket sales. This would also serve as a solution to
the clip card sales problem.
Woo Commerce
WooCommerceisadedicatedE-commerceplugin
for WordPress and is considered one of their
leading e-commerce plugins. Woo Commerce
would bring with it the option to also operate an
online shop for the Centre. Furthermore, as they
would like to use Mobile pay there is an add-on to
Woo Commerce, which would enable people to
pay via mobile pay.
Conclusion
Afterlookingintotherangeofeventmanagement
plugins available for WordPress and factoring in
ClearLight’scoreneeds: aCalendar,awiderange
of payment options and a responsive design, I
came to the conclusion that the best solution

54
for the CLKBC would be to use Event Espresso
combined with Woo Commerce for the opportunity
to easily sell clip cards and support mobile pay.
Event Espresso’s simple to use interface will make it
easytosetupandmanageeventsandenablesomeone
else to take over the event management in the future
if needed. By using Woo Commerce to sell the clip
cards and to support mobile pay this will make selling
the clip cards cleaner and easier to manage and
enable them to sell other things online in the future.
Furthermore, with Event Espresso’s social media
integrationitwouldenablepeopletosharetheevents
on social media boosting the awareness of upcoming
events and attracting more people.
References:
Tribalcafe / Gary Fox. 2015. The 5 best Event
Management plugins for WordPress . [ONLINE]
Available at: https://www.tribalcafe.co.uk/5-best-
event-management-plugins-wordpress. [Accessed
24 May 2016].
Ivycat / Tom Ewer. 2015. Events Management On
WordPress:TheTop5Plugins.[ONLINE]Availableat:
https://ivycat.com/wordpress-events-management-
plugins. [Accessed 24 May 2016].
Elegant Themes / Joe Fylan. 2015. Spread The Word:
8 of the Best WordPress Events Plugins. [ONLINE]
Available at: https://www.elegantthemes.com/
blog/tips-tricks/spread-the-word-8-of-the-best-
wordpress-events-plugins. [Accessed 24 May 2016].

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