Knowledge Finder was born from ULI’s commitment to provide members access to ULI content, to deliver a better member experience, and to further knowledge sharing across the global network of members that is core to ULI’s mission. And in just eight short months since launching, Knowledge Finder quickly became the most popular of the three member tools. By the end of FY21, visitors increased by more than 285 percent over the previous fiscal year, with more 115,000 unique users. There were 300,000-plus page views, 80,000-plus video plays, and 27,000-plus downloads attributed to these unique users—which significantly exceeded expectations and demonstrated the value derived by members worldwide.
In addition to a steady stream of new and returning users, new content was added at a strong pace, averaging 15 pieces per week throughout the fiscal year. Most of Knowledge Finder’s content is available exclusively to ULI members; however, nonmembers are permitted access to key pieces of grant-funded or industry-critical content, hence, more visitors than members.
Beyond the great response and positive feedback from members, Knowledge Finder also won its fourth Communicator Award from the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts in May 2021. This year’s award recognized the Knowledge Finder monthly digest emails that deliver content matching each member’s self-identified interests with recently published content from Knowledge Finder.
FY21 Enhancements
Throughout the fiscal year, new content types and features were released to make Knowledge Finder an even more powerful tool for members around the world.
ULI Learning Courses, Virtual Tours, and Podcasts were added as new content types, joining the existing types of Books, Case Studies, Events Library, Reading Lists, Reports, Videos, and Webinars. With these new additions, Knowledge Finder rounded out its offerings to enable members to search and discover nearly all content types delivered across the organization.
Multilingual capabilities were first introduced with the launch of Japanese translations of the full site in fall 2020. By summer 2021, new languages were added, including Chinese, French, German, and Spanish. This significant capability enables ULI’s global membership to unlock best practices and knowledge from other members around the world, regardless of which of these languages the content originated in.
Another new feature that debuted in FY21 was the ability to search within podcasts, videos, and webinars by keyword or phrase. This ability is powered by cutting-edge technology, which machine-transcribes the audio files and allows members to search and fast-forward to the exact moments within over 1,200 hours of webinars, videos, and podcasts.
And finally, the latest new feature introduced in summer 2021 was the ability for members to save key pieces of ULI content to their own personal libraries. This feature enables members to save the content that most interests them and revisit their collections whenever they like.
ULI continues to expand the award-winning Knowledge Finder with hundreds of pieces of new content and features to come in FY22. To learn more and to see what is coming next, visit Knowledge Finder’s About page.
