Case Study: Association of Accounting Technicians achieves increased member engagement and SEO gains with Higher Logic Vanilla

How AAT Facilitates the Learning of Accounting Skills Using Vanilla

The Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) is a London‑based non‑profit membership body with over 130,000 members worldwide that provides accounting and finance qualifications and short courses. Faced with a decade‑old forum platform that had security issues, functionality failures and declining member satisfaction, AAT wanted reliable hosting and support, a mobile‑friendly, brandable, searchable forum with modern features and the ability to own and grow their data. After evaluation, they selected the hosted cloud offering from Higher Logic Vanilla.

Higher Logic Vanilla migrated AAT to its hosted Vanilla platform, implementing redirects, a mobile‑friendly design, an advanced search add‑on and API integrations to surface forum content across AAT’s site. The move restored and grew engagement and SEO: AAT saw a 10% increase in organic search traffic, 8% more unique users, 35% more pageviews, 22% more pages per session, and session‑duration gains of 28% overall (20% on mobile, 35% on tablet), alongside steady increases in new user onboarding.

Association of Accounting Technicians

Stuart Waterman

Online Community Manager