Nova Scotia Power Builds a Foundation for Digital Success with Sitefinity

On September 7, 2019, Hurricane Dorian ripped through Nova Scotia. Leaving a path of devastation in its wake, the storm uprooted trees and left boats scattered across the province’s rocky shoreline.

The damage caused by the hurricane left more than 400,000 Nova Scotians without electricity. Nova Scotia Power (NSP), the regional power utility/electricity company, leapt into action immediately.


They deployed emergency crews to restore power to their 520,000 residential and commercial customers. Less than two days later, most of the province had its power back.

Customers were able to use their website to get service updates and to report outages. While the website handled the traffic surge without issue, the hurricane highlighted the importance of having a reliable, responsive and secure digital experience—especially during a disaster.

NSP’s website was built on an old legacy platform that made it difficult to quickly build an experience that went beyond customer expectations.

Drawing inspiration from leaders like Amazon, Nova Scotia Power envisioned delivering experiences that revolved around customer value. To bring this digital transformation to life, NSP worked with digital agency SilverTech to create a roadmap that focused on:

·      Delivering easy, effective and personal customer experiences

·      Streamlining operations to deliver customer value

·      Innovating at the intersection of experience and operations

·      Building platforms that accelerate and scale the delivery of new experiences

After considering Sitecore, Kentico and Drupal, NSP went with Progress® Sitefinity®. Simply put, Sitefinity was the best fit for the project’s objectives on both the business and system level, because of how easy it is to manage multiple sites, create personalized and engaging content and develop connected, cross-channel touchpoints.

One big advantage Sitefinity brought to the table was ease of integration with critical data sources and business apps. NSP wanted to standardize on a system that could use that data to deliver tailored, relevant experiences while maintaining brand consistency.

SilverTech and NSP focused on several key areas for the new site, including optimizing site search through enhanced sitemap, search and navigation capabilities.

But the biggest highlights revolved around the tight integration between Sitefinity and third-party data sources and apps. For example, the “MyAccount” section of the site taps into a utility-specific account management platform.

The homepage features a new interactive display called “Today’s Power,” which shows customers personalized view highlighting where their energy is coming from. Sitefinity pulls this data from various sources in real time and creates a visualized view of  them. With NSP moving toward renewable energy, this graphic highlights NSP’s commitment in an engaging way.

The new site has been live for less than a year, and it has already had a large impact, achieving:

·      42% increase in new users

·      12% increase in organic traffic

·      52% decrease in bounce rate

·      91% increase in page views of the MyAccount portal section of site

Moving forward, continuing to evolve their digital transformation is a key priority, including implementing chatbots and continuing to personalize content based on visitor data.