How we designed and built a content-managed website, a lead-capture and CRM backend, email-verified gated resources and an interactive culture diagnostic for an Indian leadership development consultancy.
Arise needed more than a brochure site. JMDA delivered a platform that presents the consultancy's thinking, captures and qualifies enquiries from five entry points, gates premium content behind verified emails, and gives the founder one dashboard to run it all without a developer.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Client | Arise, the leadership development practice of founder and lead facilitator Kalyani Kumar |
| Audience | CHROs, HR heads, L&D leaders and business heads in Indian organisations |
| Engagement | End-to-end design, development, deployment and ongoing enhancement |
| Scope | Public website · content management dashboard · lead capture and CRM · email OTP verification · gated resources · culture diagnostic · seasonal campaign micro-site |
| Stack | Python, Django 6.1, PostgreSQL, Bootstrap 5, vanilla JavaScript, Apache on AWS EC2, Gmail SMTP, WhatsApp API |
Arise helps organisations build the leadership capability their business needs next. It designs programmes, coaching and talent strategy around the real context of a company's people, so change shows up in day-to-day behaviour and business results, not just in attendance sheets.
Arise is led by Kalyani Kumar, who has spent 23 years in learning and development. Her career includes building the L&D function from scratch at BNP Paribas India Solutions as the organisation grew from 600 to 4,000 people, leading L&D for all BNP Paribas entities in India alongside the CEO's leadership team, and seven years running Asia Pacific and global leadership initiatives at MSCI. The business is founder-led and expertise-led: credibility, a clear point of view and quick, personal responses win work, and the platform had to carry all three.
Arise sells high-value, consultative B2B engagements. A typical sale starts with an HR or business leader recognising a problem (new managers struggling, a leadership team not aligned, a culture drifting during growth), continues through a discovery conversation, and ends in a tailored programme. The website is the top of the sales funnel: it must help a visitor recognise their problem, trust Arise's approach and start a conversation.
100-day learning journeys for aspiring, first-time, mid-level and senior leaders, built around leading self, leading others and leading the business.
Leadership team workshops, problem-solving sessions and visioning offsites using tools such as Belbin Team Roles and Six Thinking Hats.
One-to-one executive coaching, peer coaching circles and Hogan assessments for leaders stepping into bigger roles.
Turning values into everyday behaviour, culture pathways through growth or restructuring, and evidence-based selection.
Every Arise programme is built on its proprietary 3i model: personal awareness (Identity), interpersonal effectiveness (Influence) and the ability to create the conditions for others to succeed (Inspiration). Together they produce integrated leadership.
We built the model into the home page as an interactive element (hover or tap a circle to explore), so a visitor meets Arise's thinking before they meet its services.
Arise's buyers rarely search for “leadership training”. They search because something is going wrong. We modelled the site around these buying triggers and mapped each one to the service that answers it. The same mapping powers the “What are you working on?” chooser on the Services page.
| Buyer trigger (what the HR leader is living with) | Routed to |
|---|---|
| “Our new managers are struggling.” · “Our middle and senior leaders aren't keeping pace with our growth.” · “Our engagement survey keeps pointing to our managers.” | Leadership & management development |
| “Our leadership team isn't aligned and our teams work in silos.” · “We need fresh thinking on a tough business problem.” · “We need help shaping a vision for the next three to five years.” | Facilitation & offsites |
| “A talented leader's style is getting in the way.” · “A leader is stepping into a bigger role.” · “We've hired a senior leader who needs to land well.” | Executive & peer coaching |
| “We're growing, merging or restructuring and losing what made us special.” · “Our values are on the wall, not in behaviour.” · “We have high attrition or too many hires don't work out.” | Culture & talent advisory |
Owns the people agenda; needs credible evidence and a partner who understands business context. Typical first touch: Culture Tension Scan or a practical guide.
Designs capability programmes; wants modular journeys and measurable outcomes. Typical first touch: the learning-journey builder.
Feels the problem in results; wants speed and a personal conversation. Typical first touch: discovery call booking or WhatsApp.
When a business's main asset is one expert's time, every hour spent updating a website, chasing an enquiry or emailing a PDF is an hour not spent with clients. The platform had to solve six business problems.
The old presence described services but didn't help a visitor recognise their own problem or take a next step. Arise needed pages that diagnose before they sell and a clear call to action on every page.
Prospects arrive with different intent: ready to book a call, wanting to send a detailed brief, after a free tool, or just curious. Each needed its own low-friction path, and all of them had to land in one place.
A name and an email aren't enough for a consultative sale. Arise needed team size, role, area of interest, preferred reply channel and, for diagnostics, the prospect's own culture pattern and priorities.
Arise's practical guides are a strong lead magnet, but only if the email behind each download is real. The gate had to verify the email in seconds and never feel like a hurdle.
Services, blogs, FAQs, testimonials, company details and the founder's story all change. The founder needed to edit them herself, with SEO-friendly URLs, ordering and publish/unpublish control.
In consulting, the first reply often wins the work. Arise needed to know the moment a lead arrived, with the full context, and be able to reply directly from the inbox.
Help the right HR leader recognise their problem, trust Arise's approach and start a conversation, and give Arise everything it needs to make that conversation count.
JMDA ran the engagement in five phases. Each one turned business understanding into a concrete design decision before any code was written.
Mapped Arise's services, the founder's story and the buyer: an HR leader with a specific, often urgent people problem. Decision: a problem-first page structure (“Does this sound familiar?”, “What are you working on?”) rather than a services catalogue.
Designed visitor journeys for each intent level and one unified lead data model behind them. Decision: a single lead table classified by category; separate forms tuned for booking, detailed enquiry, resources, diagnostic and sign-up.
Built the platform as independent Django apps: public site, CMS and leads, users, alerts, campaigns. Decision: content changes never touch code; campaign features can be added or removed without disturbing the core.
Deployed on AWS EC2 behind Apache with PostgreSQL, a custom domain, transactional email and WhatsApp messaging. Decision: Indian time zone everywhere; SEO metadata, canonical URLs and Open Graph tags on public pages.
Added lead magnets and seasonal engagement over time: gated resources, the Culture Tension Scan, a newsletter and the Diwali “Light a Diya” wall. Decision: each new feature plugs into the same lead pipeline and dashboard, so the CRM grows richer with every release.
The platform is a server-rendered Django application split into focused apps. Visitors use a fast, SEO-friendly public website; the Arise team uses a secure dashboard; both share one PostgreSQL database.
Home · About · Services · Service detail · Blogs · Contact · Resources · Culture Tension Scan.
Content CRUD · lead capture APIs · email OTP · signed downloads · lead views by category.
Email identity, mobile login, role master, user records, duplicate and phone checks.
Light-a-Diya wall + JSON API · rate limiting · spam blocking · date-driven home popup.
post_save signals on lead tables · background email with Reply-To visitor · hourly flood cap.
URL namespaces · templates · media & static · IST time zone · multi-account email config.
The public site only reads content; all writing happens in the dashboard or the lead APIs. This keeps public pages simple and fast to render.
Campaigns (Diwali) and notifications (alerts) live in their own apps and hook into the core through Django signals and template tags, so they can be switched on or off cleanly.
Django templates deliver complete HTML with meta titles, descriptions, keywords and canonical URLs, which matters for a consultancy found by search.
The public site is written to diagnose before it sells. The home page opens with the problems HR leaders recognise (“Managers expected to lead, not just deliver”, “Leadership capability not keeping pace with growth”) before introducing Arise's approach, its four services and the 3i model.
| Content area | What the team controls |
|---|---|
| Services | Name, description, image, display order, active/inactive, SEO title, description and keywords. The URL slug is regenerated automatically when the name changes. |
| Blogs | Title, date, rich description (rendered from Markdown), image, publish toggle, SEO fields, automatic slug. |
| About us | Story, founder image, vision, mission and values (heading plus description for each). |
| FAQs | Landing-page FAQs and contact/service FAQs, each with its own display order and linked to a page type or service. |
| Testimonials | Name, quote, photo, display order. |
| Company details | Phone, email, address and six social profile links used across the site. |
| Users & roles | Team members with role, contact details and state (from a validated list of Indian states and union territories), with duplicate email and mobile checks. |
The commercial heart of the platform. Five public entry points, each tuned to a different level of buyer intent, write to one unified lead table. Every lead is classified automatically so the team sees exactly where it came from.
| Entry point | Visitor intent | What we capture |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery call booking (home page) | Ready to talk | Name, company, role, work email, phone, area of interest (5 options), team size band, preferred time slot |
| Contact enquiry (contact page) | Has a specific brief | Name, company, role, email, phone, topic (7 options), message of at least 10 characters, preferred reply channel (Email, WhatsApp or Phone), explicit consent |
| Resource download | Researching, wants practical help | Name, company, verified email, which resource they asked for |
| Culture Tension Scan | Self-diagnosing a culture issue | Name, company, email, their resulting culture pattern and top priorities |
| Updates sign-up | Interested, early stage | Email (duplicates skipped automatically) |
Arise's five practical guides (3-3-3, What Your Team Isn't Telling You, One-on-ones: the meeting you shouldn't cancel, Ask This, Not That and The Scorecard Audit) are offered in exchange for a verified work email:
Arise's most distinctive lead magnet: a roughly 10-minute self-assessment for HR leaders that shows where their culture pulls in two directions, how well it fits their strategy and where to start in the next 90 days. It runs entirely in the browser for instant feedback; when the prospect saves results, the platform stores their contact details with their culture pattern and top priorities. Before the first call, the consultant already knows the prospect's culture tension.
manage.py leadalerts_test previews or test-sends every alert type.Much of the value of the platform sits in its business rules: they decide what counts as a good lead, how content behaves and how the system protects itself.
| Category | Meaning | Sources and stored context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contact or discovery conversation | Booking form (team size and time slot), contact form (message and reply preference), and manual dashboard entry |
| 2 | Resource download | Requested resource title stored with the lead |
| 3 | Culture Tension Scan | Culture pattern result and the prospect's priorities |
| 4 | Updates sign-up | Email only; one record per email |
| Verification & protection rule | Value |
|---|---|
| OTP length and source | 6 digits from a cryptographically secure random generator |
| OTP validity | 10 minutes |
| Minimum gap between OTP sends | 60 seconds |
| Maximum attempts per code | 5, after which the code is discarded |
| Download link lifetime | 7 days, signed with a dedicated salt |
| Lead alert flood cap | 30 per hour; leads are always saved |
| Diya wall rate limit | 10 per visitor per 10 minutes; latest 240 shown |
Every saved lead passes through the same logic: new lead saved (post_save signal) → wait for commit → category enabled? (no: skip, lead kept) → more than 30 leads this hour? (yes: pause alerts, send one notice) → classify lead kind (discovery / contact / resource / scan / sign-up) → build message (fields, IST time, sanitised input, Reply-To) → send in background (20 s timeout, logged). Saving the lead never depends on the email succeeding.
Controlled option lists (topics, team sizes, slots, reply channels) give Arise clean, comparable data for every lead, ready for reporting and future scoring.
The fields asked for match the questions a consultant asks in a discovery call, so the conversation starts further along.
The email account that sends verification codes is the one resource the funnel can't run without; flood caps and throttling keep it healthy.
The data model is organised around three business domains: content the visitor reads, leads the business acts on, and people who run the platform.
Every lead lands in Contact_details with a category. The team sees one timeline of demand, one alert pipeline serves all channels, and new lead magnets plug in without schema sprawl.
Leads link to a company record found or created automatically, case-insensitively. Multiple contacts from one organisation roll up together: the beginning of account-based selling.
Built on Django's auth framework, using email as identity and a unique mobile number for dashboard login, with names normalised and full name derived automatically.
Words and names are kept only when shared; a derived visible_words property decides what appears publicly, and moderators can hide words without deleting data.
Not every visitor is ready to book a call. The platform offers a “next step” at every level of readiness and routes them all into the same pipeline.
An HR head searching for help with struggling first-time managers lands on the home page and sees her exact problem described in the first section.
She downloads One-on-ones: the meeting you shouldn't cancel. A 6-digit code arrives, she verifies, the PDF downloads. A category-2 lead is created and Arise is alerted.
A week later she takes the Culture Tension Scan and saves her result. Arise now knows her culture pattern and priorities (category 3).
She builds a learning journey for her managers and books a discovery call, choosing team size 51–200 and a morning slot (category 1).
Kalyani receives the alert, sees the earlier download and scan result under the same company, and replies from her inbox the same morning.
A lead platform handles personal contact details and publishes visitor-generated content. These are the protective measures built into the platform's flows.
leadalerts_test) offers status, preview and test-send modes, and a plain-language configuration file lets a non-developer change who receives alerts and which lead types trigger them.A mature, widely supported stack keeps hosting costs low for a small business and makes the platform easy for any Python team to maintain.
| Layer | Technology | Why we chose it |
|---|---|---|
| Backend framework | Python · Django 6.1 | Batteries included: authentication, ORM, migrations, CSRF protection, signing, admin and signals out of the box. |
| Database | PostgreSQL | Reliable relational store for content, leads and users, with room to grow into analytics. |
| Frontend | Django templates · Bootstrap 5.3 · vanilla JavaScript · Bootstrap Icons | Server-rendered for SEO and speed; lightweight JavaScript for the scan, OTP flow, journey builder and AJAX forms. |
| Content formatting | Markdown (custom template filter) | Lets the team write rich blog content without HTML. |
| Gmail SMTP via a multi-account email utility | Transactional OTP codes and lead alerts; more sending accounts can be added in configuration. | |
| Messaging | WhatsApp messaging API · click-to-chat links | WhatsApp is the preferred business channel in India; context-aware CTAs on every page. |
| Hosting | AWS EC2 · Apache with mod_wsgi | Predictable cost and full control; custom domain arise.org.in. |
| Localisation | Asia/Kolkata time zone · Google Translate widget | Times in IST in alerts and dashboards; content reachable in regional languages. |
The platform changed how Arise wins work: from a static presence to a front office that attracts, qualifies and alerts on its own.
Every enquiry, download, scan and sign-up sits in one table, classified by intent and grouped by company, instead of being spread across inboxes and spreadsheets.
Team size, role, area of interest, preferred reply channel and Culture Scan results arrive with the lead, so the first call starts from the prospect's context.
Real-time alerts with one-click reply mean the founder can answer a hot lead within minutes, wherever she is.
Email verification on gated content filters out fake and mistyped addresses before they enter the pipeline.
Services, blogs, FAQs, testimonials and company details are updated from the dashboard in minutes, with SEO metadata and clean URLs handled automatically.
New lead magnets and seasonal campaigns such as the Diwali wall launch as self-contained modules, without risk to the core site.
| Business need | Capability delivered |
|---|---|
| Generate qualified B2B enquiries | Five intent-matched capture channels; qualification fields; problem-first content |
| Grow an addressable audience | Gated resources, Culture Tension Scan and newsletter sign-up feeding the CRM |
| Respond before competitors | Instant, context-rich alerts with direct reply; WhatsApp CTAs |
| Run without a developer | 19-screen CMS dashboard; editable configuration for alerts |
| Build brand and thought leadership | Interactive 3i model, founder story, blogs, practical guides, seasonal engagement |
With a unified lead pipeline in place, the natural next step is to turn that data into insight. JMDA proposes the following data and AI roadmap.
| Initiative | What it does | Value for Arise |
|---|---|---|
| Lead pipeline & status | Add stage, owner, follow-up date and source tracking (UTM, referrer) to every lead; a lead timeline per company. | A true sales pipeline and visibility into which channels bring revenue. |
| Lead scoring | Score leads on category, team size, job title, company and resource-download history. | Focus the founder's time on the highest-value prospects first. |
| Personalised scan reports | Store the full Culture Scan responses and generate a tailored PDF report and service recommendation with AI. | A premium, shareable deliverable that pre-sells the right engagement. |
| AI-drafted first replies | Draft a personalised response to each enquiry in Arise's voice, for the founder to review and send. | Minutes-level response time with a consistent, high-quality tone. |
| Journey-to-proposal | Turn the learning-journey builder's selections into a draft programme outline and proposal. | Shorter sales cycle from interest to proposal. |
| Analytics dashboard | Leads by channel, service interest, company size and month; conversion from download to scan to call. | Data-driven marketing decisions. |
| Platform hardening | Environment-based secrets, role-based permissions, a dedicated transactional email service, automated tests and CI/CD. | Enterprise-grade operations as the business scales. |
For a consultancy, the real moat is understanding clients' problems better than anyone else. Each Culture Scan, download and enquiry is a data point about what Indian organisations struggle with in leadership. Captured and analysed well, that data becomes Arise's market intelligence, and the basis of its next programmes.
We'll build the platform that brings you the right conversations.
This case study describes a platform designed and developed by JMDA Analytic Pvt Ltd for Arise (arise.org.in). Client names and service descriptions are used with reference to the client's public website. Figures describe the delivered system's scope and configuration.