Personalize Content by Your Visitor's Current Weather Conditions

Over the past couple of years this need has come up in more and more of my demos and I decided to formalize some demo-ware code I had written previously.

Personalization based on weather isn't a new idea. There's some weather integration in the Alloy Demo Kit repo and I have seen weather personalization in other demos. However, it's high time this was just as easy and available as any other criteria samples.

Once you start to propose the idea - and start building it - the number of cases for this personalization start to grow dramatically.


Here are some use-cases I've collected:

1. B2B Supplier Scenario

This is where my own weather-personalization adventure started.

Imagine you are a B2B organization selling roofing supplies. How critical are weather conditions to your business? Very bloody important!

When the weather is sunny, there's a happy medium pace to sales. People are building houses and houses need roofs and so you sell some supplies.

Then the storm hits! Suddenly, instead of 2-3 houses being built or repaired in a neighborhood you now need to supply roofs for 9 out of 10 of the houses already there! Even better, insurance is covering the costs, so billing becomes less of an issue.

Weather-based content then becomes a differentiator for you over other suppliers. You can target content and, with Episerver's commerce, even target discounts to your buyers who are affected by storm-damaged areas.

Putting a roof on 20 houses due to a storm? How about we offer 5% off? Sounds pretty enticing to me.

2. Travel Industry Scenarios

I've seen this come up in two different ways.

As a consumer, I may want to know on the airline or airport website that temperatures are below freezing or that high winds are in effect.

Using personalization, these alerts can be automated!

Winds > 40MPH? Alert!
Temps < 30°F? Alert!

Similar alerts are applicable to the ground crew of the airline / airport who need to be prepared and pull out specialty equipment for these contingencies. If part of their job is to check the intranet when they sign in for work, then these alerts and applicable instructions can be presented front-and-center on the home page for easy access.

Because personalization can work over the Episerver Headless API, these content changes can be delivered to apps and kiosks as well.

3. Intranet / Employee Portal

A conscientious employer may want to add alerts to their employee portal (intra/extranet) to alert them of rain, snow, falling temperatures, or even dangerous wind-chills. 

This may be an alert on the corporate app telling employees at home to plan to leave a little early in order to make it to work on time or a homepage alert telling them that the wind-chill is getting dangerously low and to be careful on the way home.

Alerts like this would help employees to feel cared for and to offer assistance in keeping them safe during inclement weather.

Where can I get these wonderful toys?

The package is available now on Episerver's nuget feed. It can be added to your Episerver CMS by a developer or partner. There are a couple of prerequisites:

• You must be running Episerver CMS 11.6 or later.
• You must have a geolocation or GeoIP provider installed and configured.

Further details and complete source code are available on Github.