Case Study: BabyGROE - Integrated IMS and Website
Our client, BabyGROE, are a organisation promoting green and ethical ideas and products regarding childbirth and childcare. BabyGROE produce a free magazine which is distributed to new mums across the UK. BabyGROE came to Hero Solutions looking for two things:
- A fully-featured Information Management System to manage every element of their business. Up until that point they had been using Excel spreadsheets.
- A re-design of their website to fix bugs and include additional functionality.
One of the most important aspects of this project was that these two systems should integrate fully to prevent duplication of data and effort, and to streamline the way data is managed. Hero developed a fully integrated solution in VB and ASP.NET.
Key Features - IMS
Navigation
A key element of the system is it’s sheer size - it encompasses every element of the BabyGROE business (advertising, distribution, media, finance, administration etc.). An Outlook-style navigation bar was chosen to allow easy navigation between all these sections. A Quick Find tool was also developed to quickly locate a record without having to navigate to the appropriate section first.
Letter/Email Generation
Throughout the application, the user can create various confirmation letters. A consistent approach was developed for all letters. The user has the option when generating to produce it as an Outlook email or Word document, allowing seamless integration with Microsoft Office.
The content for each standard letter can be managed through a maintenance area, allowing them to modify text and merge in dynamic data from the database. They can also specify certain files to be attached by default with a letter when generating an email. Template files can also be specified for preset formatting etc.
Reporting
An advantage of moving all the data to a central database is that a range of reports, that simply weren’t available to the client before, could be produced. The IMS system developed features a Report Manager where they can generate a range of reports, provide custom filtering, sorting and grouping, and then either print or Export the results. The Report Manager also features reports of website usage.
Key Features - Website
Online Surveys
The website features an online survey tool. Through the IMS application a user can create new surveys to appear automatically on the website, adding questions and specifying dropdown options etc. Visitors can then fill these out online, and finally statistics can be run off for the results of the survey. The results can also be exported to Excel for further analysis and charting if required.
Interactive Website Portals
A key aim of the re-development of the website was to reduce the amount of time needed to manage it’s content. The website is full of material (such as articles, competitions etc.) supplied by advertisers, health professionals and also the public. Before this was all entered manually by BabyGROE.
Hero developed a number of portals where users themselves can create content for display on the website. Once new content is added, the office is notified by email and then simply have to review the content and tick a box to allow it onto the website. This means they still have ultimate control over the site, but remove the work needed to create the content in the first place.
Banner Advertising
BabyGROE also sell banner ads to appear on their website. As with everything, again the website and IMS were designed to integrate directly with each other. The user can manage a web banner advert in the same way they manage an advert in the magazine.
The banner ad will automatically take itself off the site once the time has expired, and the system also calculates the cost of the ad based on what pages it is displayed on, as well as tracking how many hits the banner ads gets.
Benefits Gained
- Website content is easier to maintain, and so therefore content is kept more up to date than before
- BabyGROE’s advertisers, ambassadors and other associates can access and submit data directly through the website - a task which before required BabyGROE staff to manually process the data, freeing up valuable time.
- Management are able to produce KPI reports which were difficult to put together, or simply weren’t available before, such as tracking sales staff performance against targets.
- Eradicated the duplication of data through the multitude of un-connected Excel spreadsheets which were used before. Again, saving time and reducing the number of errors.
We continue to work with BabyGROE and enjoy a fantastic working relationship with them.
“It really has been a pleasure doing business with you and I honestly don’t think we’ve ever worked with such a pleasant and amenable company who were happy to go that extra mile to make sure the job was done right. We’ll certainly continue to recommend you and will hopefully be back for more as BabyGROE diversifies."
Lynoa Cattanach, Director of Research and Communications
More Information
If you would like to learn more about this project, or discuss how we could do something similar for your organisation, please phone us on 0845 6120620. You can also visit the BabyGROE website - www.babygroe.co.uk.
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