CSR360 Global Partner Network
This is a project that started out with no name, kicked off in the upstairs room of a pub in Islington, spanned 8 months, had to meet the needs of people from 59 countries worldwide, and culminated in a presentation by Erskine at Freshfields in the City of London. It was quite a ride.
The Client
The Global Partner Network (GPN) is a continually enlarging network of over 100 organisations working in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) around the world. GPN organisations cover approximately 59 countries around the world. The secretariat of the GPN is held by Business in the Community who acted as the client on behalf of the network. Business in the Community is a unique movement of companies across the UK committed to improving continually their positive impact on society. It has a core membership of 700 companies, including 75% of the FTSE 100.
We’re web designers and we stick to what we’re good at. What we’re also good at is bringing together the very best teams of people when a project requires specific skills that we don’t focus on internally. In the case of this project we brought on board our friends, Funnel Creative, to handle the brand creation and offline print material.
The Erskine Process
All our major projects start with what we refer to as a Kickoff Workshop. In this case Simon Campbell, Simon Collison, and Jamie Pittock, along with Bill Green from Funnel, decamped to London for a couple of days of discovery and planning with the client team.
Discovery is all about us learning as much as possible about the client’s domain. For us to be able to deliver a first class project that meets all of the objectives set we need to fully understand the space that the project will eventually be launched into. It’s also a time of discovery for the client though. It’s important clients understand the process that will be followed throughout the project and to ensure this both Erskine and Funnel lead short talks describing what would be happening over the next few months and how it all tied together.
We place a lot of importance on planning at Erskine. However, we also make it clear to everyone concerned that any plans made may be revised through the course of the project. We avoid getting bogged down in creating lengthy functional specifications, instead preferring to do just enough planning upfront to get started. It’s only when the project that kicks off that we can iterate our plans based on the users’ needs. It’s this act of ongoing planning and revision that’s important to us.
During the workshop we conducted some LVT exercises designed to collate everyone’s initial ideas and thoughts, and planned some early user scenarios. These were followed by some low fidelity wireframes, encouraging everyone to think about what actions the users might wish to perform by engaging with the network.
A few days after the workshop the project team got together again in the studio in Nottingham for a de-brief. Those of us who attended the workshop briefed the rest of the team on the outcomes. Using the client’s original feature list and the low-fidelity wireframes created in the workshop, we then began the process of agreeing the baseline set of features that the website required to meet it’s user’s needs. Note that this set of features was eventually refined and revised after conducting more detailed user research; further evidence of our agile approach to project planning.
Technology
It’s only when this baseline list of features and required functionality are created that a decision on technology can be made. The tools that we use, whether they are existing content management systems such as ExpressionEngine or PHP frameworks for custom development, are chosen on a case-by-case basis depending on the requirements. ExpressionEngine is a publishing platform first and foremost and although it’s flexible enough to achieve some social networking features, there may be better solutions out there. The key is weighing up the built-in functionality available against the custom development required based on the baseline features list. If the custom development required outweighs the built-in functionality that you’ll utilise, you may want to think about an alternative solution.
For this project the challenge was to create a website with the duel purpose of allowing the Secretariat to promote CSR and the work of the network (straight forward publishing) and enabling the partners around the world to come together through networking and sharing knowledge (social networking). Although the latter purpose would lead to some further challenges to overcome, in our case the list of built-in functionality that we’d utilise did outweigh the required custom development. For this reason ExpressionEngine was chosen as the platform we’d build upon.
Solutions
The website was launched in September 2008 at an event attended by many of the network’s core partners from around the world as well as their corporate supporters.
Just some of the solutions Erskine delivered:
- A “dashboard” and profile for each partner organisation enabling them to publish news and events and share resources and files
- An interactive map highlighting the scope of the network’s reach around the globe
- Detailed statistics and reports for the Secretariat
- A periodically published “online magazine” aimed at promoting selected topics surrounding Corporate Social Responsibility
- A file and resource repository
- Public and private discussion areas
Simon
Jamie
Glen
Phil