With the digital revolution, there are now so many more customer touchpoints – be it via your website or your app. Are you looking to improve the user experience on your digital platforms? If so, we have the tools to help. Our bespoke solutions make sure that your needs are met in a co-created and cost effective way.

Orbit Group worked with ICE to understand the views and experiences of stakeholders and staff implementing their Community Investment programmes. These include support for Orbit customers on managing debt and finances, seeking employment, improving life skills and improving health and wellness. However, take up of the programmes was low and a new strategy was required to engage customers in the opportunities available.

“The delivery has been excellent given the constraints, hitting the brief and spec with more accuracy than a lot of longer projects!”

Tim Dumbleton, Digital Inclusion and Development Manager, Orbit Living.

Stakeholders and frontline staff involved in offering or delivering the programmes to customers told us that one of their biggest challenges was keeping track of what programmes were being offered, when and where. Traditionally, communications raising awareness of the programmes happened in a piecemeal way, and staff and stakeholders needed to keep a record of what was currently available in their area and what might be coming up in future.  When speaking to customers, they relied on their memory to get all the information across.

As a result of this insight, we proposed a ‘one stop’ online space where all the community investment work could be stored and kept up to date. We worked in partnership with the Orbit web team to ensure the site was built to maintain a seamless user journey from the main Orbit site into the ‘HUB’ site – one that could also easily be migrated into any future rebuild of the main Orbit site.

The web portal was built using the latest version of Umbraco (7); this was based on a site structure and specification devised by Orbit. It was built using an open-source Microsoft framework called ASP.Net, utilising the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern which offers excellent flexibility and options for future development and future-proofing the solution. A key area for the website was to build an easy-to-use advanced search tool which uses our faceted algorithms to help the user define and refine their search results based on key words/phrases, geo distance (miles) and cleaver page tagging. We’re currently scoping out phase two of this project to integrate this as a secure intranet, as well as a public portal using AD Federation services.

The site was deployed to a test environment for the Orbit team and our internal team to test. User acceptance testing was delivered by Orbit with a group of stakeholders and staff. The entire build process took less than four weeks.

“Just to say a huge thank you to all that have been involved up until now with the HUB. It is looking really good and ultimately the feedback from staff and partners after three sessions today has been really positive. They easily see the value of it, how it will be used and people in different parts of the business are saying how useful it will be and how they would use it. I realise the amount of time and effort that has gone in to getting this to this stage in the time scales. Really impressed.”

Sam Scharf, Head of Community Investment, Orbit Living.