The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is the professional body for the PR industry in the UK. With around 9,500 members, it produces policy, guidance, training and recognition for PR professionals.

In recent years, the CIPR has faced challenges communicating online due to having a somewhat dated website, with a plethora of pages, difficult navigation and no search facility.  As an organisation at the centre of the communications industry, they realised that they could do a lot better so invested time and energy into revolutionising their online services, starting with a more ‘cutting edge’ website that they (and their members) could be proud of.

The problem

This is what the old website’s home page looked like:

Infrastructure was an area that needed urgently addressing due to lack of measurement.  With no realistic idea of how much traffic the CIPR’s sites were receiving, nor how users were interacting with it or what they were looking for, it was impossible to plan or allocate resources effectively.

Because pages were hard to update, events calendars were published for entire year-long periods and members simply had to put up with trawling through information about events that had already happened.  There was no search engine, frames made it hard to link directly to important resources, there was no consistent approach to navigation or style, and much of the functionality was simply broken or unreliable.

We went to work.  Our first priority was to reorganise the CIPR’s online content and develop a new site map built around the needs of the user, not the internal structure of the organisation. Workshops were organised with all the institute’s departments, compromises were made and people began to think about how they could help users achieve their objectives, in a truly cross-departmental way.

A quiet revolution

Taking a member and visitor focused approach, we helped orchestrate a step-change in the way the CIPR communicates online.  With a massive archive of content to migrate, it was not practical for the CIPR to review all of it, but we coached editorial staff and produced training packs and guidelines to help them identify where content could be improved.  The CIPR’s new army of web editors were thus empowered to write useful, engaging, well linked and well structured content designed for the web.

It’s been a big change.  Staff were used to submitting update requests to a web team – who would then take days to process them.  Now, all the CIPR’s departments and groups are engaged – producing and publishing high quality content in a decentralised way, all under the supervision and moderation of a web administrator, a central controller of structure, standards, style and tone of voice.

Events: Always something happening

We placed a big emphasis on events and education offered by the CIPR. It was clear that along with making much of its revenue from hosting training events and qualification courses, events are also seen by members as one of the most important functions of the institute.  Event-related content is changing all the time, so we need to help members make time critical informed choices about the events that they want to attend and courses they want to take.

The CIPR’s new website has an events database with several easy ways of finding events, and a course finder with a database of approved courses cross-referenced with the events tools to enable a member to find a course, then see all the upcoming instances of that course that are in the events calendar.  Instant booking is powered by a partnership with the excellent Eventbrite ticketing service.

Find a course, find a date, make a booking.  Suddenly, finding and booking events with the CIPR is a breeze.

Connecting business, creating business

The institute also has a central role in connecting the industry.  Members looking for specialist help and advice on particular projects turn to the CIPR to help them network with other members, and businesses looking for a PR supplier are equally likely to want help to find the partner they need.

The CIPR website contains a constantly updated database of all the institute’s members, searchable by any member, and automatically synchronised with the main membership system. Members can also opt to have their profile displayed on a public directory that is visible and searchable by the wider public.

Exclusive members-only content

Much of the content produced by the CIPR is valuable policy research or best practice guidelines that are only available to members.  Previously this content was published in the ‘members area’, the only way in which the old website could provide limited access control over certain pages of the site.

The new site allows the CIPR to protect any page, in any section, and to set a variety of access rights, including restricting access to particular special interest groups as well as the membership as a whole.   Invitation ’teaser’ pages both encourage membership take-up, and remind existing members of the value of their membership.  There are no ‘access denied’ pages – any page the current user can’t access is simply an opportunity to invite them to join.

That said, we don’t forget search engines, which are allowed unrestricted access to the site to index all the content fully.  All the CIPR’s pages are now fully findable through Google as well as our own Google-grade site search engine.

Seamless video, seamless audio

The CIPR now boasts the ability to support rich media publishing of audio or video content, seamlessly integrated into any page.  A wealth of podcasts and video interviews is promised as the institute gets to grips with its new-found publishing capabilities.  Days after launch the first audio has already been published: a six minute interview with Katie Delahaye Paine that perfectly showcases how easy and enjoyable it is to listen and interact with rich media on the new CIPR site.

Measurement and analytics

We planned every measurable aspect of the new CIPR site with measurement in mind.  We use the awesome Google Analytics to track page views and visitor sessions, but more importantly we use GA in an intelligent way to get the very most we can out of the analytics tools it offers.  CIPR can therefore easily report on searches performed on the site (and so add resources to better serve the most popular searches), find broken links, track visitor pathways and measure conversions on event bookings.

The result

We’re not done yet, and a phase 2 will bring another revolution in social media integration, but for the moment, the CIPR can be justifiably proud of a great new front door for the world.

Of course, you need not take our word for it.  We didn’t solicit any testimonials from the CIPR, but they’ve kindly given us permission to reprint the following quotes from emails that they send us during the project.

Thank you for the excellent job you have done for us on our new website. I know it hasn’t been easy and there have been a lot of people involved, so thank you for your patience and taking the time to explain to various team members what has been going on.

You are a team we have every confidence in – thanks for restoring our faith – I never thought I would see this day!

A million thanks to you and the team for going beyond the call of duty in so many areas. Fantastic support and fantastic delivery – thank you for bearing with us!

Since we are talking about the PR industry here, a quick search of twitter will show that no-one is short of an opinion, and in the week since we’ve launched the new site, hundreds of tweets confirm that the membership agrees with the CIPR that the new site is a job well done.

A few weeks ago we donated a batch of computers to a local youth project in North London (after securely deleting all the data on the hard disks). They’ll be used to train youngsters in basic IT skills and then donated to their families to get them online.

And finally today we’ve reclaimed a not insignificant portion of our floor space which has been occupied by a massive HP A3 laser printer that is so solid it requires at least three people to carry it. The lucky (and hopefully very strong) recipient is a residents group in Finsbury Park, who are going to use it to print leaflets and posters for their community projects.

Paul, from the group, sent us an email explaining what they’re about:

We recently planted an mini apple orchard (6 trees), and hoping to do a spot of guerilla gardening to transform a currently horrible looking wall that runs the stretch of the estate.

We often need to print either 30-40 posters or about 160 leaflets or possibly both to ensure residents know what’s going on. We don’t currently have a printer of our own, so we “make do” via various means, but it means we can’t print big (A4 is too small for a poster) and we can’t print while we’re at one of our meetings. With an A3 printer on-site, we can create posters/leaflets during the meeting, print and distribute while everyone is already there in one place. It will make a massive difference.

It’s nice to know it’s going to a good home.

Donating large pieces is a great way of clearing out surplus or obsolete office equipment. If you have stuff you’re about to throw in a tip, try finding a local group who could benefit from it, or post it on Freecycle.

Any system has to have the features you need – it needs to correctly classify transactions, ensure funds are apportioned to the right portfolios in precise quantities and know how to choose and apply formulas for calculating rates of return, for example.  But we can’t be satisfied with a system that simply does all this stuff competently.  After all, someone – a lot of people, actually – are going to be using it to enter transactions and do a thousand other administrative operations every day.   No, we had to create something that was a joy to use.

Adnum is what we call the fruits of those efforts.   A web-based system designed from the ground up with our mantra of successful software design – faster, simpler, more accurate, more reliable.

You don’t have to wait while Adnum processes your thousand item reconcilliation.  It will just get on with it in the background and let you know when it’s ready.  More likely, it’s already ready, because Adnum knows when to reconcile, and keeps up automatically.  Meanwhile, you can get on with other things.

Staying alert to possible typos and mistakes is a tiring job for someone who deals in numbers all day long.  Now you have a friend who never gets tired.  Adnum knows the current price or value of every tradable asset, and while it will let you get on with your work undisturbed by constant ‘are you sure’ prompts, if you key something that doesn’t seem rational, Adnum will query it.

Navigating around Adnum is simple, logical and fast.  IOMAFIM’s Russell Collister uses it every day:

What can we do faster? Produce valuations, reconcile cash and securities, amend stock descriptions, correct errors. Just about everything is simpler, from accounting to contract note production, and yet Adnum gives us features we never had before, such as online client access, automatic stock recs, and auto balancing inputs.

Adnum is more reliable thanks to secure, highly redundant, data centre based hosting. We take care of hardware, software and data. All you need is reliable and fast access to the internet. Thanks to close integration with custodian banks, it’s also more accurate. IOMAFIM can produce fully reconciled daily valuations for online viewing in a tiny fraction of the time required with their previous system.

The ‘bridge’ between security statements from our custodian and Adnum makes the reconciliation process fast and accurate.

We’re almost ready to unveil screenshots and demos of Adnum, but for the moment we remain in a private beta phase.  To join in at a significant discount to our final pricing, get in touch today.

We started the year by developing a new site for thelondonpaper, a ‘freesheet’ newspaper here in London produced by News International (also home of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World).  The team at thelondonpaper were keen to tap into our expertise in optimising workflows and page load times – which meant we got to spend some time making the site one of the fastest loading big media sites in the business.  One of the things we really like to do is spend time making things faster, and the more we speeded up the site, the higher the traffic figures soared.  Unfortunately later in the year the advertising slump finally took its toll on the paper, and News International closed the title in September.

In the spring FT Alphaville won a third Webby award in New York, for its combination of cutting edge tech and equally cutting edge journalism.

Our summer was filled with exciting new developments for the Financial Times, along with equally exciting developments for one of our founding partners, Robert Shilston, who got married in August.

With our help, the FT relaunched its mobile site, sourcing and publishing content from all the FT’s news operations, as well as providing near-live markets data, with mobile optimised graphing and charting.  Despite the difficulties in tracking hits from mobile devices, we delivered a site that is able, for the vast majority of visitors, to remember their login, preferences and settings, and even the correct global region where they normally carry their phone.

We also started to trial a new system we’ve been working on to help wealth and fund managers to operate their business and track their clients’ assets and portfolios.  A parallel run with the system we were replacing had to be cut short after the client’s staff found ours to be so fast that using the old system was painful in comparison.  That system is called Adnum, and you’ll be hearing much more about that in 2010.

It’s surprisingly difficult for a group of people that make their living telling other people how to make the most of the web to practice what they preach.  Thankfully, this autumn we set about the belated task of redesigning the Assanka website.  We’re not quite done yet, and we’re holding back some of the more original features until we’re good and ready, but we’re pretty happy with how it’s turning out.  We welcome feedback, so let us know what you make of the new look (or even the code, if you insist).

It’s been a year to remember here at Assanka.  We hope you had a great year, and indeed a great decade, and have many exciting things ready to challenge you in 2010.

We’re excited to have the opportunity to introduce best practice to many different and varied aspects of the CIPR’s online services, many of which have not developed significantly since 2000, and we will be launching a raft of updated services to CIPR members in 2010.

We are delighted to say that last night, FT.com won ‘best mobile site’ at The Association of Online Publishers Awards in London which celebrate the very best in UK digital media. The judges said that m.ft.com was

clear, clean, easy to use, with good use of personalisation while staying true to the brand. A thoroughly effective mobile site.

Assanka has been involved with the development of FT’s online services since 2006, and it’s fantastic that this, our first foray into mobile, has resulted in such a prestigous award. We took an uncompromising approach to developing the FT’s new-look site for mobile users. We knew that FT readers are big fans of Blackberry, and increasingly they’re also browsing on iPhones. The range of browser capabilities, particularly when you factor in corporations rolling out custom configurations to all their Blackberries, is daunting.

We developed a set of interchangeable templates that mapped to various device capabilities, to suit the CSS and HTML rendering peculiarities of the various mobile browser technologies. Another challenge is charting. On some devices, we have quite a high resolution available, and can include charts and graphs with plenty of detail. On devices with smaller screens, we serve the same chart at a different size with less detail, to give the user a similar quality of experience and ensure that the graphic is well sized for the reader’s handset.

Finally, thanks to cookie support on many modern handsets, and the co-operation of many network operators that helpfully provide tracking data to us as they pass on the user’s requests to our servers, we are able to log in mobile users and attach their FT user account to their handset. This enables readers to customise their homepage, displaying their portfolio stocks and customising the regional focus of their news stories.

Overall, the site has been a big success, and a good couple of kilos of glass now says you don’t even have to take my word for it. Grab your phone and head over to m.ft.com and judge for yourself.

In fact Alphaville was named winner of two Webbys – the judges’ award and the ‘People’s Voice’, both in the Best Business Blog category.

Paul Murphy, editor, said:

It is a real thrill to win both Webby honours in our category and we’re grateful to all those who voted for FT Alphaville, and left such kind comments.

Those comments were publicly available prior to judging, and demonstrated the incredible strength of feeling in Alphaville’s devoted audience, a notoriously hard-nosed and hard-to-please demographic. Alphaville attracted more comments than all the other nominees combined.

I went to collect the award in New York with Paul and Alphaville’s editorial team:

Considered the “Oscars of the internet”, the Webbys are the leading awards honouring excellence online, across websites, interactive advertising, mobile and online film and video. The awards, established and decided by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, are now in their 12th year.

The latest awards received a record 9,500 entries from more than 60 countries and winners will be honoured at two ceremonies in June, held in New York.

Founded in 1996, the awards are also known for a five-word limit on acceptance speeches. Past headline-grabbing speechmakers include Al Gore (“Please don’t recount this vote”), Beastie Boys (“Can anyone fix my computer?”), and Prince (“Everything you think is true”). At the moment the Alphaville readers seem undecided on the best line for the team to deliver when they collect the gong but the suggestions are pouring in.

Despite having a London focus, Alphaville has become world renowned in the financial community for sharp analysis and insight, lightning fast reactions and breaking major stories first. Viewers have come to know that if it’s not covered on Alphaville, it’s just not worth knowing.

Never afraid of controversy, the blog has been the subject of a High Court injunction brought by Northern Rock, and has even faced legal challenges over the use of the word ‘portacabin’. Whether you like what you read or not, it’s undeniable that FT Alphaville is essential reading for anyone working in financial markets.

We’ve always had our sights set on a Webby for FT Alphaville so we’re absolutely thrilled that the site has won both awards. It’s a great endorsement of both the fantastic content and the live blogging platform we developed for it.

Readers of The Times are eligible for a three-course meal at over 1,000 of the UK’s restaurants by collecting tokens printed in the paper and on the website. Once the reader has four tokens, they can decide where to go by selecting from the list of participating venues printed in the paper at launch, or by using the interactive map search, throughout the duration of the campaign, that we developed for Times Online.

Taking Google’s mapping system as a base, we added a comprehensive UK place name and postcode search engine, and a plotting system capable of real time sorting and clustering of markers to provide a great user experience. Additional usability features like automatic zoom-to-fit, choosing between similarly named places, and a conflict detection approach that guarantees no overlapping markers make this map stand out from the crowd.

Times Online’s Claire Harford said:

We gave Assanka a tight deadline, and a complex brief for something we wanted to benefit from long term. This was the first time I have used Assanka as a supplier and I was pleased with their clear, thorough proposal, adherence to agreed deadlines and their overall client support. They have earned my trust as a supplier and I will be considering them for more work in the future.

The flexible integration options we designed will allow Times Online to use the same mapping facilities again and again for a variety of purposes. A straightforward but powerful administrative interface can deploy new map sets in under 5 minutes.

We just discovered what looks like a lovely Indian just down the road from our office in West London, so we’re off to check it out. Cheers!

The loss of 25 million child benefit records by HMRC in November 2007, whilst the most serious data security incident ever recorded, is not the only problem to emerge in recent years. The UK Visa application system was revealed to allow applicants to see others’ details by simply changing a few digits in the website address. I could carry on reeling off examples, but it’s frankly embarrassing.

It’s not just the Government that’s irresponsible with personal data, although they’re by far the worst culprits. The discount chain TK Maxx lost millions of credit card numbers to hackers in December 2006 from its US parent company, which also raised the question about what the data on UK citizens was doing in the United States to start with. Any data exported to the US loses the protections that it has under UK law, and American companies can (and some do) tend to move it around indiscriminately.

When businesses and organisations set up new systems that will store and process customer data, data protection should be integral to the system’s design. But all too often data protection is seen as a legal obstacle, not a technical one. Getting suppliers to sign data protection terms in contracts is not the solution – in the case of many of the public sector incidents, the supplier will have been well within their obligations, while the department that actually uses the system does so in a way that ends in disaster.

Surely the problem is obvious – these organisations are trying to solve data security with procedure, and procedure requires people to get things right all of the time, which they don’t.

So if we accept that people occasionally make cock-ups, and also accept that there are a lot of low-paid people working with public sector IT systems, and multiply the probability of any individual making an error by the number of people capable of making that error, it’s actually surprising that we don’t see this kind of thing happening all the time.

So what’s the best way to address this? Taking the two components of the problem individually, you could train all your staff to make it less likely that any one individual makes a mistake, or you could reduce the number of people who have the capability of making the mistake. Take the HMRC incident. It seems to be the case that a fairly junior member of IT staff, probably on a low salary, was able to download a complete copy of the child benefit database. It cannot make sense to train this person to a sufficiently high standard that you can rely on him not to make this mistake, because there will be tens of thousands of people requiring such training.

However, you could simply prevent that user from accessing the data in the first place. Make such a function only accessible to higher-level users, who are more highly paid, better trained, and fewer in number.

Better still, remove the feature entirely. Why should anyone need to download the entire dataset? If this needs to be done regularly, then you need to take a step back and work out what problem you’re solving with such a cavalier approach, and find a better way. In this case the National Audit Office wanted the data for audit purposes. And they request the same data on a regular basis. Why then, is there not an automatic process built into the HMRC system that exports, compresses, encrypts and transmits the necessary data directly to NAO each month?

What makes this incident even worse is that the NAO didn’t even want the sensitive data. They only wanted a subset of the database, but HMRC felt it was too expensive to process into the form requested.

There is clearly a need for a very senior information security manager to have the ability to export complete datasets, in any large database system. Every other function should be proportionate to its objective, and taking the attitude that any member of IT staff can just fire and forget the entire database anywhere they like is not just irresponsible, it’s also illegal.

The Government protests that ‘the procedures were in place – but they weren’t followed!’. When you want to protect your money, you don’t pile it in the middle of the street, draw a line around it and enact a law making it illegal to steal it. You lock it in a bank and remove the possibility altogether. Procedures are flaky. Technology works. Let’s just hope that one day Government learns to use it properly.

The Foundations fund aims to achieve an additional 4-6% return on the value of investors’ portfolios by gradual leveraging, but in a unique way that does not involve the usual levels of risk, volatility, cost, restriction, and administration. An existing life policy portfolio (or other suitable asset) is assigned to the Foundations Program and its collateral value is used to participate in a collectivised borrowing and reinvestment Program. Provided that the asset participates in the program for at least five years, the investor will receive the additional profit generated upon exit.

We began with an extensive requirements gathering exercise combining analysis of the program documentation, interviews with key stakeholders, and observation. The main participants in the business are located in both the Isle of Man and Guernsey, but also travel extensively and are rarely in the same location. We were able to create a specification for a system that fulfilled the procedural requirements of fund administration as laid out in the offering document, but which also achieved a greater degree of automation than the client and the administrators had thought possible, while retaining the flexibility to deal with individual circumstances.

Development of a system

Due to the distributed nature and mobility of the user base, and the desire to retain flexibility in the choice of administrators, as well as the inherent advantages of no per-user licensing and installation issues, the system was designed to be web-based. This also enables Assanka to provide support easily and efficiently, and for entire organisations of new users to be enrolled in a matter of minutes.

The entire development schedule and process was managed by Assanka, keeping all stakeholders up to date despite widely spaced geography. We pro-actively prompted client deliverables to ensure that we were able to achieve critical path milestones without unnecessary delay. The new system launched on time, and to budget.

An orderly transition

Whilst Foundations did not have a dedicated software system set up already, the fund had been running for just over a year and administration had been conducted using spreadsheets and a rudimentary Microsoft Access database. These tools were reaching the limits of their capacity, but contained live data that needed to be migrated. We imported the data from these sources and continued to operate both in parallel for a month, during which we were able to identify and correct errors in the data.

Smooth running

During each monthly cycle of operation, the Foundations System manages data on participants and assets, maintains ledgers and runs regular processes to allocate points and profits according to the Foundations rules. All these calculations are performed automatically, efficiently and accurately by a system designed around the needs of this fund.

Whilst the system takes responsibility for most calculations, it also ensures data integrity is maintained. All data operations performed by the system are transactional, ensuring that updates are never left in an incomplete or partially complete state, and rolling back to a known safe state in the event that an update or series of updates fails.

Although users of the system must be experienced fund managers and familiar with the rules of the Foundations program, they need not be familiar with the system itself. Martin Treanor, Sales Director says:

Assanka helped us to envisage a solution that would be both robust and flexible. Accuracy in reporting is vital to our proposition and so too is the need to efficiently relay information to our customers, distributors and counterparties. Assanka’s approach was refreshing because they started with a blank canvas and then fully researched the unique complexities of our business before they began to formulate a proposal that addressed our needs. We are delighted with the results which not only accommodate our current system needs but also provide us with a stable yet flexible platform from which to support further growth and development. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Assanka and are excited about future opportunities to further enhance our services

Bespoke reporting

We assessed the administrators’ and promoters’ requirements for reporting, and produced a range of reports in Excel-compatible CSV and Word-compatible RTF formats, allowing the users the greatest degree of flexibility over the report output and formatting. The layout of form letters and statements was designed to take account of the entirely bespoke Foundations brand requirements, providing consistent style across all client-facing documentation.

For audit purposes the system also retains a permanent copy of every report generated and provides a searchable index of these previously generated reports, whether they be internal reports, spreadsheets, statements or form letters.

Access and oversight

Access to the system is made from any internet-connected computer and secured with SSL encryption. Each user is configured for access to appropriate parts of the system and data relevant to their role, whether they be an administrator, promoter or support engineer. Information is restricted according to each user’s role.

Having securely identified each user logged in, the system also logs each data operation performed along with the identity of the user that actioned it. This audit trail enables all activity to be traced back easily to the moment that the data was changed.

Triple strength support

Our approach to support works on three levels – Preventative, Proactive and Reactive. We aim to prevent the majority of potential problems before they occur by ensuring that hardware and operating systems are up to date, systems are adequately protected and all activity on the system is properly validated and logged. Automatic backup systems run daily to archive data to an off-site location, ready to rapidly restore in the event of a problem.

Occasionally problems do occur, and when they do, Assanka’s advanced error handling system detects and logs the error, files a complete report with our support management system, and provides a tracking code to the user allowing correspondence on the issue to be traced back to the original fault quickly and efficiently. In this way, we usually discover problems proactively, and often resolve them before anyone is aware that an error has occurred.

Finally, all Assanka’s web based software is built to incorporate our web helpdesk as part of the integrated user experience. This means that reactive support can be obtained quickly and easily without needing any further contact information, passwords or reference numbers. We track our response to every support request via the web helpdesk, recording response and resolution times to ensure conformance with our SLA obligations. We offer SLAs on four levels to match the client’s requirements, so Foundations selected the response level that suited them.

Where the problem relates to the client’s ability to contact the system over the web, or where they simply prefer to pick up the phone, we also operate a telephone support service, available 24 hours a day.

Ongoing development

We continue to advise Foundations on the best ways to achieve higher efficiency as their fund grows, including barcode tracking of application forms, and automatic parsing of PDF statements from asset providers to avoid the need to key in data.