Affino Assists AOP with Rapid Site Redevelopment and Deployment

Almost exactly one year ago, Affino was commissioned by the AOP to resolve a matter of some technical delicacy and urgency. The incumbent site at the time was malfunctioning, and AOP required a swift resolution to ensure ongoing business continuity.

Within just a fortnight of collaborating with Richard Reeves’ team, Affino had helped recover data, redesign, populate and deploy a fully viable phase 1 solution / replacement - covering all of AOP’s essential business functions.

Two weeks on from the re-launch, the AOP team was trained and up and running with site management - promoting their events online, taking payments for bookings and managing the various events contact lists through the Affino platform.

More recently we’ve completed a whole year’s cycle, with all the events being promoted through the main Affino site, and with the focus increasingly moving to developing the member areas with dedicated secure parts of the website for member resources and research.

The site has seen major advances in the areas of branding, Inside Out Convention, Group spaces and expanded knowledge centre.

Collaboration

The key challenge here was obviously that of timing, as the new site had to be deployed within an extremely short span. Planning meetings alone can stretch into weeks and months, and we are most of us familiar with the inherent difficulties in obtaining site and functional / wire-frame sign-offs on an accelerated basis.

As always, our unique and highly disciplined ’Digital Business Audit’ was the critical catalyst here in disseminating the core requirements, and being able to fast-track all the aspects of the project in parallel.

A flurry of fluid meetings - physical, virtual and otherwise allowed both sites to maintain momentum, although much of this success was down to robust discipline and being able to wring every usable minute out of the working day.

Affino is akin to a Formula One team that specializes in delivery industry strength digital business vehicles, particularly within the media sector. The Affino Unified Digital Business Platform advantage is that there is so much high-powered technology and functionality available on-tap, all seamlessly integrated and run through a core central CRM. The integral Design Centre and other confluent systems are what allow high-powered business solutions to be delivered so rapidly.

Yet without properly symbiotic collaboration, you will struggle to arrive at the optimal result. The Affino process of close immersive collaboration, with indepth audit, analysis, training and consultancy is what enables these sorts of projects to fly. We’ve done a few of these very rapid deployments and it’s never easy and rarely routine. It is testament to the nature and flexibility of the core solution as well as the many people working closely together that allow these sorts of projects to reach a happy conclusion.

Solution

The key Affino Unified Digital Business Platform components that power the AOP site are as follows:

• CMS for all content management
• CRM for all account and contact management, as well as elements such as delegate attendee lists
• Ecommerce for selling event tickets, in particular the monthly forums
• All online promotion of member services, events etc. are driven through Affino
• The site is fully secured and encrypted, allowing for the secured member spaces and resources to be easily accessible
• Rolling out the account automation and contact capture for events to greatly automate and simplify the day to day running of all AOP’s events, and to facilitate and automate member registration processing, and delegate capture for events

Success

Highlights of what has been achieved from the earliest moments for www.ukaop.org:

• Affino helped to recover all key data within 24 hours of being commissioned
• New AOP holding page was up within 24 hours
• Info site was up within 7 days
• Fully fledged news, promotion and member site within 2 weeks, including initial population of CRM
• First event up and running within 4 weeks, and paid for monthly forums within 6 weeks
• Successful rollout of all member areas and events over the course of the year
• Continuous improvements to site, including major re-branding, and design evolutions throughout the year
• Event and Subscription automations to help streamline customer workflows