Working Families

The brief:
Working Families had never made full use of the power of the web for its annual, nationwide competition, Britain’s Best Boss. The competition didn’t have its own brand identity, and that was hampering its ability to increase its reach. Working Families needed the competition to have its own brand presence, and they wanted to use digital to reach more people and make the competition easier to manage.

What we did:
The first strategic challenge of the project was to create a brand identity for the competition that reflected the values of Working Families, but also had its own story and didn’t cleave too closely to the parent brand. In the past the competition had had a different look and feel every year, but Working Families wanted to establish a distinctive brand identity that would provide a consistent and lasting image of the competition from one year to the next.

In addition, the Britain’s Best Boss competition had always been an off-line experience. Working Families saw digital as an excellent way to expand the competition’s reach and get more people involved, but they needed a comprehensive digital strategy that would enable them to make good use of the internet.

instinct hosted a number of workshops to help Working Families determine what they wanted to achieve both in the short term and the long term. Our workshops with Working Families uncovered four major goals that the charity wanted to achieve. They wanted to:

1) Promote the competition online,
2) Make it easier for employees to nominate their bosses
3) Make it easier for bosses to complete their entry forms, and
4) Make it easier for Working Families staff to manage the entire competition online

As the workshops progressed we realised that Britain’s Best Boss could evolve from a yearly competition into a year-round source of valuable information for bosses and employees.

There were three distinct user groups that we need to cater for:

1) Employees. Anyone in the UK can nominate their boss, so we needed to reach as wide an audience as possible to deliver a high number of quality nominations. We felt that a digitally focussed campaign was the best way to reach the most people. Once we’d drawn people to the site we needed to provide them with a good user experience, so they would hang around, explore the site and ultimately nominate their boss. The site architecture would need to be straight-forward and intuitive and the online nomination form would need to be easy to complete, so users wouldn’t bail out at the critical point when they were nominating their bosses.

2) Bosses. Once an employee had nominated their boss, the boss would need to complete an entry form. We knew from our research that busy bosses would abandon the form if it was going to eat up too much of their time, so we broke the form up into simple chunks, and ensured that bosses could save the form and return to it whenever they had a spare second.

3) Competition administrators. In the past, administrators at Working Families had to sort through the nominations manually and enter the data into spreadsheets. The process was time consuming and Working Families wanted to streamline it with an online Nomination Management Tool. We worked with the folks at Working Families to define the main goals for the Nomination Management Tool and create an interface that was easy for people with minimal IT skills to work with.

Once we had gained an understanding of the various user groups we were targeting, we came up with a strategy that focused on dynamic, interactive banners; an intuitive and easy to navigate website that featured original content about what Working Families considered to be traits of an exceptional boss; and a Nomination Management Tool that made it easy to change the content on the site and manage the competition online.

Execution:
We combined our findings from the workshops with what we learned from our user research to start designing the user experiences.

We created User journeys, process flows and wireframes which enabled Working Families to see what their new website and Nomination Management Tool could offer and how it would behave. The user journeys and process flows were tested with a variety of user groups and the information we gathered through user testing informed our designs and the overall online campaign. We then produced Prototypes of the website and the Nomination Management Tool and tested them with the appropriate user groups. This iterative design process helped us to incrementally refine the Britain’s Best Boss campaign.

We explored a number of creative avenues for the digital campaign. In our creative workshops with the client we agreed on an eye-catching, animated banner campaign based on the idea that great bosses “see the bigger picture”.

Finally we designed and developed a bespoke online Nomination Management Tool to support the management and judging process of the competition. This Nomination Management Tool makes it easy for Working Families to manage all aspects of the competition from start to finish.

Results:
We established a unique digital presence for Britain’s Best Boss whilst taking a lot of the headache out of managing the competition. Here is what BT- the sponsor of the competition, had to say about the campaign: "The second best performing creative banner campaign that ran across BT Yahoo during June."