It’s both a privilege and a delight to work with our amazing clients and help bring their ideas to life; whether that’s through creative design, intriguing copy, emotive video or clever animation. We LOVE the journey we go on with clients, from receiving their initial brief through to delivering the end result and seeing the impact it goes on to achieve.
What we have realised though is we’re not always good at sharing what we’ve been up to. But that’s going to change – starting now!
To kick things off, we asked Ally (who works on the digital projects at Alive) what have been three of the most interesting, challenging and colourful digital projects she’s worked on recently.
Here are her top three picks.
Bringing inspiring and impactful employee stories to life for TCS
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is part of the Tata Group and an expert in digital business solutions and all things IT. The company has more than 400,000 employees spread across 46 countries.
The brief
TCS came to Alive with a wish to showcase the fantastic things their employees were doing; from charitable endeavours and making a difference in the local community and world around them, to pushing themselves to the limits to overcome extreme physical and mental challenges.
The stories had huge potential, not just for powerful internal comms campaigns but also externally for all company audiences, including customers, stakeholders and for recruitment. And so ‘TCS Superstars’ was born.
The challenge
The Alive team worked closely with TCS to devise a way to bring these stories to life and highlight the inspirational team members at the heart of the organisation, who are living and breathing the company’s own values.
One of the key challenges was digging deeper to reveal the people behind the stories and to get the human element across.
The location of the ‘TCS superstars’ themselves, being spread across a number of different countries, also presented logistical considerations.
The result
An important first step was recognising their ‘stars’. Each was presented with a bespoke wooden box filled with special star pin badges designed just for them. An achievement certificate, an award and a handpicked thank you gift that reflected their story in some way.
Alive then designed and created a dedicated TCS Superstars website, complete with introductory video about the initiative’s aims, to let TCS showcase the stories to a wider audience.
Employees have been interviewed, filmed and their stories shared, through a mix of blogs and videos, showcasing each individual and their achievements. This includes Gunasekar, who has pioneered a Tsunami early-warning device, ultra-marathon runner Tobias, and Thomas-Sajo who is changing lives as part of a non-profit organisation.
Alive helps TCS to honour each superstar with an individually chosen gift (often linked to their individual passion), which is presented to them along with a beautiful personalised and branded box, containing a pin badge, keyring and certificate.
The project is ongoing and continues to reveal more and more incredible stories, helping TCS honour its internal superstars.
At Alive, we all really enjoyed working on this project and it was lovely to receive such kind words from Sobha Varghese, at TCS Europe:
“I would like to acknowledge our amazing partners at Alive with Ideas (Alan Oram, Allyson Taylor, Cam Yavari) who ran with the idea and perfected it with their creativity and commitment. It wouldn’t have come so far without you guys and I want to say “Thank You!”
“I’m happy to say that this tiny thought has now blossomed into an inspirational movement. #TCSsuperstars is all about putting people forward, telling their stories, unveiling their emotions, and recognizing them for their passions and achievements (aligned to our corporate values).”
Sobha Varghese, Head of Internal Communications at TCS Europe
A window into the world of KP Snacks colleagues
From Tyrells to Skips and Hula Hoops – and of course, their iconic KP Nuts range – KP Snacks is home to some of Britain’s favourite snack brands and supplies all kinds of delicious products to retailers across the UK.
The brief
KP Snacks approached Alive seeking a fresh, revamped website. Looking for a new concept and a great user journey that would be enhanced with videos and bold imagery, and that would celebrate their most valuable resource – their people. The website is a little window into their world.
Alongside the new website development the team at KP were keen to highlight the hard work they have put into their corporate social responsibility progamme, which they call ‘Our Taste for Good’. KP asked for help to promote the company’s commitment to improving its products and its pledge to reduce its packaging impact on the environment – their PacKPromise.
Challenge
To get the balance right in showcasing the people, working environment and the great brands that make KP one of the nations’ favourite snack companies and a great place to work.
One of the key requirements of the build was to make it quicker and easier to update product lines to help promote KP’s broad range of brands, as well as regularly updated anecdotes about how colleagues feel about working at KP Snacks.
Result
First and foremost we provided a unified look and feel on the new corporate website using great imagery and video and giving KP a site that was also efficient to use (a flexible backend that is better suited to meeting the needs of KP corporate comms and brand teams) and which was wholly designed with the user experience in mind.
The site is now more flexible to cope with the ever-changing snacking world that KP is at the heart of. A system that allows changes to the main site pages, press releases, etc quickly and efficiently but also for their ever growing range of products and initiatives. One such initiative being KP’s new ‘PacKPromise’, which we were delighted to help promote. We built functionality onto the pages that detail KP’s product packaging initiative through online mapping, used to find local recycling points. This initiative was run in conjunction with TerraCycle.
For the whole team, the project has been fantastic to work on. It has been great to support KP and provide an enhanced and holistic website user experience that we continue to support the company with.
“Our company is fun, we have great brands, but most importantly we’re all about our people – and I wanted an agency who would understand that and help us bring it to life through our website and other comms. Straight away I felt that Alive ‘got’ us and provided the creative inspiration exactly where we needed it, as well as the technical expertise to deliver a well-functioning website.”
Keren McCarron, Head of Corporate Affairs & Communications
Streamlining KP Snacks contact facility for consumer teams
Within the remit of the KP Snacks website project a separate and technical project emerged for the consumer care team. It became clear that having an easily navigated corporate website, with lots of great content was just half the story. A crucial element was having a system for the administrative teams to be able to support the unenviable task of managing hundreds of enquiries daily, without compromising the brand integrity.
The brief
The consumer teams approached Alive looking to streamline the contact process, making their teams lives easier and response times faster through integrating a new third party CRMS. Through a collaboration project with a software platform provider that KP had identified, Alive were asked to come up with a way that multiple website contact forms (from their different brand portfolio) could all use a similar contact information structure which would map into the new CRMS.
Importantly, it needed to be cost effective, efficient and able to be rolled out across other brands which Intersnack group have acquired in recent years.
The challenge
One of the main challenges with the project was the need for the form to use a system Alive were unfamiliar with so we rolled up our sleeves and set to work with the partners to ensure the solution was robust, gave the consumer care teams the maximum information they needed to improve their response times and which ultimately would make the process cleaner for both the consumers and for our client.
The result
A system that from the front works efficiently but which is a veritable powerhouse of information behind the scenes for KP Snacks consumer teams.
Since this system has been implemented successfully we have started working on supporting the consumer care teams with ensuring a FAQ portal can provide ‘self-help’ allergen and lifestyle information to our consumers. To build a portal where the info can be updated easily and information supplied can be amended accordingly, month on month.
We loved the challenge of this technical project. We always know we can develop a solution that will give the client what they need, but we also pride ourselves in considering the if’s, but’s and maybe’s of a brief. What the system could do and why it’s the right fit for purpose. Then we know that we have done a good job.
“We find working with Alive With Ideas easy with good project planning, scope definition and communication, delivering satisfactory outcomes on the projects we have commissioned to date.”
Mike Waddell, Technical Services Support Manager
We love meeting new people and we’re always happy to chat, to see if we can help. If you like what you see here and you need some creative inspiration for your own business, then drop us a line to hello@alivewithideas.com, or call us on 01256 331021.
