Case Studies
Care for the Family improves teamwork with Huddle
With more than 100 employees, Care for the Family is one of the UK’s key charities promoting strong family life and helping those suffering from family breakdowns. Founded by best-selling author and speaker Rob Parsons, the charity is committed to strengthening family life and helping those who face family difficulties.
Its family-building events have been attended by over 300,000 people and many more have been helped through special initiatives – including stepfamilies, bereaved parents and those parenting alone.
Care for the Family is one of the first charity Huddle users in the UK.
Staff across four offices UK-wide and community representatives in Greater Manchester and the Isle of Man are using Huddle to work on projects together and exchange research and statistics.
With Huddle, Care for the Family’s employees can instantly create a network of collaborative team workspaces, each time bringing together the right team for the right project. Care for the Family benefits from free Huddle service, which is available to all registered charities.
The senior management team is already taking advantage of Huddle’s document sharing tools to distribute teams’ quarterly reporting on best practice. They also collaborate to create a survey template for use at the Care for the Family seminars. In addition, Huddle is used to facilitate training and plan workshops.
“Charities cannot afford to ignore Web 2.0. It solves many of our common problems: constant need for keeping costs low, improving communication between staff in various locations and bringing volunteers together,” said Jon Mason, Executive Development Officer, Care for the Family. “There are many collaboration applications available on the web, so proper evaluation is a must. We couldn’t fault Huddle – it offers a special package for charities, which is completely free and offers all necessary training and customer support.”
Care for the Family has already discovered some of the biggest benefits of Huddle – eliminating ‘email storm’. Traditionally exchanging up to 100 emails a day between various members of the team, the charity stopped sending any emails that involve ‘action’. All documents that require review or approval are now posted online in the charity’s huddle. Those responsible for action are tasked with review deadlines. Additionally, online editing means the staff can work from any computer, PC or Mac, not worrying about downloading and converting files.
In the future, Care for the Family is hoping to use Huddle to collaborate with similar interest groups in New Zealand and South Africa.
Huddle.net builds business on Huddle.net
My name is Charlie and I run the Commercial Team at Huddle.net. I thought I’d give our customers an insight in to how Huddle.net uses its own product. After all, if we don’t use it then how can we expect our customers to? It also means we establish our own internal user group that can shout about things we like/don’t like and generally beat the product team around the head. Hopefully we are acting as representatives for those customers that don’t have time to engage with us.
Here’s how Huddle’s sales team uses Huddle on a daily basis, feature by feature.
Files:
We do not run a shared drive at all. We have a ‘Sales Workspace’ where we have set up a folder structure. Folders include things like sales collateral, marketing documents, best practice sharing, proposals and loads more. Any one of my team can access and update the documents. Yesterday I made a change to a pricing document and alerted everyone through Huddle. We are all now working from the same version. We also use the approval workflow built in to Huddle to alert each other when there is some content in there that we want others to review. We’re heading to Internet World soon and so the plan has been uploaded and each individual can comment and give their thoughts. Equally the management team can approve the plan.
Tasks:
We don’t use this to set individual tasks. We get more use from it by setting milestones for the team. E.g. ‘complete monthly objectives by x date’. That way we can all see when key milestones are approaching. Integration with Outlook 07 via iCal was also a big bonus for us. I can now see my milestones in outlook as well as Huddle.
Whiteboard:
The surprise feature that I didn’t think I’d use – I use it all the time. For example, instead of emailing me their weekly objectives the team upload them on to a whiteboard. This way we can all see what each other is working on and I don’t get lots of emails. I needed to get some product feedback from people the other day so I created a whiteboard, put what I needed in the description field and then alerted everyone to go and post their comments. Instead of receiving 30 emails, everyone posts their feedback in one place and I can copy and paste it in to Word when I want to print it out. I love whiteboards!
Overall I reckon we’ve cut email traffic by 50% across the company by comparison to other companies not collaborating properly. No longer am I party to massive CC emails with peoples comments on a presentation. They all get posted centrally. No longer do I get email feedback on an idea, 50% of it duplicated and the rest I have to pick through and put together. I use whiteboards – did I mention I LOVE WHITEBOARDS!
I know I’m entirely biased but Huddle actually works. Initially you have to change the way you work (as with any new tool) but after a couple of weeks, the improvements in efficiency and collaboration far outweigh the initial time to change.
If anyone wants to chat to me about how they could get more out of Huddle then feel free to drop me a mail at charlie@huddle.net – I promise I won’t sell it to you…..unless of course you need it.
Firefly Tonics refresh their suppliers
Firefly Tonics manufactures and sells high quality health drinks across the UK, Europe and the Far East. Launched by Harry Briggs & Marcus Waley Cohen in 2003, the aim of Firefly is to provide energy & health drinks that refresh and re-invigorate, yet are completely healthy and natural. From early beginnings in Harvey Nichols, Firefly has grown rapidly and now sells over 30,000 bottles per week in 23 countries globally and stores, bars & cafes across the UK.
Firefly wanted to promote an increased sense of community within the network
Firefly started using Huddle in November 2006 to connect their growing network of international suppliers more effectively with each other and with the Firefly team in London. The aim was to use Huddle to distribute marketing materials simultaneously and to keep everyone up-to-date with the latest product news and information. Firefly also wanted to promote an increased sense of community within the network by keeping everyone in contact and allowing them to share information, plan joint projects and discuss ideas.
Based on feedback from Firefly and their distributors, the Huddle team released further improvements to the system in January, enabling users to upload zip files of multiple documents in one step, copy files from one huddle to another and personalise huddle invites. All these improvements were designed to develop usability and reduce the time taken to perform routine tasks – essential for huddle to be taken up within the supplier network.
We love using huddle – I wish every system we had was this simple!
Firefly have now extended Huddle out into their marketing and PR agencies and also use it to manage their raw-ingredient suppliers, packaging designers and bottlers – key tasks that are fundamental to the success of their business.
Not only that, but several of the suppliers who started using Huddle through Firefly have also signed up to the service in order to collaborate with their own customers more successfully. Proof of its success if ever there was…
“We love using huddle – we can update our marketing materials centrally and our suppliers are automatically notified that files are waiting for them. I wish every system we had was this simple!,” said Kate Moore, Marketing Manager, Firefly Tonics.
“We’re delighted to have been able to help Firefly grow their business so successfully to-date. Their success is a great example of the benefits to growing businesses of harnessing the intuitive, organic nature of social networking tools with the power of enterprise applications. Huddle is a powerful tool for companies like Firefly Tonics, allowing them to connect their virtual teams and manage essential business functions in one place. This makes a huge difference in such a highly competitive market and for a complex global business,” said Alastair Mitchell, CEO, Huddle.net
How collaboration became Contagious
Contagious is a quarterly magazine and DVD, a weekly newsletter, an information feed, an events organiser and a brand consultancy investigating the latest and most innovative exercises in branding, design, technology and popular culture. They are widely regarded as a leading authority in non-traditional marketing exercises, and have a genuine passion and enthusiasm for tracking the changes in today’s media climContagious started using Huddle is November 2006 to manage individual projects and connect their growing network of partners and collaborators. The aim was to use Huddle to act as a central repository for all ongoing projects where users, regardless of location or time zone, could securely collaborate on materials and documents relevant to their brief.
Contagious needed a bird’s eye view of each project whilst guaranteeing that sensitive data was only available to each project’s members.
“Our clients are based everywhere from Singapore to San Francisco and members of our team travel extensively, so being able to access multiple documents, make changes and return them to the team efficiently via a central online system is of paramount importance,” Paul Kemp-Robertson, Editorial Director commented.
The nature of Contagious’ work meant that they needed a bird’s eye view of each project whilst guaranteeing that sensitive data was only available to each project’s members – something that Huddle was able to provide in its ‘Dashboard’ and security model.
Based on feedback from Contagious and their collaborators, the Huddle team released further improvements to the system during January, enabling users to upload zip files of multiple documents in one step, copy files from one workspace to another and personalise huddle invites. These improvements were designed to improve usability and reduce the time taken to perform routine tasks – essential for Huddle to be taken up within their network of regular collaborators.
“We’ve found Huddle to be very intuitive – the clients we have ‘invited in’ to work with us have navigated their way round the system immediately and effectively with no help from us. We’ve received positive feedback from all users,” added Paul Kemp-Robertson.
Contagious now use Huddle to manage around 15 projects at any one time, ranging from print production of quarterly magazines to international conferences. The team also have access to all archived projects which contain invaluable knowledge that would have previously been locked up in emails or users’ private document folders.
Huddle has quickly become an important part of how we conduct our day to day business.
“Huddle is a convenient way for a creative business like ours to manage global relationships in an efficient and economical way. It’s a lot less messy than
email and has quickly become an important part of how we conduct our day-to-day business. Anyone who’s ever tried to keep track of a million document changes, tried to unite a group across different companies in different time zones or simply wished they hadn’t left that file on their desktop at home should be using it,” Paul Kemp-Robertson said.
Going forward, Contagious plan to use Huddle as their primary tool for servicing their large clients, several of whom have signed up to the service in order to work with their clients and partners. Proof of its success if ever there was…
Andy McLoughlin, Product Strategy Director commented: “Contagious are a classic example of how social networking tools combined with robust enterprise technology can bring huge benefits to businesses, particularly in the creative sector. Effectively managing complex projects and relationships across different teams, locations and time zones is a challenge for all businesses today; but one that can be successfully resolved by Huddle, allowing innovative companies like Contagious to get on with being creative”.