Case Studies
Aggie-Lance, freelance agriculture jobs site, Huddles up for personal client contact
Aggie-Lance, freelance agriculture jobs site, Huddles up for personal client contact
Iowa-based Web 2.0 business Aggie-Lance is focused on bringing an ‘Elance-style’ business model to the agriculture industry, where agriculture companies can meet potential employees to hire for various types of jobs.
Mark Jewell, founder and president, came up with the concept and created the online community in April 2008. The unique challenge to the agriculture industry (or aggie) is that it’s a very well-connected industry reliant on word-of-mouth recommendations for employees, but farming projects often need to be staffed up quickly with people outside an employers’ personal reach. This is where Aggie-Lance steps in to match-make freelance job seekers with employers. Already the website has a database of 500 reliable freelancers and many trusted clients. Aggie-Lance is quickly carving a position for itself as the go-to site for advice on where to begin finding the right people for a farming job.
Mark set about looking for a collaboration tool when he read a piece in Fast Company magazine about Huddle and several of the competitive solutions on the market. He became a customer in June 2008.
“Huddle looked like the best solution in the market so I went with them. It proved to be a sound decision when they looked after me, like I was important to them, and they made sure I had absolutely everything I needed,” said Mark.
Using eight Huddle workspaces for various client projects, Mark finds that Huddle helps him overcome one of the biggest challenges involved with crossing the Web 2.0 world with an industry not known for embracing internet innovation.
“In the ag business world, people like to shake hands and meet people face-to-face before committing to do business with them. So take-up of the latest web innovations can be slow. With Aggie-Lance I am bringing agricultural businesses the benefits of the web in connecting them with great people that they might not have found otherwise, but I still need to bridge that gap of having a personal connection with my clients. Huddle is a terrific solution to meet this compromise. When they’re in a Huddle workspace, my clients feel much more like they are working in the same office as me.”
Accountability is also a big part of the puzzle for Aggie-Lance – the ability to show clients that the work they pay for is getting done.
“When clients can view work as-it-happens in a Huddle workspace, they are so much more confident that it’s being done well and meeting their specifications,” said Mark. “The transparency and showing accountability is a big factor for me in terms of Huddle’s value to my business.”
Mark uses the workspace primarily to share files with clients, such as when managing a large-scale web development project for an agriculture business that needs to review plans, templates, drafts, or see tasks and notes about the project. He uses the wikis (whiteboards) for brainstorming on occasion as well.
“Comfort and trust are huge in Huddle and partly, that’s down to how easy it is for clients, or anyone, to grasp it without any training,” said Mark. “This is true for people without any special IT skills.”
Huddle also offers business value that impacts on the bottom line. Mark said: “It means I can put off getting a large office as we grow, and all the associated overheads, until I really need it.”
Mark uses one of his eight workspaces for an agricultural fraternity comprised of members from around the US. These members share files such as housing plans, designs and other work centred from an office in Nebraska. The community chairpersons are able to share budgetary information, assign tasks, host discussions, set deadlines and get things done more quickly in the workspace. They use Huddle to collaborate with people from all over, and because it is fully branded with the Aggie-Lance logo and look and feel, it brings a side-benefit of added awareness for the company. There are 16 primary users in that workspace.
“I opened that workspace up and just let them run with it, and it’s been fantastic visibility for my company in the market, since Huddle allows full branding of its workspaces.”
Mark sums up his views on Huddle: “I was breaking new ground in online collaboration in the agriculture industry but I knew it could work in our market. If we can do it, anyone can! For me the convenience, ease of use, ability to edit documents online, and not needing to worry about which computer I’m using – just being able to log on – are huge benefits in Huddle. The customer service is great. Huddle will remain central to my business practices as we expand.”
In-Form Design Services pushes fresh, energetic design over Huddle
York-based In-Form Design Services specialises in creating all types of corporate design, from signage, to point-of-sale materials such as banners, corporate identity design and a host of other design functions. The company services clients based in the North of England, ranging from small to large companies, universities and established and emerging businesses.
In-Form turned to collaboration software as an advantage for client service. In-Form found Huddle to be easy-to-use, accessible from anywhere, and enabled the sharing of documentation without relying on emailing attachments to large groups of people.
Gavin Lewis, creative director at In-Form said: “When in the midst of a design project, proofs and drafts would be flying around huge teams via email. It was becoming a nightmare to keep track of, and most email systems have limits on the size of attachments, which is bad news for imagery work. We often use huge files in design.”
In-Form says that the team hoped a collaboration technology would bring an important side-benefit: adding focus to a project and a sense of being a part of the team. In the past, without any collaboration, disparate elements and staff would be working with clients located across the globe and the sense of ‘team belonging’ could get lost. In creative work this matters for the level of service clients expect and deserve.
Gavin continues, “Impartiality is also a concern when managing collaborations between teams within large organisations. People only need to see the info they need, and no more. We found that this was easier to achieve with Huddle, as opposed to using collaborative tools that were already tied to one organisation’s technological infrastructure.”
In-Form says it uses Huddle in a number of ways both internally and externally for the benefit of its clients, including:
- simple document storage
- project information management
- using Huddle as an electronic learning environment – using the workspaces to manage information to facilitate the journey of participants in executive learning programmes
Huddle has also changed working practices within the organisation since adoption. “Amongst other things, it saves the time spent searching inboxes for documents and allows us to know if and when members of project teams have actually viewed the documents,” said Gavin.
Huddle’s biggest business benefit for Inform is that it allows the team to chart the progress of projects and administer project information and levels of participation with more certainty and clarity.
Gavin concludes: “Huddle brings focus and its simple-to-use document storage structure can be used to intuitively enhance the journey through a project or programme.”
Inform says Huddle was selected over competitive solutions because “we like the interface, its support, and the fact that users can get the full benefit from Huddle without us needing to add them to a domain or do any complex IT tasks.”
Public sector partnership uses Huddle for easy local-area collaboration
Northamptonshire Enterprise is a partnership between the public, private and voluntary sectors, whose purpose is to develop the Northamptonshire economy and support job creation. The area – a key growth area in the UK – is supported by Northamptonshire Enterprise through Ambassador Programmes, events and information about economic data, business support and a wide range of projects and initiatives. In achieving its goals, Northamptonshire Enterprise Ltd works with a large number of stakeholders to co-ordinate development of the local economy.
The collaboration sometimes requires as many as 20 partners to work together. Collaboration tools are key to this process and the group wanted to make it easier. Huddle’s online workspaces provide the space for them to work with partners at any time or place – so big ideas come easier. The workspaces are easily accessible via the group’s public web site.
Prior to using Huddle, Northamptonshire Enterprise had already proven itself as an innovator, using both Teamroom and Skype for collaboration. Huddle currently sits alongside these products in its IT portfolio, enabling all stakeholders easy access to the information they need, while maintaining privacy on the data they do not need.
At present Northamptonshire Enterprise is using Huddle workspaces to collaborate with a range of stakeholder groups from the area, such as the Food Group, the Leather Heaven for the leather industry, an industry skills and learning group, and the team supporting activities for its own corporate PR.
When asked if Huddle has been a game changer, Jane Moch, Northamptonshire Enterprise, said: “It’s early days yet, but there’s a growing interest from our partners to find out more about making the most of online collaboration.”
“The biggest benefits of using Huddle are the ease-of-use and having the ability to manage all the workspaces centrally.”
All staff at Northamptonshire Enterprise have access to the documents and information within Huddle, and external stakeholders have their own project workspaces.
“We chose Huddle for its lovely design, for the fact it’s so easy to use, and the forthcoming features they are planning. The administration is extremely straightforward, enabling us to get on with our core business objectives of invigorating the local economy.”
Creative agency breaks radical ground in client & staff management using Huddle
Watch Marketing Matters video case study
Marketing Matters is one of the biggest marketing agencies located in southern England. With clients ranging from Standard Life to Sunseeker yachts, Marketing Matters offers integrated creative services including PR, creative and digital work.
Marketing Matters turned to Huddle.net when it required a place to hold all its creative threads together in one place. It needed a clear, organised workplace that was visible to all stakeholders on project teams. Email was deemed to be a very poor medium for communicating the status of tasks on a typical creative project.
Martin Tonks, digital director said: “We’re a cutting edge creative agency, fully digital, with an old-fashioned full-service model, if you will. We need to keep track of our projects in real time and good client service is our lifeblood. With our design work, clear demarcation is required on proofs and approvals at each step of every project.”
“With our fully-digital process and content, we needed an online tool that would go far beyond what email forwards can achieve. Before this, we’d often get huge emails from our clients with long lists of details and requests. From that email we would pull out tasks and actions. If you think about how many team members are doing this each day, it was a completely inefficient, multi-stepped process just to figure out what you had to do next,” continued Martin.
Now, with Huddle, Marketing Matters uses communication, collaboration and online monitoring in transparent workspaces inside and outside the enterprise. Critically, their clients have visibility into the entire design process, seeing how the designs are created and how the team works.
“Now, because of Huddle, our web development or digital team members need to write tasks, status and communications in a non-techie way so the client can understand it. This is extremely good practice for our employees. It helps keep the overall project cost down when the client and agency interaction is more transparent. The client can automatically see the process and what is on schedule, or what isn’t,” said Martin.
Huddle also cuts down on travel costs and reduces the need for meetings. “We don’t have to run expensive team meetings or waste time travelling to them. The online collaboration tool covers everything a status meeting would, so we cut meetings right down to the ones we really need,” Martin continued.
Marketing Matters currently uses Huddle workspaces with more than 50 clients. One of these is Camper Nicholson, the international super-yacht marina business. It is a brand known around the world in boating circles.
“We design web sites for each of Camper Nicholson’s marinas around the globe, and we design them all from our location in Dorset. The project entails design, functionality, navigation – everything. The client can see exactly where we are with each part of the project, and give us feedback without relying on confusing long email trails bouncing between multiple team members and client-side colleagues.”
“Before adopting Huddle, we tried out some other project management tools but we found they lacked the one most important thing to us – client visibility. We required a collaboration tool that worked across the firewall so we could create openness in our projects. Having Huddle dramatically changes client visibility. It used to be that design was viewed like a ‘black art’ – a hidden world. Now clients have a much better understanding of the mechanics behind the process,” said Martin.
Martin said it has forced an evolution in the client management process, which works for both the client and his team.
“The head of the Camper Nicholson account on client-side is bouncing between marinas located all over the world and he can be hard to reach. With Huddle, he can send a web request from Port St Lucia and we can start working on it the same day. You can’t achieve this with email because the Account Manager would have to disseminate tasks and pull the actions out of the email string, which takes up valuable time.”
Marketing Matters has broken new ground with how it manages staff.
“With online collaboration tools, you can essentially bypass the whole Account Manager funnel – anyone working in the creative industries knows that the AM is the centre of activity and the busiest person on the team. Here, we are entrusting staff to be more interactive and more transparent with the clients. We stop our designers from being ‘techie’ all the time and encourage them to speak in a business lingo. Email is a looser form of communication whereas the collaboration tool helps us generate more focus in our language around actions, tasks and deliverables – the things that move a project forward.”
Marketing Matters finds that this more structured way of working enables a new kind of discipline and a supportive environment for creative people to get on with their core job functions.
Martin concluded: “It also means we can do things sooner, cheaper and more efficient. I think our approach is radical right now, but in five years it will be the norm.”
35 staff members at Marketing Matters use the unlimited number of workspaces Huddle provides, across all of their client accounts. Marketing Matters conducts projects via Huddle that span the remit of web design, viral, targeted email marketing, campaigns, online and interactive.
Huddle promotes intergovernmental working with Government Skills
Government Skills aims to improve the delivery of public services by building the skills of people working in government departments, non-departmental public bodies and the Armed Forces across the United Kingdom. In its day-to-day operations, Government Skills deals with employers across many departments including learning and development specialists and HR practitioners.
The organisation wants to improve collaboration between staff members, partners and stakeholders – people working across government departments and agencies. Seeking an online tool that could act as file repository, communication and collaboration tool, Government Skills found Huddle.net. A main reason for needing a collaboration tool was the quick dissemination of information, via an OTS (off the shelf) tool that worked for both internal and external stakeholders – a set of requirements that Huddle could fill. The organisation is using Huddle for five workspaces with more than 300 users from over 40 different organisations across the government logging in to share information crucial to their job functions.
Training made easy and efficient
Government Skills has one primary Huddle workspace that it uses to connect with staff inside the organisation – to share and discuss information and documents. Nicknamed the ‘Cuddle,’ this workspace is used by approximately 50 staff on a regular basis. It assists staff to disseminate information and provides a way to discuss issues without clogging up email inboxes.
The other three workspaces target learning and development professionals, HR and procurement specialists and the ‘Coaches in Government Network’. Each workspace has its own manager who is responsible for keeping the information updated and keeping members up to speed.
Across all four workspaces, there are more than 300 members from at least 40 different organisations across the government.
The primary reason for engaging Huddle was to create an online space that would make it easier to find information and encourage discussion among stakeholders. Government Skills needed a central space where information could be disseminated and feedback sought. It was critical that time wasn’t wasted in keeping and accessing this information. It was also critical that this tool worked with both internal and external stakeholders. The main objective was to move projects in learning and development forward, to meet the group’s main aims, including policy development.
Following the implementation of Huddle, the group says take-up was slow at first but quickly gained ground as people saw how it improved their work-life.
“We have experienced a steady increase in users since last summer when we introduced Huddle. We no longer need to promote the workspaces; people find out about them and ask to join so that they can have access to all the information they need. There, they can communicate with other civil servants,” said Nora Brodian, Communications Manager at Government Skills.
“The workspace has become essential for our Common Action project, which is all about how departments can work together to address their common skills needs. This can include, for example, sharing information about learning and development contracts or best practice on procurement,” said Nora.
The tool is used in different collaboration aspects. Groups communicate via Huddle about things like opportunities and events. “We use it for recruitment, for advice and for learning about new opportunities. One HR user posted a message asking what assessments and development frameworks other organisations use for entry to the Senior Civil Service, and received prompt responses.”
Working better together
Huddle is all about helping people work better together. It encourages a new way of working and a shift away from using email as the main way of collaborating. With large teams of people Huddle can create efficiencies in finding and sharing information. It is complex enough for secure collaboration, but easy enough for non-technical people to get up and running and maintain.
In some ways, Huddle has been the catalyst for advancements in Government Skills’ way of working. Nora said:
“Previously, if someone in a department needed training on something, they’d wait until it was offered in their own department. Now, with Huddle, people can check out when other parts of the government are running that same training and get it done more quickly. It has started to make a difference in interdepartmental working.”
Nora speculates how this may help create efficiencies in the organisation, although she notes these intangibles can be hard to measure. “With greater use, as we get more out of Huddle, it might be easier to measure some of the efficiencies it creates.”
Nora said that she could envisage it driving other new ways of cross-government working. “There is a demand to work cross-government. We are now using Huddle to advertise training opportunities to wider groups, so when you start a new training programme it’s with a wider view than just your department, and therefore people outside can take advantage of it. It allows us to open opportunities.”
Nora points out that with stakeholders asking to join the Huddle workspace, rather than the other way around, it’s a strong proof point for the usefulness of the tool. She said:
“Everything’s in one spot, so people naturally want access to it. People find out about it themselves through word of mouth. Request for membership is driven by the need for that instant access. We could imagine a future where this could be a new way of having meetings.”
The 300 members include those working in learning and development, policy development and procurement – those who procure learning and development within government. Coaches, who provide guidance and mentoring and stem from all departments of government, also use it. “There is a network of coaches who use the tool and they have found this is a way of getting feedback from other coaches in government,” said Nora.
Nora sums up the benefits of Huddle: “The main benefits are its immediacy, the fact that it’s easy to use, and easy to manage. It meets our purposes of sharing info, sending messages to members and facilitating discussion. Though we don’t use all of its functionality yet, we can envisage ways of using it to its fullest extent in future and seeing it become a driver for further cross-government collaboration.”
Boots Huddles up for efficient working practices
Alliance Boots, the international, pharmacy-led health and beauty group which operates Boots high street stores, has transformed key aspects of its business to become more customer-led through the use of Huddle. The implementation, in August 2008, was Boots’ first collaboration software installation and comprises 300 users within Boots’ support offices. The tool was required by Boots to ensure the customer was at the heart of all decision-making processes, for example, those involving trading and ranging decisions, through to creation of store layouts and marketing activities.
Customers are the heart of the business
“Huddle has radically changed the way our key business units operate,” said Martin Duffy, contracts manager in Boots’ Customer Insights team within the marketing department, “in that our Customer Insight material is now accessible by all teams all over the world via a simple web browser without having to download anything onto their individual computers. Our business units consult with each other more efficiently through Huddle. The key benefit is that material now flows freely throughout the business to support critical business decisions.”
Boots’ Customer Insights team is the main engine behind the creation and delivery of all market and customer insights. The team’s research supports decisions that impact Boots’ entire retail operation. The end-result of the team’s work therefore needs to be disseminated quickly across all support offices and commercial business units to support Boots’ wider retail operation. Email was becoming an increasingly poor solution for distributing large attachments, to a lot of staff members, quickly.
Huddle’s off-the-shelf collaboration solution supported Boots’ vision of being truly customer-led by allowing business insights material, containing key information about servicing its customers, to be instantaneously accessed by all Boots staff. Access requires nothing more than a simple web browser without needing major IT support. At present Huddle is primarily used for internal communication and collaboration, but with the workspaces being accessible across the firewall just as easily as they are within the business, Boots has made some of its tender process documents available on Huddle to be shared externally with potential business partners.
We’re sorry; your email server is full
“Huddle has changed the way we work and reduced our reliance on email,” said Duffy. “The main change in working practices, and a continual challenge, is to drive the team to continually upload documents and refer users onto Huddle rather than clog up email systems and shared networks. When material is uploaded and shared, there is no question about where the latest, most current version resides, so we don’t waste time looking for it or waiting for our beleaguered email server to download it.”
“Now, when people come to us with queries, in nine times out of 10, they have already looked up background research on the Huddle workspace, so less of our time is wasted explaining things.”
“The team at Huddle has been a joy to work with, offering flexible solutions with extremely credible account servicing. Huddle has the ability to revolutionise the way you work as an individual, a team and ultimately as a business, allowing efficient information transfer at very high speed. The main challenge for Alliance Boots has been driving peoples’ working practices and engaging people, so that Huddle is at front of mind when access to information is required,” said Duffy.
Huddle’s flexibility and security was also paramount to Boots’ success with the workspaces.
“We have hundreds of suppliers, and if they ever accessed the wrong data it could create a breach in security. Huddle worked closely with us to ensure all the data is internal-only and we locked all IP addresses. Data that needs to be protected includes customer data from Boots Advantage cards. So this was a critical part of the implementation.”
Why Huddle?
Alliance Boots references three reasons behind the Huddle implementation:
- Huddle was a credible off the shelf solution
- It was quick to implement
- It catered to Boots’ need to share documents and collaborate with teams located all over
“People take to Huddle like a duck to water. It’s simple and intuitive. It even generates better ideas for how to do things, because of how simple it is. People get creative with how they use it within different parts of Boots.”
Duffy concluded: “The future of Huddle within Alliance Boots is very positive. There is a huge amount of potential still to be tapped into. For example, some of our key trading areas have a vision to develop increased ownership and usage of Huddle across the wider business, allowing more insights and document sharing across more facets of the business. Where do we stop? Huddle could potentially be rolled out to all our stores.
Kerry Foods benefits from Huddle for multiple creative agency management
Kerry Foods, the leading supplier of chilled foods in the UK and Ireland, is utilising London-based Huddle’s online collaboration software for management of its brand strategy in the UK. Creative agencies located in different places, working for different organisations, all collaborate on unified Huddle workspaces which they access via a web browser. Huddle doesn’t require any downloads or installation to use. Huddle supplied Kerry Foods with the hosted system to allow the company to house all of its artwork, images and video files on one platform, offering remote access to all stakeholders.
Kerry Foods’ internal marketing team is responsible for managing media, PR and design agencies, and each of these groups must be kept up to speed at all times with all aspects of the Kerry Foods brand. Crucially, these branding, marketing and PR activities rely heavily on passing images and other data back and forth between teams at various stages in the development process. A typical task requiring multiple agency and internal contact would involve creating and signing off new packaging design for a Kerry Foods product, such as Cheestrings or Wall’s sausages.
The team at Kerry Foods is currently using five Huddle workspaces for different aspects of the branding work, keeping the information relevant to the team who needs it and maintaining privacy and security for those who don’t. Approximately 25 people based in various places including London use the workspaces on a daily basis to collaborate. Internal project teams use Huddle, as do the external agencies.
With a heavy reliance on image-based work, saving large files on a local computer or server and emailing them back and forth can create a huge amount of time waste, sometimes resulting in lost files or lost versions, and confusion over which versions are being edited and which are final. The process of emailing large files over the firewall, outside the organisation, means it can get stuck in email systems or be marked as spam. At times, so much data needs to be shared that email isn’t even an option, meaning without an online collaboration space Kerry would need to save files onto USBs or CDs and post them to teams – experiencing a couple of days’ lag time on work.
One of the biggest benefits to using Huddle for Lisa Badger, marketing executive at Kerry Foods was that she didn’t need to get IT involved to start using Huddle. “I’m the project lead on this and I’m not technical at all,” she said. The beauty of Huddle lies in its accessibility and usability. Up-time can be experienced in as quickly as one hour.
Setting people up on Huddle requires simply giving them a password to sign in – training isn’t really required. “Once people spend 10 to 15 minutes in the workspace poking around, they get the hang of it. It’s so easy to use, we don’t need training,” Lisa said. “But we do have the option for training if we want it, and we always have a direct line to Huddle for any queries or service issues that arise. Huddle’s customer service really makes you feel you are working with a small company that looks after its customers.”
Agency environments tend to have a dynamic workforce and staff members change frequently. When asked if she needs to worry about new project team members coming on board, Lisa said, “Not at all – the agency can just invite the new team member into the relevant workspace and they’re ready to go, I don’t have to do anything.”
In the past, if one agency required an image from another agency to take the next step forwards on a project, it would require someone at headquarters burning it onto a disc and mailing it to them, losing a few days in the process. With much of marketing now taking place online, the speed of things is changing and this multi-step process doesn’t keep up with the modern pace of business.
Lisa said the bottom line on using Huddle is that it frees up her time to focus on important tasks. “With Huddle, I can always be doing more important things. It helps me focus on the overall task at hand, which is managing our brand strategy.”
Web design company Raspberry Frog benefits from Wiki tools for real-time interaction
Raspberry Frog is a small innovative web design company based in Coventry, West Midlands that thinks big and works smarter. Specialising in accessibility and usability, Raspberry Frog mainly serves the needs of charities, the public sector and businesses.
Working with clients throughout the UK, communicating online is paramount for Raspberry Frog. The web design business, in a typical day, means sending visual mock-ups through to clients, getting feedback, tweaking the designs, and gaining approvals at every step.
The vast majority of email systems fail when sending or receiving a large amount of files (including different versions). And that’s exactly why over-reliance on email simply doesn’t work for Raspberry Frog when managing version control.
Seeking a better way than clogging up its clients’ email servers, Raspberry Frog required an online repository of discussions, documents, files and images. This repository needed to be accessible not just by one person, but all of the project participants both in-house and on client side, to log in and see what’s happening.
Raspberry Frog now posts all of its web project deliverables and initiates online, active discussions about them to manage the project management process and always keep things moving forward. A typical workspace would include documents showing project specifications, web strategies, functional specifications, visuals, site maps, wireframes and so on. “Huddle is very practical because if someone important like the CEO wants to see what is happening they don’t have to rely on anyone on the team. The person can just log in themselves and view progress at a glance.”
“It gives a professional image of they way we work. It helps me collate the feedback I receive from multiple sources. It’s really good for allowing people to have their say, which is a modern style of working. We get comments on the files in the workspace from different people and partake in active, real-time discussions with the entire team with the wiki (whiteboard) tool.”
Being a small business, Raspberry Frog’s workforce of two full time staff as well as freelancers use Huddle, and on the client side five to six people use it at any given time. These people could be working from anywhere in the world. “It’s so simple to use; it’s not just web or tech people who log in. Even a finance director may be involved.”
“I think it’s good a project management tool for this speciality niche. I’m able to get Huddle up and running without getting IT involved, and add workspaces whenever I need to. I can create a new workspace within minutes to show a potential prospective customer how we work, and this impresses them because it is fully branded with their look and feel. We pitched to a charity in London recently – a client who maybe would feel we are far away in the West Midlands. But she saw the workspace with her own logo and colours, and she knew that we could manage the project from anywhere with no interruptions in an easy manner.”
Raspberry Frog also benefits from the way Huddle centralises everything. Nathalie feels more in control of projects, because all of her messages, conversations, whiteboards and files are centralised.
“Another superb thing is the sign-off tool. As a project manager, it is extremely helpful that I can post something and Huddle automatically emails the team with a request to sign-off or approve my post. That is really good for reporting, and keeping track of tasks for yourself or your colleagues – we use the calendar tool in a similar way.”
“I don’t buy things easily. But with Huddle, I was wowed straight away. It was an impulse buy, but I get great value out of it – and I’m usually very hard to impress.”
Winston & Strawn: Huddling up with clients
Winston & Strawn LLP is an international law firm with 950 attorneys among 11 offices including Chicago, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York and Paris. Winston & Strawn in London are Huddle.net’s lawyers and a customer. The London office uses Huddle’s unified collaboration platform to manage client projects and share legal documentation online. For the lawyers advising on emerging technology, Huddle is a focal point for the management of documents for its emerging technology clients who have embraced it. It proves particularly useful for the lawyers who travel extensively and require access to documentation online. In addition, managing all documentation via Huddle helps them to keep track of the latest document versions and eliminates ‘reply all’ email threads. “Initially, we used Huddle during Huddle.net’s series A round of funding. There was so much documentation going back and forth and using Huddle made it much easier to keep track of what was going on. Today, we recommend it to our emerging technology clients” said Barry Vitou, corporate partner, Winston & Strawn.
Rufus Leonard: Where client extranet met social networking
Rufus Leonard is a UK-based brand and digital media consultancy whose clients include BT, Shell, Accenture and Travelex. In early 2008, the company expanded to Dubai. They use Huddle as a fully branded client extranet, connecting all the relevant teams, files and discussions internally and externally to deliver their work without wasting time and effort sending large files via email. Control and ease of use were key to Rufus Leonard’s requirements for an extranet and Huddle was able to provide everything they needed and more. They were able to get all their internal staff and clients trained and using Huddle within two weeks from launch and were instantly proving the benefits of working more efficiently and professionally.
Charities huddle up
UK: The Web of Hope is a non profit organisation helping people to achieve sustainable living, whether as individuals, as part of a local community or a business. Even though they are a small charity their staff are spread far and wide (Manchester, Worcester, Bath, London and Sri Lanka) with external partnerships with people in numerous different countries.
Huddle has helped the charity with work together more easily.
Using it with both internal and external clients and colleagues the largest benefit was streamlining the organisation’s work by using Huddle as the focal point for all document storage and communication therefore instantly improving team work and productivity.
“We primarily use Huddle as a data storage/sharing facility and have successfully used it following a big event we held in the Maldives where we uploaded all of the minutes, keynote speeches, attendee contact list and photos for all of the attendees to view,” said Tilly Jarvis.
Right to Sight’s mission is to eradicate the global crisis of preventable blindness through the use of proven, leading edge techniques in cost recovery, training and surgical practice. As a charity working all over the world they need one central secure place for all project executives and managers to keep documents and manage their countries projects.
The internal use of Huddle has successfully done this by “bringing our team from all around the world to one place” said Rosie Kennedy, Administrator, Right to Sight. She continued: “This is possible because of the streamlined communication of documents, ideas and plans no matter what country you are in, be it in Africa or India the information is easily accessible when required.”
USA: Institute of Awakened Mutuality (IAM) offers educational opportunities for a growing community of people devoted to ever-growing embrace of all that they are. IAM were trying to solve the problem of an overabundance of emails to various project team members. Instead they decided to use Huddle to collaborate together on an outreach project.
Greg Aurand, Founder, IAM told us: “Huddle allows me to post various pieces for review, and assign tasks to team members.” A major benefit the IAM seen since using Huddle is improved team management, Huddle has made cross communication very easy to handle. Commenting on this Greg said, “I find that I send out a lot less emails, and phone calls have been cut down to almost half. I seem to have a lot more time for managing my part of the project, since it takes far less effort to stay in touch with other team members.” Furthermore benefits of Huddle included the ease of uploading documents for others to view and having comments all in one place rather than sporadically distributed via email or word of mouth.
SOUTH AFRICA: Community Health Media Trust (CHMT) is a non profit organisation which has produced HIV/AIDS public health education material since 1998 under the Siyayinqoba Beat It brand.
CHMT has used Huddle to create a new web site and co-ordinate the work being done by various internal and external contributors. The designer, developer, copywriter, project manager and various others were all able to access the project documents online through Huddle.
Megan Craig, Media Campaign Manager, CHMT said: “Huddle really aided our project and allowed all the stakeholders to access the same information easily. As the project manager it was also easy to identify problem areas where certain team members weren’t interacting with the material as often as they should. It’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use, which makes it so accessible and genuinely useful. It creates a project hub that’s really meaningful and assists everyone in achieving the project outcomes. We’d definitely like to use it for future projects that require collaboration between a variety of stakeholders, both internal and external.”
UK: 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. 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.
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 in an online workspace. Those responsible for action are tasked with review deadlines. Online editing means the staff can work from any computer, PC or Mac not worrying about downloading and converting files.
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”.
