We all have a big idea to make education accessible, enjoyable and achievable for every child. We plan to do this through a combination of our community objectives, member’s needs and commercial aims.
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Company: The Consortium
Entry submitted by: Ceri Heathcote (Content Strategy Manager)
Community: Collaboroo
Lithy category: Digital Design Excellence
The Consortium is a market leading supplier of products and services to schools, colleges, academies, early years establishments, care homes and public sector organisations in the UK. It is a one-stop shop with a focus on buying made easy. It has a market leading website and extensive range of over 40,000 products. Collaboroo was launched by The Consortium as a new brand to engage teachers and early years practitioners.
Our digital goals with the Lithium-powered community platform
Collaboroo was created with a shared mission between The Consortium and its members, primary teachers and early years practitioners. We all have a big idea to make education accessible, enjoyable and achievable for every child. We plan to do this through a combination of our community objectives, member’s needs and commercial aims.
The design elements make our community unique
Following extensive competitor and market research, we identified four key areas that would make our community really unique and useful for teacher and early years practitioners. These areas are shown below.
Our Brand Blueprint
For our community, we decided to create a new brand, which is supported and facilitated by The Consortium. We believe that this will allow the community to be owned by its members but with some additional help from The Consortium to get it going and keep it on track. Our branding is reflected in our visual identity, community design and communications and was created by an in house team, which comprised of content and social specialists, designer, web designer, classroom team specialist, copywriter and photographer. The brand workshops were complemented by feedback from a panel of teachers and early years practitioners at each step of the way.
Our community consists of a clean fresh look and visual and modern looking feed on the homepage and category pages that allow the content of our members to take centre stage.
How we executed our design
Collaboroo was customised with a visual feed on the home and category pages to show different types of content marked with branded icons to give users a variety of ways to contribute and interact.
Q&A - Lithium’s forums module
Competitions - Lithium’s contests module
Expert blog posts – Lithium’s Blog Module
Topic Talk Groups - Lithium’s groups module.
Ideas - Lithium’s TKB module.
TKB Templates
We implemented 3 different templates to select from when contributing an idea:
Pre-populated headings on ‘how to’ forms also helped to keep the contributions focused.
Encouraging Interaction
We wanted a clear call to action for our visitors on every page so included 3 buttons in the site header.
We streamlined the process for contributions with a custom built drop down which guided the contributor through the necessary choices and took then to the correct form.
It goes without saying that our busy audience needed to access Collaboroo on the move so our designs are fully responsive.
Content Filters
On each of the home and category pages a custom filter controlled by predefined labels (added to the content by members) allows visitors to quickly discover what they need.
We adapted the Lithium community function of ‘kudos’ to become ‘smiles’ with our own smiley icon.
We carefully designed a custom page to tell the story of Collaboroo using branded icons.
Metrics showcasing our design excellence
Collaboroo launched in mid January 2017 and since launch has seen the following:
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