How Harrison Carloss Helped YMCA To Connect
Following a piece of internal research, YMCA England & Wales were looking to improve their internal communication across the entire federation.
The federation is made up of 83 independent YMCA’s throughout England and Wales making communication and resource sharing a challenge. Staff, volunteers and trustees weren’t engaging with the current communication platform, it was lacklustre, unintuitive and cumbersome for users to access.
YMCA were looking for an intuitive internal platform to help bridge this gap, promote a more collaborative working environment and help them to achieve their wider strategy. The objective of the platform was to encourage communication and enable YMCA’s to help one another, sharing resources, knowledge and strategies.
Their objective was to devise a solution with the aim of 1,000 users signed up to the platform within 12 months of launch.
Say Hello to Y-Hub
Harrison Carloss worked with the team at YMCA England and Wales to spec, design and build a brand new digital platform; encompassing a complete directory, live news updates with a ‘breaking news’ ticker, the ability to list and book onto in person and virtual events, a chat function for private and public chats (including emojis and Giphys of course!), resource and brand centres as well as the very competitive daily quiz. Y-Hub enables over 10,000 staff, volunteers and trustees across England and Wales to come together on one platform to communicate, collaborate and share resources.
The platform has been custom designed and built on Laravel and Vue as a progressive web app, allowing them to create a version of Y-Hub accessible through a browser, as a desktop, tablet or mobile app along with native push notifications. Users can search for a colleague in a local YMCA using the directory, start chatting with them, share resources or even create a group chat of colleagues with similar job roles interests to help one another. Y-Hub also allows users to choose when they would like to receive push notifications too, ensuring that people can choose to receive notifications only during working hours if they wish.
Making The System secure
One of the agency’s main focuses for the project was ensuring the system was secure.
Data security best practice has been used throughout the system and was considered in every aspect of its development. From running on a dedicated server to using industry leading security software, Cloudflare – they’ve taken additional steps to ensure that all data on Y-Hub is protected.
Harrison Carloss also conducted penetration testing before launch to ensure the system was secure.
Plus, the whole system is backed up every night just in case so the team can sleep easy!
Y-Hub Showcase
The system was officially launched at the YMCA’s National Conference in the summer of 2023. Harrison Carloss created a launch video for the event which showcased the key features and benefits. They also created welcome packs to hand out to every event attendee at the end of the talk. This included help guides on how to register and download the app with a QR code to the registration page to help ensure a high adoption rate early on.
Since launch, the platform has achieved the initial target of 1,000 users in half the time, exceeding expectations. The platform has been well received and it’s already making a huge impact on YMCA’s throughout the federation with regards to collaboration on projects and enabling better communication at a local level.
Jerahl Hall, Senior Communications Manager, said:
Harrison Carloss are an extremely talented and committed group of individuals, with a real passion for delivering for their client. They were dedicated to each step of their project, thinking about how it would be received, and how it could be developed to become even better. They care, and that makes all the difference to an organisation like YMCA.
About Harrison Carloss
Harrison Carloss is a strategic creative agency with 50 years of know-how behind them.
