Building an enterprise collaboration platform for private communities

A multi-tenant platform for brands and organizations to launch highly engaged, self-contained communities.

Industry

Communication, Social Network

Solution Customer validationDesignDevelopmentDiscovery Year

2019

Challenges

Our client, Connectt, was struggling to drive engagement and scale the platform they had designed and built for students in the UK, called Campus Society. They asked Windmill to re-design and then help to build out a new platform that could support a business pivot. Their new strategy was to create a white-labeled, fully customizable social media platform for brands, organizations, or institutions looking to create thriving communities outside of the mainstream third-party social networks, thereby retaining full control over data, moderation rules and policies, and monetization opportunities.

Approach

We did a detailed analysis of communities and related experiences. We extensively interviewed existing users of the legacy Campus Society platform. We identified the gaps that community owners, brands, and users encounter in popular social networks. Based on this we built out the user experiences across web and mobile platforms and then assisted the Connect team with delivery and deployment.

A better way to connect

The brief was to create a fully-functional community platform which would be clean but familiar to users, thus smoothing their introduction and ability to engage immediately.

Windmill designed and helped build a white-labeled, multi-tenant, fully customizable social media platform to enable brands, organizations, and institutions to deliver engaging community experiences that are unmistakably brand-linked. A strategic decision was made to keep a familiar look and feel to the whole social experience, keeping things clean and as simple as possible.

• Create channels and feeds and populate with posts, articles or blogs
• Comment, like, share and report posts
• Tags and @mentions
• Upload images, photos
• Chat between community members
• Integration with e-books platform

As part of launch activities of the platform to the UK student community, a major advertising campaign with a UK retail bank involved a tie-up with online textbooks for students, which was fully designed and implemented by the Windmill team.

Empower engagement

All the classic features were carefully thought through so digital collaboration could be second nature.

• Share Photos and videos
• Comment and like posts
• Ask via polls
• Create groups
• Organize events

Manage and analyze

We went beyond the end user to design intuitive data analytics dashboards to obtain valuable insights regarding activity and effectiveness of posts and to manage compliance.

Impact

Campus Society, a highly differentiated social network focused on college students was re-launched using Connectt, and the platform was instrumental in obtaining an agreement with Female Tribes, a community for women based on a world-leading survey by a global advertising agency. The compelling new platform enabled acquisition by a US-based VC firm and is now being positioned with multiple high-profile brands.