Clickingmad

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

NCVO is the National Council for Voluntary Organizations. We're a charity in England and we are a membership organization for other charities, social enterprises, and community groups throughout England. We support them with the running of their organizations and help lobby government on their behalf. I lead the digital and communications team for NCVO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Clickingmad?

Starting with the OpenID project.  We wanted a way for our users to log into our websites without having to share their data, something secure. We had previously used the Persona Project which is being withdrawn by Mozilla. There was a hard deadline, and a need to replace that with something that users would trust, something that would allow them to keep control of their data.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Clickingmad, supports four of our websites. They also built and support an OpenID authentication service. That allows our members to log in to our websites and to access restricted content. Clickingmad is one of a number of web developers, web agencies that we work with. In the instance of the OpenID project, the previous authentication had been implemented by a different agency.

One of the websites that they developed for us, has an online shop on it. They implemented a WordPress blog and then styled it so that users would experience it as part of our main website. It has a calendar of upcoming events, various content types that we tag so that they pull into different parts of the site. We have a media center, press releases, and press briefings. There’s a members area which has content in it that you can only access if you're logged in as a member.

For the authentication project, we started by stating what we wanted, then Clickingmad made some recommendations. They ran through various options, such as using something similar to Google’ sign-in, and Facebook’s sign-in. Then they recommended the solution, which eventually became OpenID. We commissioned the work, and they set up the server and installed it. We starting testing, by integrating the sign-in with the website that they run for us, which is NCVO.org.uk, our corporate site. They then liaised with two other web agencies we work with who run other products, and integrated the authentication service. They shared documentation with them and worked to implement it on their sites. Afterwards, we did user test data and additional testing before going live with it. We employed a third-party company to do a penetration test of it. Subsequently, the test showed no issues, so we added a couple of minor suggestions to improve it which they then implemented.

What is the team dynamic?

We worked probably quite closely with two or three people there. We had one point of contact for support inquiries, and a separate one for development questions.

In a project, we would speak at least weekly, engaging more regularly as it reached the end. Clickingmad would also be talking to us several times a week on other issues such as ongoing bugs or anything that we're fixing.

How did you come to work with Clickingmad?

We took over a smaller organization for a merger. They were the agency for that organization. We asked them to develop the NCVO website because it felt like a good opportunity to work with a new agency. We're having problems with our previous agency for that site. We never went through a competitive tender or anything like that.

How much have you invested with them?

We pay £1,500 a month to support what's now four websites and the authentication service, and that includes kind of support but within a kind of small development. The Authentication Open ID Project, that was around £4,000. I think that the original build of the NCVO website was around £10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The beginning of 2013. four and a half years ago.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

When we launched the new NCVO website it was a much slimmer and more focused site. The implementation of the WordPress blog led to more engagement from users because it was easy for them to comment on the site and also a lot more engagement from our internal staff. It’s become much more of an active platform for us since we did that, which was a big success.

How did Clickingmad perform from a project management standpoint?

I think they are very responsive and they're very flexible, which we really appreciate. They're very easy to work with. It's not bureaucratic, so we really like it. It's very easy to get hold of them. They set out timelines and work hard to hit milestones where we regularly discuss kind of ways of working. They're very open to feedback and open to adapting how they work to suit our needs as we've changed as an organization.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their technical expertise in terms of Joomla, which is the content management system that they use, is really good. We've always found their work to be of good standard and trust their recommendations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’ve been working with them to work to shift into using a code depository that we own and to move our sites to a hosting environment that we own. I think they work with quite a lot of small charities and small businesses that may not want that. It’s been a bit of a journey for them. Whilst they're very flexible and very responsive, we've wanted a little bit more visibility around things like tickets and the use of our support hours and things like that. They're working on improving that as well.