The shortlist for the prestigious Belfast Telegraph IT Awards has been released and GCD are delighted to have been shortlisted for two awards, both Digital Project of the Year!
We’re proud to be included in a shortlist of diverse businesses who showcase the innovative entrepreneurship and passion for building great digital products and solutions in the tech sector in Northern Ireland.
Digital Project of the Year – GCD & Global Home Warranties
The first of the two digital projects of the year (in no particular order), is our progressive web app built for Global Home Warranties, a local arranger of structural defect insurance. They challenged GCD to create a digital solution that would innovate, digitize and automate their existing manual and paper based business processes, across all stages of their sales funnel.
We developed a progressive web app with a host of custom features tailored to their processes, the solution ensures:
- All sales leads are automatically imported and auto assigned to staff on location
- All interactions with the sales lead are stored on the system and the lead can be easily passed through each stage in an eye-catching visual way
- All forms across the process are now digital, moving from paper-based forms that had to be printed and posted to clients
- Surveyors can now take a tablet device out on-site and whether offline or online, complete the survey easily, taking photos if required
As a result of the custom digital solution, Global Home Warranties have successfully transformed their process of purchasing insurance, both internally and for their clients. The solution has completely innovated and automated their manual and paper based processes and the company will be entirely paperless by early 2022.
The registration process is now 12x quicker than the previous paper and spreadsheet based systems and sales leads are getting to the relevant salesperson in half the time – speeding up response times of new enquiries and claims.
The huge success of this digital project can be seen in the complete transformation and innovation of their internal processes, not only to the benefit of staff but always with the client’s experience at the core. It has been a brilliant digital project to work on, one that highlights how taking the leap and digitally transforming your business can produce great rewards.
Read the full case study here: GCD and Global Home Warranties
Digital Project of the Year – GCD & Cash For Kids
Originally, Cash for Kids came to GCD with the challenge of creating an innovative digital platform to transform and manage their day to day fundraising campaigns throughout the UK.
The core digital platform we developed, ‘Giving is Easy’, successfully enhanced their fundraising efforts, to better digitally engage with their supporters, to streamline their processes and to ensure the swift distribution of funds or gifts to those in need.
One of their main campaigns is Mission Christmas, which sees huge support locally. To help increase capacity, improve user experience and ensure efficiency across the process we developed additional functionality into the custom platform, including:
- An online facility for companies and organisations to sign up to be drop off points
- An online facility for organisations (social services, carers, etc) to sign up to request gifts for children
- An online searchable map of all drop off points for people wishing to donate
- Online management for the process of approving gift requests and the subsequent collection, sorting and distribution of gifts
For the 2019 campaign, there were key improvements, the biggest of which was to improve the sign up process across the board. We removed the various forms and developed a gift certificate feature.
The key goal was to ensure that every child that was applied for, received a gift and the charity were delighted to announce that they had achieved this via the campaign. Across the whole Mission Christmas campaign, £14.6 million was raised in gifts and cash, helping 380,054 children.
Following the outbreak of Covid-19, their general fundraising and regular income streams disappeared overnight. In response to the urgent demand for support, Cash for Kids launched an emergency appeal, where 100% of funds raised would be distributed to local families in crisis to cover essential needs of food, heating and electricity. To support this appeal, GCD worked at speed to develop a custom web based emergency appeal application within the ‘Giving is Easy’ custom cloud platform, in just 9 days, to efficiently manage all fundraising, donations, grant applications and fund distributions for the appeal.
In total £1.75 million was generated via the online platform and every penny of this was distributed to local families. Thanks to their supporters and our technology they were able to help 50,000 children. They also achieved their aim of ensuring that payment was received within 24hrs of their application being made.
We are delighted that both these digital projects have been shortlisted at this year’s Belfast Telegraph IT awards and we look forward to the awards ceremony, which takes place on Friday 5th November 2021 in the MAC Theatre, Belfast!
