Since the Kerrygold Community Awards 2010 website went live in March this year, members of the public have been busy adding to the fund and voting for their favourite project. With the fund increasing daily, The Marketing Farm has developed new software to accommodate this exciting second phase of the project and encourage consumers to continue to add to the fund and vote.

Recent additions to the site to include:

Flash animation barometer

Every time the fund is added to, the animation shows a 10p counter travel down the barometer and rise to the top. When it hits the top, the total fund increases and the liquid in the barometer increases to show how the fund is increasing

Most popular projects and most recently added projects

To encourage people to continue to vote, the most popular projects and recently added projects are constantly displayed on the search page, allowing users to easily click through to projects

Search results

To ensure that voting is as fair as possible, the search page displays all results in a random order. Each time the page is refreshed, the order changes. There is also the option to sort search results by popularity or most recently added

Downloadable marketing packs

Marketing packs are available to download on the website, along with a hints and tips sheet for successful marketing. Project owners can then print off the marketing materials and campaign for people to vote for their project

Ezines

Two types of ezines have been created by our software team – a personalized ezine, sent directly to project owners with the name of their project on it which can then be forwarded onto friends and family, and an editable ezine which is available to download from the website. By entering their email address, users will be sent an ezine, and be able to edit their project name and then send on to others

Weekly updates

Every week an email is sent automatically to all project owners informing them of how their project is doing in comparison to other projects in their region, encouraging them to continue to campaign and promote their projects, and also counting down to the closing date for voting ensuring that project owners are kept constantly up-to-date with their project’s progress

The software build for this second phase of the site has been incredibly complex, but we are very proud of our work. Show us your support by purchasing your pack of Kerrygold butter, visiting the website and adding 10p to The Kerrygold Community Fund (watch out for the flash animation!)

The Marketing Farm are preparing to double the capacity of The Software Farm in the next 12 months to meet the demands of existing and future projects. Plans will soon be unveiled to build offices to accommodate our continued expansion.

Our team comprises of cherry picked talent working as a highly motivated team in our Bucharest office. Our programmers possess considerable experience in web-based application development and the creation of scripts, programs and interfaces. The software talent in our Bucharest office, overseen by our Director, Dragos Perca, is underpinned by our creative and strategic resource in the UK. This means that we are able to understand and specify the perfect solution from the simplest of briefs.

We will brand and integrate solutions into a front end to meet client requirements and provide communications and support where necessary. Our server bases operate in the UK and the US with contingency systems in place in Romania. We are also able to provide global 24 hour technical support for the systems we develop, in which automated error messaging systems are embedded. All our systems are security audited to safeguard against all possible fraud scenarios.

Case Study

An example of our ability and success is highlighted by our Financial Portal Platform Software, developed in conjunction with New York based EMS Financial Services. This 18 month project was developed to budget and to schedule. It is the world’s most advanced and automated escrow system in operation and securely controls millions of dollars of trades every day across the world and around the clock.

Member Benefits

EMS members can easily setup, track and manage all of their telecom trading transactions in real-time from anywhere and anytime and in any currency.

Members set up a new project by inviting a buyer and/or a seller to transact telecom services. The details of the project are clearly defined (region, rate, increment, invoicing cycle and settlement period) and terms and conditions of agreement are all confirmed automatically.

Upon the acceptance of project terms and conditions by invitee, the buyer is able to allocate and lock funds from their general holding account to the specific project, thereby securing the transaction and activating the project. The buyer is able at any time to increase the amount of security, as may be required.

Once the agreed billing cycle has been reached, the provider simply selects the specific project they would like to invoice, enters the total amount of minutes used into the designated field and an automated invoice is issued to the client for review and approval. Upon acceptance, funds are released from the project holding account and are moved to the provider’s general account.

Members can easily and simply access to all their projects, financial and corporate data with the simple click of their mouse. From simple summary overviews to detailed downloadable reports, members have full control and complete visibility to all their activities, transaction and status.

In the event of a billing discrepancy, the client has the ability of issuing a dispute for a specific invoice, where the disputed amount is held and secured in lock box until a resolved while the remaining balance is released.

Administration benefits

The administration console role reduces administrator input, risk of human error and reduces administration and accountancy costs. It provides complete transparency over all realtime online statements, automatically flagging up unusual or suspect activity.

No activity is unrecorded and a virtual and easily accessible footprint archive of all user, project and fund activity is catalogued. Any account can be frozen and locked and user accounts and instant detailed activity analysis.

All contacts recorded online with the ability to contact customers easily at any time. All data can be downloaded into various user-friendly formats for offline purposes.

Ongoing Support and Upgrades

The Software Farm supports long term maintenance and support contracts. In this case we have released a series of upgrades:

• The administration and optimisation of a database of tens of tables, containing hundreds of thousands of records
• The optimization of modules and improvements of the user interface (quick access, new features), both within the user’s Portal and administrator’s Panel
• The creation of animated charts and reports, based on user input parameters (date range, etc). Export results to offline files.
• Incorporation of extensive use of Ajax, enabling results page content to load faster and ensure form validations are instant
• The use of new new javascript libraries and plugins (jQuery) for date picker widgets, form validation, and canvas manipulation
• The opimisation of the website for quick load, CSS and javascript caching
• The installation and renewal of SSL certificates
• The use of CPanel for daily server updates, security audits, and modules management

URN FMCG promotions

Open Up Your Business Online with  The RingLeader^. It leaves the flock standing!

There are a flock of online shopping systems available online. But we didn’t like any of them, so we challenged our software team to develop The RingLeader. The result? A very friendly total ecommerce solution we believe is easier to operate, more powerful, affordable, flexible, and customer friendly than the flock.

Our software team work hand in hand with our marketing team and we can provide you with all the marketing and design support you need in addition to ongoing software support and advice to grow your sales. There is no advance fee for the basic software provision and we are also willing to look at joint ventures on a case by case basis.

Our Software Director, Dragos Perca, is growing our Romanian team as we continue to attract high end web development and online software projects.

Our latest employee to join The Team is Emanuel Polak, a senior programmer with strong communication skills and a thorough working knowledge of web programming and database functionality. He excels in PHP, MySQL, xHTML/CSS, Javascript/jQuery, XML, RSS, jSON, Actionscript and creative suites including, and not limited to Dreamweaver, photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, Corel Draw.

How Can Our Team Help Your Business Grow?

We can develop:
Document and Content management systems
Online customer helpdesks
Billing and trading systems
Online sales environments
Membership management
Personnel recruitment and administration platforms
Property and sales platforms
Discussion forums and voting systems
URN FMCG promotions

The Helpdesk we developed for our telecommunications client, Total Ltd., helped them win the prestigious Customer Service Award at last year’s Mobile News Awards!

View the online demonstration here. Our software team will create helpdesk solutions bespoke to your business. Challenge us!

Features and Benefits

Lower service costs
Enabling end users to submit service requests; get status updates; or efficiently find their own answers over the web.

Centralised Reporting
Dashboard reporting capability. With hundreds of predefined reports, managers are able to quickly get answers to key business questions and actively monitor the support centre status in real-time.

Knowledge Management
Real-time service content is captured in an easy-to-access knowledge base.

Access data online anytime, anywhere

Integrate with and update data in your existing software (eg Goldmine)

Automate email monitoring
Emails can be monitored based on key words to auto-generate service requests; existing service requests can even be updated based upon a customer reply.

Improve staff management and performance

Automate workflows

“Our customer helpdesk
has become a cornerstone
of our customer service
excellence.”

Lorrin White, Operations Director, Total Ltd.

Click here to find out more about this award winning Cheltenham based business.

We develop bespoke systems which could include the following

Dashboard with:

• Latest Announcements/News
• Latest items added to the knowledge base
• Important documents
• Advanced search within Knowledge base and Documents
• Links to RSS notification systems
• Live widgets connected to existing in-house software systems (eg Helpdesks)

Announcements / news

• Description, time to live/expire, priority (high/medium/low)
• Target the announcement to a certain department
• Send email alerts

Document management

• Centralized location (uploads organized into year/month/day folders)
• Retrieval: both browsing through documents and searching for specific information (categories, tags / keywords)
• Security: browse / download / upload privileges
• Distribution: notify members of the intranet system that a new document is available
• Archiving: remove it from the current list but hold a copy of the document on the server

Knowledge Base (question : answer)

• An online Knowledge Base for information on troubleshooting, solutions to common issues, how-tos, tips on using software or hardware
• Intranet users can post a question to other users, looking for answers for a specific topic
• Topics split into categories
• Tag assignment (find topics by: recent, featured, hot, week, month)
• A question can have more than 1 answer. Each answer can be voted up/down
• The user asking the question can mark an answer as the most appropriate/agreed one
• Unanswered topics can be easily tracked

Events Calendar

• Upcoming meetings, deadlines and other important events

CMS pages

• General procedures
• Help pages
• Department pages
• Employee directory
• Public contact lists

Business Links

• Links to Web pages that the team members will find interesting or useful.
• Links to internet sites such as virus scans, research, dictionary, thesaurus, competitors, customers

User management

• Organize users into departments
• A user can belong to more than one department
• Send alerts/messages to all users within a department
• Alerts can be stored internally and/or emailed to their inboxes

Resource Booking

• Booking and keeping track of resources that are in use throughout the organization
• Conflict checking
• Resource management (meeting rooms, laptops, projectors)

Photo Gallery

• Manage and search corporate and departmental graphics
• Create a graphics gallery to store corporate artwork, logos and photos
• Store data such as title, caption, author

Suggestion box

• Keep track of suggestions for your business and encourage employee participation.
• Sensitive data can be isolated and secured so only those who should be viewing the information are allowed in

Survey Pools

• Determine the date that you wish your poll to begin, and set an end date
• Display it on the intranet home page for high visibility

Take a break!

• A fun area where employees can go for a chuckle or to read on their lunch or coffee breaks