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!)

As Kerrygold is owned by a cooperative of Irish dairy farmers, the company understands that by working together, great things can be achieved.  The Kerrygold Community Awards have been created to give away £1,000’s to local community projects.

The majority of winning projects are decided by the public who can visit the site, enter their Unique Reference Number (available on special packs and tubs of Kerrygold), and then cast their vote for the project they think deserves a share of the money.  Each time a consumer enters their unique reference number, 10p is added to the Kerrygold Community Fund.

Visit The Site
Our objective was to design and develop a fully interactive and searchable awards platform that is able to process entries and voting in real time, controlled with a full administration console. The site needed to be simple for the user to browse, search, vote and add entries and also easy to manage by administrators and the Kerrygold team. The site has three different phases according to which part of the competition is taking place and has been developed to accommodate an infinite number of entries and generate maximum search engine referrals.

The software build for such a site was complex, with key achievements from our team including:

• Successfully creating a voting system and a commenting system, allowing users to both vote and comment on any project
• Building a system for three different phases of the project, with each phase being activated according to set periods of time
• Designing a money pot counter which is added to each time someone enters a URN
• Ability to search projects based on various criteria
• Creating a powerful admin panel for projects management, comment management, cotes management, media library etc
• The site makes use of PHP, MySQL, Javascript/iQuery/AJAX and CSS

The whole team here at The Farm are very proud of the website so please purchase your pack or tub of Kerrygold butter, visit the website and add 10p to The Kerrygold Community Fund by entering your URN.  You can then cast your own vote for which project you feel deserves a share of The Kerrygold Community Fund!

As well as all this, Kerrygold are also giving away 5 prizes of £2,000 – just enter your URN to be in with the chance of instantly winning £2,000.