A smart solution
The SMP Alliance is seven organisations working together to create and deliver the digital roads of the future.
They recently celebrated their first anniversary and were keen to both acknowledge this milestone and also thank their colleagues for the part they played in this success.
Whilst the SMP Alliance Communications Team had some firm ideas about the branded products they wanted, as an organisation with colleagues geographically spread across multiple locations, they had a specific challenge and needed to find a merchandise partner with a smart solution to match.
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The brief
The SMP Alliance Communications Team asked M&M to source a branded pin badge and a quality, hard backed notebook to celebrate the Alliance’s first birthday.
Not only do notebooks always make useful gifts, but the badge was to be the first in a series marking different anniversaries, starting with bronze and finishing with a golden memento after ten years when the Alliance had completed its programme of work.
All pretty straightforward so far. However, the Alliance had two main challenges, and both involved time.
Firstly, the Communications Team were working to a tight timescale in terms of the lead time to source, produce and distribute his merchandise.
Secondly, with Alliance colleagues spread in locations across the UK in offices, working from home and working on sites, as well as others located internationally, the Communications Team needed help with fulfilment together with a self-service mechanism for colleagues to order their gifts.
The approach – and that smart solution
Short lead times are something we are very used to at M&M and the team got to work straight away, arranging samples, artwork, schedules and production.
With the physical merchandise sorted, it came down to that smart solution and we introduced the SMP Alliance to M&M’s branded product portal.
Designed to be a helping hand for busy marketing teams, our portal is the perfect way to make your merchandise, uniform or other assets easily available to your teams, wherever they are.
We created a dedicated online product portal for the SMP Alliance using the Alliance branding and featuring the notebook and badge, as well as a counter to show how many items were left at any one time.
This enabled the Communications Team to send colleagues a thank you email containing an invitation to link to the dedicated branded portal to order their gifts to be sent to their home address.
Everything else took place behind the scenes, with our fulfilment team taking care of the packing, wrapping and distribution of each order. We even created branded stickers as a nice finishing touch to seal the letterbox friendly boxes.
Soon the notebooks and badges were winging their way across the UK – and further afield too.
The all-important results
The Communications Team were delighted with the merchandise and also the response from colleagues, who have been wearing their badges with pride and using their notebooks regularly.
Indeed, soon after the portal was launched, there were envious glances towards those who had been the early birds in placing their orders, with colleagues wanting to know how they could get theirs too!
Small extra touches made a further impact, such as the badges being mounted on cards with a personal thank you message from the Alliance Manager.
The real benefit was the branded product portal, as Neal Anderson, Senior Internal Communications Consultant with the SMP Alliance explains: “We simply wouldn’t have been able to execute this campaign without it. Our small team didn’t have the capacity or digital resource immediately to hand to set up something similar.”
“Even if we had accepted orders by email, it wouldn’t have been practical or possible for our small team to process, pack and dispatch them as we had many other tasks and priorities.
“The portal was a game-changer for us, and to have a straightforward, intuitive and logical user experience for our colleagues was another key consideration for us. The team at M&M couldn’t have been more friendly, helpful or accommodating.”
So with good quality, well-received products, great service and a smart solution, what advice would Neal give someone in a similar situation?
He said: “If you use an end-to-end service like this, it will save you time, save you money and save you a lot of effort. M&M will take away all the hassle from you – and do it with a smile too!
“I would highly recommend them, and we’ve already worked together on other projects.”
