Bridging the gap

Following a piece of internal research, YMCA England & Wales were looking to improve their internal communication across the entire federation.

The federation is made up of 83 independent YMCA’s throughout England and Wales making communication and resource sharing a challenge. Staff, volunteers and trustees weren’t engaging with the current communication platform, it was lacklustre, unintuitive and cumbersome for users to access.

YMCA were looking for an intuitive internal platform to help bridge this gap, promote a more collaborative working environment and help them to achieve their wider strategy.

Say Hello to Y-Hub

We worked with the team at YMCA England and Wales to spec a brand new digital platform encompassing a complete directory, news, events, chat (including emojis and Giphys of course!), resource and brand centres as well as the very competitive daily quiz. Y-Hub allows over 10,000 staff, volunteers and trustees to come together on one platform to communicate, collaborate and share resources.

The platform has been custom designed and built on Laravel and Vue as a progressive web app, allowing us to create a version of Y-Hub accessible through a browser, as a desktop, tablet or mobile app along with native push notifications. Users can search for a colleague in a local YMCA using the directory, start chatting with them, share resources or even create a group chat of colleagues with similar job roles interests to help one another.

Making the system secure

One of our main focuses for the project was making the system secure. Data security best practice has been used throughout the system and was considered in every aspect of its development. From running on a dedicated server to using industry leading security software, Cloudflare – we’ve taken additional steps to ensure that all data on Y-Hub is protected. Plus, the whole system is backed up every night just in case so the team can sleep easy!

Y-Hub Showcase

The system was officially launched at the YMCA’s National Conference in Summer 2023. We created a launch video for the event which showcased the key features and benefits. We also created welcome packs to hand out to every event attendee at the end of the talk. This included help guides on how to register and download the app with a QR code to the registration page to help ensure a high adoption rate early on.

"Harrison Carloss are an extremely talented and committed group of individuals, with a real passion for delivering for their client. They were dedicated to each step of our project, thinking about how it would be received, and how it could be developed to become even better. They care, and that makes all the difference to an organisation like YMCA."

Jerahl Hall, Senior Communications Manager

Find out more at: https://harrisoncarloss.com/projects/ymca-england-wales/