The Solution

With all of this in mind, The Village was born. It offers a virtual community that creates a close-knit atmosphere and welcomes all of Arriva’s employees from their various operating companies. The idea behind The Village is that the heart and hub of a village and it’s community is often its high street. Arriva’s platform would recreate an online high street that offers discounted goods and services to its ‘local’ people.

Using the SmartTiles™ feature on our SmartHub® software, Arriva placed a different SmartTile™ for each benefit as a building on their online high street. When clicked on, each SmartTile™ takes an employee through to a specific benefit or discount. For example, ‘The Village Bike Shop’ was the entrance to the Cycle to Work application page, ‘The Village Nursery’ linked to the Childcare Vouchers application page, and ‘The Village Local Store’ opened employees to grocery discounts. Over the Christmas period, the entire platform was updated to reflect the festive season with snow-capped buildings. Most recently, ‘The Village Travel Agent’ SmartTile™ was launched to promote the travel discounts available.

Language is a big part of developing a strong brand identity and Arriva used it to create and build the sense of an actual village. This is shown when promoting the upcoming Cycle to Work window, Arriva would advise its employees that ‘The Village Bike Shop’ is now open between the hours of 26th June and 24th July – instead of referencing an open application window.

It was decided that the Arriva Pantone colours would help tie the brand identity across the platform, communications and promotions. Arriva believed that these colours would strike a good balance between providing a clear bond to themselves without alienating any employees who work for a subsidiary. With the tone of Arriva Pantone colours being darker, Arriva felt that this was more appealing for their male-dominated workforce too.

In its first eight months, The Village platform has achieved 20% engagement based on 3,400 employees registering for the scheme. This is fantastic when taking into consideration that Arriva had to rely heavily on printed material to communicate to their widespread, offline workforce. With these results, Arriva is well on their way to hitting the 25% engagement target set for the first year. The Village has also seen a total spend of £630,000, an average of £74,000 a month.

Communications have been tracked as a success too, showing a unity between The Village brand, how Arriva communicate the brand to employees and their usage of the site. Nothing highlights this better than when the introduction of the ‘The Village Travel Agent’ SmartTile™ saw the highest level of spend in a single month – an impressive £91,000. The top retailers that month were Expedia and lastminute.com.

Arriva took back to The Village the titles of ‘Best Branding’ and ‘Most Creative Communications for Larger Organisations’ at the Engagement Excellence Awards 2015.