Speakers in Schools

Project background
LiTHe was engaged by Advantage SA (formerly SA Great) to redevelop the Speakers in Schools website for Advantage SA, including the backend administration system.

The Speakers in Schools program features over 400 volunteer speakers from a range of careers and backgrounds who are available to visit schools around the State to share their personal and professional success stories with students.

Challenge
For Advantage SA, it was important the redevelopment made the program easier and more efficient to maintain with automated booking processes.

For teachers they wanted it to be simple to request speakers and find information about the speakers and their topics.

Advantage SA also wanted to make it easy for speakers to log in and see invitations, accept or decline them and view details about their presentations.

Solution
LiTHe redeveloped the website to include speaker profiles which are maintained by the speakers themselves, with Advantage SA automatically alerted of updates so they can review content. It is easy for speakers to maintain their profiles, more information is available for teachers and it results in less work for Advantage SA.

We also redesigned the ‘Request a speaker’ form so that once a request is submitted, speakers are automatically matched to topics and regions and invited to present at the schools via email. Speakers can simply click links in the email or log in via the website to accept invitations.

After the presentation, the status is changed to complete and an automatic feedback request form specific to the presentation is sent out to the teachers and speaker.

Other features implemented include:

  • the ‘Become a speaker’ form - to automate the process for new or aspiring speakers
  • a blog - where Advantage SA post about presentations, and speakers and teachers can then comment and start discussions
  • Eventbrite -integrated into the site to automate bookings
  • reporting  - to filter information and produce data about the number of speakers on topics, number of presentations etc. 

Results
Processes are now much more automated creating great efficiencies for Advantage SA. Reporting is comprehensive and information is easier to maintain. The experience for teachers and speakers has also improved with more information available and the processes simplified for arranging presentations.

These results are confirmed by our client who said our redevelopment “definitely increased user satisfaction - the site has halved the workload of our coordinator for the program. The automation of the site is amazing and has really simplified the whole booking process. It has also increased website traffic and the CMS allows us to continuously update the site whereas before we did not have access to do this ourselves resulting in old information remaining on the site.”

You can visit the website at: http://www.speakersinschools.com.au/

Our work