 So welcome to this business and strategy session. We're going to introduce an enterprise solution that we both use in Drupal. So I'm going to introduce myself. My name is P.K. I'm from Manchester. So I'm the CEO of LiveLink, which is a Drupal shop. And predominantly we're a kind of marketing agency that focuses on technology and delivering marketing solutions and marketing automation solutions. We mainly use Drupal, Drupal Commerce, Copernica, which is a marketing automation engine, and BitHide, which is an analytics engine. Because we figured that data is important, not just to deliver the right kind of solution, but also ongoing marketing, kind of relevant, timely marketing unique, the right kind of data. I'm going to introduce Ed. Hi, I'm Ed Abbas. I'm the head of Manchester Soccer Schools. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview in terms of who we are, what we do, and why we've done this project. So we're the International Grassroots Football Division of Manchester United, the commercial arm. There are four pillars to that. The academy, the foundation, charitable arm, centre of excellence, and then what we do around the world. We predominantly deliver to children ages 8 to 18, but we've delivered to children who are younger and to people up to 80 years of age, but we have been checked whenever we've done that. We are what we call an authentic experience. When I say that, I mean that what we deliver on the field to children of all abilities is essentially the same training practices that the Manchester United First Team and Academy employ every day. But we do it in a way that the children are able to take part, but that they feel like everybody's the pro as a First Team player mind. I'm actually employed by Nike. Nike run Manchester United Soccer Schools as part of the wider long-term merchandising agreement. And Nike uses Manchester United Soccer Schools to promote the Manchester United brand around the world. As you said, we reach thousands of children in every part of the world. And our programmes, generally speaking, operated with experts, partners in different territories. We have a relatively small team back in Manchester. We do all of the strategy, the curriculum, and quality control to make sure it's delivered in the right manner. All of the coaching is done with our own coaches. Generally sent from Manchester, who work for us all over the world. But these part, these expert partners in each territory allow us to bring a scalability that our small team and our own wouldn't be able to deliver. But what we have identified is with that small team, that clearly digital is a massive opportunity for us to reach far and wide. And in LiveLink, we found a company that were very much like-minded in the structures that we were trying to pursue. We created this project in order to ensure that we had consistency against all of the different operations we have around the world, and hopefully then harness some synergies for everyone's benefit. We have about 10 partners around the world in various locations, which I'll come into in a second. And when we went into this, they had each one of those operate at a standalone website with some had e-commerce engines, some didn't have e-commerce engines, and turned it to all operate to a certain degree in isolation. We came in and we said, well, look, that's not going to benefit everyone. We need to bring all of this together. So we started off with our main MBSS, hope the main site, and then gradually now we're rolling out part of many sites. So to give a sense of where we operate, we have full-time operators in India, China, Singapore, and in the Middle East, and then we have seasonal camps as well, in places like Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan. All of these partners all have different goals, all have different needs, but what we've tried to do is be a support for them, essentially. So just to give you a bit of an idea of the project description or the impossible task that we gave PK and Rivalink, we came to where we said we wanted to create a consistent digital presence to elevate the brand and market out in sector schools. It needs to have a central e-commerce engine, but that central e-commerce engine needs to be able to then load out to each individual partner site with individual products. That would help us hopefully to drive standardisation across reporting, because we would have got different types of reports from different projects, although with this we'll have one single view, essentially. We had three global sites that we needed to merge together, because it made no sense to fragment the traffic, as we had it previously. But what we wanted to do, as we said earlier, was enable partners to sell unique products in each of their local markets, dependent on cultural differences, the needs of the footballers in those countries. We have different products, so we needed to make sure we could represent that as part of this project. And by doing this, by having this consistency and this central hub, hopefully my team, essentially, in Manchester could increase marketing collaboration and support for those partners, so hopefully everyone gets more out of it. So in terms of the requirements, just to keep it simple, we need to be multi-site, multi-region, multi-linked. Not a difficult request, but only. It needs to be B2B and B2C, e-commerce based. Multiple checkouts using multiple currencies. Responsive theme, because obviously everyone's using Google now. And with marketing automation features. Oh yeah, and with the content pollution workflow as well. And all of that, hopefully, drafts a fantastic reporting suite for us so I can say that we are correct and all of our partners are doing a fantastic job for us. So I'm going to hand to PK now to explain how we made sense of everything that we wanted. Actually, mainly we didn't. We kind of did. So we started off with a base group of commerce module, set of modules, and before we embarked on developing this project, delivering this project, we know commerce really well and we've done many, many projects using commerce. So Drupal commerce became kind of a defacto default solution. Because as we understood the project and its requirements, it became obvious that we needed a really flexible checkout system and Drupal commerce does that really well with extra pains. We needed to validate forms as they were being filled. I'm going to, through the slides, I'm going to show you that there are multiple steps to checkout and there's a lot of information gathering during the process before the checkout and after the checkout. So Drupal commerce is quite strong at doing that. We also used views extensively and I'll cover some of that a bit later. And also the ability to handle many payment types. So that was also kind of a strong part of what Drupal commerce can deliver. The other idea, the other key things were kind of using the entity API and the field API because of the nature of multi-steps and multiple kind of data sets that we required. Views, huge number of reports, very custom and because views uses fields with custom entities and especially because we're storing player details. So the main kind of thing was broken down into eight steps during the project planning stage and the requirements were as had kind of created vaguely set out. So we then kind of proceeded on to the next step which was to actually designing the user journeys. So that was the kind of first step. So understand broadly what the client wants and then we tried to make sense of it by actually planning out the journeys, the typical user journeys. And invariably, a visitor would end up coming to the site, viewing a camp or a course, add something to the basket, check out and then along that process there were a lot of details being captured. So I'm going to detail out some of those a little bit later. And then the key, key thing about this project was in the way Drupal commerce was used which is once you create an order in Drupal it invariably cannot be modified but the system actually that Manchester United required was that the order could be modified afterwards. Okay? So a number of things can be done with the order afterwards. So this was quite unique. Oh, we believe it's unique. So the first step was to optimize the checkouts and the first step invariably is fairly standard these days where you capture just an email address because that then enables you to get an artist abandoned because of the complex nature of the form filling that's required. All that information usually is not available at hand by the user so they may abandon the basket at some point in the process. So we made sure that just capturing the email address gave us the ability to then communicate with them automatically. So I'll cover a bit of that a little bit later. And once you completed your booking you then could come back and view your orders and actually the system would tell you what sort of things you haven't done and what sort of things you need to do or what sort of things you need to book more on top of that initial order. So the same order gets modified multiple times. So the first thing we addressed were what data were we looking to capture? So in this case we were looking to capture parent's details or guardian's details, and normally name, age, gender and medical details. Now some of this data is actually used to validate whether they are appropriate for that particular camp. So like age is used in that way. Also the details of the person transacting which may not necessarily be the parent or the guardian. So again it's a third party. Also the ability to actually have multiple product types. So we were selling courses, camps, airport transfers, weekend stays, visa support letters because a lot of the kids come from all over the world and they may require visas to enter the United Kingdom. And also multiple payment methods. So editing an order multiple times was a big challenge. Do you guys familiar with commerce and the way it works? No? Okay, well it can do this. Okay, it's a huge amount of customization but it can do it. Another complication that was added was the ability, because of the value of the order, these are high value products. So typically a top end course is over 2,000 pounds. Yeah, we have some courses that are 800 pounds, 2,300 pounds, so it's difficult for people to essentially pay all that all in one go. So we need to give them the opportunity to pay over a period of time. So initially just to get the booking, they can take a part payment and check out. And then they can come back and pay off the balances. But not only that, they can also come back and purchase extras. And there are many types of extras that they can pay. The other big thing was also the ability to actually check out without paying anything at all. I mean, I think that's a bit crazy, right? But actually it works because it allows people to just go through the checkout and then they know they can come back and pay. And they can come back and pay with the bank transfers and credit cards and such. Also the admin staff can also, when they receive bank transfers, they can apply the payments on behalf of the customer. Okay, so they can do that manually. The big aspect of the system was the ability to order extras. These are all kind of upsells and cross-sell, not cross-sell, but upsell. So these are extras to the camp itself. So think like airport transfers, weekend stays, matchday tickets, and soccer kits. So these are all things we can sell afterwards and they can be attached to the original order. The reference number is the same always. So just to kind of recap, so we require one global site, many partner sites. The site database shares users' orders and content. Okay, so it was a very kind of integrated system. Each site or a partner site has a unique set of products. So we used a number of, I mean these are two kind of key modules we used. We used probably 50, 60 different modules. And some custom modules were also developed for the system. But domain access, are you familiar with domain access module? Yeah, so that was used to control permissions because what we wanted was a system where global admin role could go in at any site whereas localized admin could only control and modify and manage the local sites. We also used the work bit module. I think some guys will be familiar with that also. Also to control the content workflow as to how content could be published locally in less than India and it could either be then pushed into the global site or vice versa. The other big requirement which hasn't touched on was apart from the B2C element of the system, we also needed a B2B system because apart from being able to sell local camps, we also have field agents, sales field agents. So we have sales agents around the world which could be, they could be a state agent, not a state agent, it's not sales agents, they could be specialist sport tour agents and they also then sell in whichever territory they're an expert for group bookings. Now it's beneficial to them because they might organize the travel that the airport transfers themselves so it's a business for them but it's great for us because then we maybe get rather than one individual booking we'll get 20 or 30 coming as a group and we also know that they'll have a group leader so it takes a lot of the pain away of them managing that group that are coming over to the UK for us. So we forgot to mention this at the early stage of the project that we needed this as well. So this was kind of another mini application within the application itself where an agent could come along and actually make block bookings and then fill out player details by uploading a CSV file. The agents also had slightly different payment options. Their roles would also signify what commissions they received. They also could generate invoices for each booking that they made either as whole booking or as part booking for each child so they could supply invoicing direct to the parents. Also we used another key module we used was the Drupal Message module which was used which automatically generates emails to chase the payments for unpaid payments. For administration, menus were customized to be used workflow using Workbench. Also the admin role allowed orders to be amended by admin staff. And the other kind of nifty little feature which is standard Drupal is the ability to log changes. Every time you touched an order and did something on it it would create a log with the order. So when you viewed it underneath there's a log of all the activity. And that is automatically generated by the system. So that becomes very useful. And also if somebody were to cancel an order again it can be handled automatically with an email that is sent to the customer. The reporting engine was developed. There are many many reports that were specified. I think originally there were about 25 different reports which were going to boil down into 10 key reports which did the role of 25 different reports. So you could for example an abundant basket was a kind of key feature. How to manage abundant cards was a key feature requirement up front. So there's a report that we use with creative views that allowed the admin staff to actually come and use that as a lead generation tool either then and afterwards. So the system itself would manage the abundant cards. So there are time delayed emails. I'm going to show you a diagram that's quite complicated which does that process. And there are many many other things that the admin can draw, the information they can draw. Because some of it is operational, some of it is for sales, some is for marketing. For example for operational reports we have kind of an insurance report for example. So this report would specify because this is required by the insurance company would list children and group them in age groups for the purpose of insurance. Make sure they ensure while they are in the care in the MESS care. For marketing we developed a multi-step, many many multi-step emails which would generate depending on where you were in the checkout or if you had already checked out or if you had bought an extra and so on and so on. And there are many many many of these. I'm going to show you a great example of one of those. And if you're not using that you should use the message module because it's a fantastic configurable module for exactly this kind of purpose. Also all the data that we were collecting about transactions, users and so on was also being pushed into the Copernica marketing automation engine which is then used now to actually automate a lot of the other marketing outside of the transactions. We're also now in the second phase of this project where we're actually helping MESS with email marketing, social media, search and display remarketing and landing pages based on what we call optimizing pages as you go along so you look at the performance of various key pages and if they're not quite right we experiment and we optimize and create landing pages. We're also going to be introducing website tracking which is more akin to scoring people as they land you create a profile and you score them based on their journey during their visits either single or multiple visits and when you know who they are when they're going to put something in the basket and they go through the checkout you then attach all of the history browsing history with the site to their profile. So that then gives us an insight into what we're looking for next season where we will then know what the typical journeys look like what are the top 10 journeys, for example and try and optimize them. So this is very much a business application that actually is optimized or we want to optimize it to deliver maximum revenue. So this is a diagram I was going to show you so this is typically somebody's actually put a camp trying to book a camp and put them in the basket and they have a football language which is a specific course that teaches football and also English language because a lot of the kids that come from Russia China and they're not very good with English so they get taught soccer as well as English. So it's a great selling so this is a kind of automated messaging example that we've developed using the message module and a little bit of customization but essentially it's a workflow as to you've paid not paid, how much have you paid some of these emails are time delayed so you know 7 days later what happens 14 days later what happens based on your previous action or inaction and the ultimate goal is to get them get the user through this time based thing get the payment and prepare them to send their child to the camp so it works really really well. So it's going to present what kind of impact we've had so far. So as BK said there's been a lot of work that's gone into this so far and we haven't stopped yet we're always looking to optimize whether it be the front end, the back end the experience of the parents, the children who come on the camps we thought we'd just give you a bit of an idea of what we've seen as success so far which we were hoping to get out of this project but certainly bringing true so we've seen the numbers go 5% and that might seem like a relatively small increase but the external markets have not changed all that much and we've seen this through word of mouth people that used the website before that they were getting a better experience so they're coming back to start to use it. Our conversion rate because it's such a high value product you know we don't need to sell that many of them to actually drive the piece that we're driving but we've virtually doubled that conversion rate in the short space of time we've been running this project now which obviously at this stage of the sales process that we're in right now for this summer has had a huge impact. We've also seen 5% of our revenue now coming from abandoned basket emails alone that's something that we never had before we had no option to do that we didn't know if someone came on and abandoned but that was it, they were gone that was our last opportunity now we have the automated emails that go out and give them different messages to hopefully get them to come back but also if emails don't work we have the details so we can contact them we can phone them, we can email them personally we can use all manner of ways to try and encourage them to come and purchase so that kind of jumping in revenue for us has been huge something that we probably we had an idea of when we started but probably didn't realise the benefits of it because we're in line with the administration and hence the reducing of costs not just for us centrally our HQ also for all of our partners around the world they all pay we centrally paid to invest in this but all our partners pay a licence fee to be part of this which was a fraction of what they were paying before to run their own websites with 10, 20 times more ability to do things than they've had before most of them never even did our e-commerce before to be with them and each time there's an increase in revenue for mobile devices which anybody who's doing a building website with responsive things will know how important that is that's huge for us as well and we're finding more and more people now are using our websites and encouraging whether it be mobile or tablets and it's something we're trying to encourage more and more we've made some mistakes as well and we've got a lot of negative stuff now out of the positive stuff it leaves all the mess it gets to me so along the way we made some assumptions that were probably incorrect during the discovery phase we probably didn't discover enough we focused actually a lot of our focus initially was on user journeys and the flexibility that was required by the system but there were a lot of levels in the detail and it proved true there were some aspects that we didn't discover until we were halfway through the project and then we had to rework some of the bits which is quite typical for a complex project like this because sometimes it's just not possible to discover everything but we should try we didn't you know because the nature of Drupal is flexibility and there are many ways of doing the same thing so we probably didn't focus enough on how we store the data because how are we going to ever use it so if you start from what you need you can then decide on how you're going to store stuff and how you're going to use it afterwards so data structure was very important and the granularity of it was important we also actually towards the end of the project we discovered that there were some aspects that were missing we hadn't discovered so part payment was one of them which is a challenge in its own right somebody will tell you if you've ever worked with commerce have you done part payments it's a difficult one there isn't a ready-made module that does it so we had to write one of them and there were other aspects also especially taking part payments bent deposits and all those kind of stuff so those are the kind of things that I think discovery is very important because sometimes a client will not tell you everything if you've not asked the right questions you won't discover it and sometimes you just don't know to ask the right question so more talking actually is very important you know to talk more work things through a little bit more so next phase what are we doing so we've already done three sites I think we're about to launch India so India is being launched we launched Italy last month and we already launched the global site and the UK site so we're kind of launching one on a site per month but I think we're going to accelerate that so I think within the next three months this phase of the project will be complete we're also implementing a content strategy to try and get more traffic to the site and then we process every three months we look at the customer journeys and optimise some of them and try and hopefully improve the conversion conversion rates and then the key thing is Ed always wanted a world domination type a colourful dashboard that I could give to management so Ed wants some colour and some graphics and all that to see to actually deliver the metrics that he wants to keep an eye on so we're also building in a dashboard and we have an application that has been built by LiveLink and it's called BitHive go and check it out it's called BitHive B-I-T-H-W-I-V-E dot com so I think I hope it's been useful for you guys if you have any questions we'll take a few questions I think we've got plenty of time no technical questions for me please neither of us are technically I'm at the business end of the presentation so well first born and raised in Evertonian so treat David well I head of international and Evertonian so treat Mr. Moyes well he's been really good for us so talking about your timed message releases was that all managed completely by that the message module was Drupal what managed your actual email going out yes so all the transactional emails and abandoned emails and payment anything related to payment and so everything that is generated within Drupal using the message module and did you find much of a performance fit is Drupal the right tool to manage that well I think these are not high-volume emails so you're probably sending out maybe depending on your transaction levels but maybe no more than 50 hundred emails per day so it doesn't usually have a huge impact on your application just a question around the rollouts for your partner sites what sort of strategy did you go with at the start and why are you accelerating from a month to more of a quicker rollout I guess in terms of the strategy for rollouts he's been more on a need basis which partners needed were already more ahead in the curve in terms of e-commerce so we were comfortable with them keeping their websites in the short term until we got some of the ones that had more of a need did you have a training rollout strategy for the partner sites which you mean because it's global yeah we've had them over to Manchester the live link have also prepared some video tutorials documentation we have to hold their hand in the short term as well so we'll do a bit of that for them from e-commerce as well to help them through the process of using it as well so it's not a fast process because we're effective these are more than websites this is their business engine in a lot of ways so it's holding their hand for probably you know the rollouts I guess to a certain degree not for PK but for us it's the easy bit and then it's making sure they're comfortable with it and also making sure they get the most out of it as time goes by with the documentation did you have both an online and offline experience or did you build an online documentation too I mean the main way we deliver this is through actually screen capture and then put a voice over so we do it more visually rather than actually can hear words and we've done the screen take over training as well so obviously while they're at their computer maybe in India we've taken over their screen and shown them what worked them through the actual administration system as well so they can see how to use it and one more question how are you guys going to manage global priorities or partner sites requesting features on the sites as it all go through one central management or can partner sites request new features that will roll out because I understand using domain access which is one database across multiple domains but obviously all these partner sites might have different feature requests because the country is at their end actually all the features are available in all for all partner sites so there is a degree of standardization here we try and not customize each partner site to that kind of degree the main thing that they can customize is content and products but beyond that no the features are the features that is decided centrally by HQ what we have said to them is because we understand as well that most of them have maybe not got at the moment got the sophistication that we're trying to bring to this as well for them but what we have said over time once we're bedded in and all partners are up and running then we'll try and look at it on a three month basis ok what are the things that you would like and everyone submit their ideas now if there are things that everyone needs then we'll probably fund that centrally if an individual partner wants to do something themselves and it's going to be a massive drive for their business then we'll let them fund it via live link so there will be potentially customizable things but they have thought this as well they need to invest if they want to do that but mainly the features are then rolled back to all the sites whether they use them or not but they're available thank you very much so all the reporting is that all done with views yes most yes it is in fact yes yes it is possible it really is it requires a lot of work but it is possible and also we've also got the export features so when you create a view for something we can also export the data so you can just take it and it just does it and also in the views you can add filtering so there's a lot of flexibility in views and there are some advanced features within views that you can use to generate these reports I work with a non-profit and just like you our core product is relatively valuable it's a child sponsorship so it has a relatively high long term value and so just like you we have a fairly low conversion rate for our product my question is when you're looking at optimization have you been able to implement live audience testing A-B testing or multidariate testing with a conversion rate like that or have you used other methods of optimization yes we've already in fact in fact within couple of weeks I think literally within couple of weeks I noticed that there was a drop off during the journey because the camps were not visible where they should be so we actually merged couple of steps into one step and kind of optimized that so we constantly look to do live testing constantly so any key page during the journey or even as a landing page is optimized and tested but this is an ongoing process of course be sure to tell you as well that I'm the biggest pain when it comes to those kind of things I'm constantly looking at the website every hour of the day thinking how can I make that content better can we place that particular module about a camp in a better place that might be more visible it's not easy because obviously we're not necessarily that consumer and sometimes you only find out by moving it and doing it and then you realize that in a fairly typical demanding age that I am within about two weeks we were already doing that and we'd not even really finished more on any of the sides What tool are you using for that? What tool are you using for the testing? Oh we use the Google Webmaster Tools Oh you use Webmaster Tools? Because again there is no Drupal module that does that for you and I'll be honest with you it's something that's been in the back of my head for a very long time we developed we started to develop a new theming engine for Drupal 7 which kind of we finished but one of the key features of this was the ability to actually create pages on the fly to do the A B split tests but we kind of shelved that because the amount of energy that was required to keep it up to date and introduce the responsive element it just became a bit too much it was a resource hungry beast so we've killed it It's a difficult challenge Yeah absolutely Thank you Anybody else? Not difficult one please It's a long day Sort of technical With your partner sites do they have responsibility because you're using the domain access and you're giving them certain rights do they have responsibility or I guess when it comes to asset management do you have any ideas about sharing content and images across the partner sites or is it? So like image libraries and so on they are shared so there is a central repository for assets that you need content can then just be created on a per domain basis and then you may decide you may have the role that says you can publish this elsewhere apart from your own so maybe if there's a piece of news or something which is of interest globally that can be pushed into HQ where a content manager would then decide whether to publish it or not so they may just tweak it and then publish it globally So the Indian party could put the content on their site and make coffee up to us but we'll have to say yes that's okay we'll put on the global site as well And how did you go up there when you come to SEO when you came to the global site did you have that sort of canonical link? Yeah absolutely So it goes both ways whoever decides whoever is actually publishing the content or creating the content can decide where it might be of use and even you may find that when the published content globally the Indian market manager may decide that story of interest into India and they can pull that story and actually publish it Alright thanks a lot Thank you Anybody else? Well thank you for attending this session I hope you found it useful and if you need any more information well you can Actually if you want to put my email and stuff So anyway if you want to write it down it's pkltl.uk.com or come and see us at liveindewmedia.com Thank you