I’ve long been a technology promoter and an advocate, particularly, of all web based applications. It’s interesting how IT / web literate people are these days and how that growing IT / web literacy impacts in the most unexpected areas of your everyday life. Here’s a couple of examples from my humdrum life; last week I renewed my Car tax completely online. Instead of getting all the documents together and shuffling off to queue in the Post Office only to find when you eventually get to the front, the woman in the cage says “this insurance document is for the wrong car” or something like that……..aaaarrrgghhh!!! No, I simply type in my vehicle number and the website back-end technology goes off and checks if I’ve got a current MOT (I do) and if I’ve got current insurance (I do) and then having passed that quality threshhold satisfactorily – it takes my payment electronically and a few days later my new road tax disc turns up in the post. Job done!
Another recent example of pushing-the-envelope with IT / web literacy I became aware of was when Comic Relief turned this to their advantage when they used their website to help raise even more money – but also to get their hands on it quicker.
The charity has worked with Cisco and other partners to make use of leading-edge web technology to make it quicker and easier for people to make charity donations and they overhauled their web presence and call handling capability to cope with the increased demand. Around ten thousand of the charity’s volunteer operators in call centres also made use of the web-based application to reduce ‘paper-form’ usage and accelerate the time it took from initial donation to that money being available to spend on those who need it.
“We live in a new, connected world of Web 2.0 and that means that we need to have a site that supports user-generated content, and a richer experience showing how the money raised makes a difference while providing cool tools for online sponsorship,” said Martin Gill, head of new media at Comic Relief.
Gill added: “having more information on the site, means the technology needs to cope with more people using those services, which drives longer session times and demands greater bandwidth. Traditionally, the lion’s share of donations made use of simple paper forms distributed to call centres. We are now in a situation where we are looking at how we can reduce that volume of paper, which will increase the efficiency of the processes around those donations and mean we have the money in the bank more quickly. That’s great from our point of view as it means we can earn extra interest on that cash and good from the donator’s point of view as it means their transaction has been managed in a more professional and expedient way.”
So there in the same week, thanks to step-improvements in consumer IT / web literacy and organisations who are encouraged enough to make use of that knowledge to leverage a better online business proposation, I was not only able to get my car tax renewed painlessly and efficiently from the comfort and safety of my desktop computer – but I was also able to make my personal donation to Comic Relief safe in the knowledge that it would get there safely and securely, but also an awful lot quicker. Good news all round, eh?
