Royal Bank of Scotland

In an organisation as large and diverse as RBS, there was a need to bring senior and middle management teams closer together, get news and policy out quickly to geographically-diverse teams, get feedback and start confidential conversations. The key was to have a highly personalised web and email feed for each individual reflecting their areas of responsibility, interests and teams.

The solution was the Free Rein CMS with integral email and SMS broadcast and CRM database tracking – mixing personal preferences with defined business priority needs. The website news page was updated regularly and then articles were matched to each user's profile. The emails then sent were personal to each user (complete with personalised web version) as was their view of the website itself. Highly secure to encourage online discussions to (almost) Chatham House rules.

Sites (one for each main division) were only accessible to Royal Bank of Scotland senior managers with a pre-approved account.  The systems retained a full archive of all communications and maintained an audit trail of which content had been accessed by which users to refine the subsequent personalisation. Senior managers could suggest discussion topics for future communications and could add comments against current discussions. This brought a high level of community interaction for teams spread throughout the UK.