The Tour of Britain
The Great Tour website
Events
The Tour of Britain
Tour Ride website
Events
The Tour of Britain
Email marketing
Events
Since 2005 we’ve helped the Tour of Britain grow online, consistently upping their game and keeping their brand fresh, against tight budgets and timescales.
Our brief
The Tour websites have four main objectives: to promote events; provide attendance details; host press and team information; and publish results and photography from the events. They also need to encourage people to sign up or donate, and be easily updatable on the fly. All within the tight budgets and timescales typical of these kinds of events.
What we did
Our sites for the Tour balance complex, evolving technical requirements with strong brand objectives, giving each a strong, distinctive identity in its field. As well as the main site, we’ve created sites for ‘The Tour Ride’ in partnership with The Prostate Cancer Charity and, recently, ‘The Great Tour’ of the British coastline.
It was soon clear that a full content management system would not only dwarf the Tour's budget, but would be too in-flexible to cope with their unpredictable changes. So the sites now benefit from a combination of bespoke CMS functionality, and manual updates to sections that need room to evolve each year, or change at a moment's notice.
To help cut costs, we’ve introduced email newsletters that act as their primary communication with visitors, sponsors and volunteers. We've reduced time spent on managing volunteer sign-up by directing the process through the site, and created a partner intranet that allows the Tour to share files with their national stakeholders efficiently and securely.
As the events have grown, we've come up against stiff competition for the Tour work. But we’ve always won through thanks to our service levels and response times, and our commitment to achieving fantastic results, whatever the budget.
‘Tour of Britain take a view that our website must dovetail with our business strategies and since our relationship with Positive began in 2005, we have found them highly capable in achieving this goal, as they take the time to understand our business as well as our requirements.
‘Every year they manage the design and technical implementation in a very short time-frame but are able to deliver on time and within budget exactly what was required. Year on year, we are rewarded with a significant increase in users as well as rich content that provides a firm basis for even more growth. We would have no problem in recommending their services to others.’
Kevin Nash, Online Marketing Manager, The Tour of Britain