THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC RELATIONS (CIPR) is the voice of the public relations profession, a champion of its interests and a respected partner to the broader communications community.
Their world-class foundations aid people's understanding of the public relations profession. They provide CIPR members with education, up-to-the-minute research and a code of conduct to enhance their professionalism.
“We chose Glasscubes because it offered the right balance of file sharing, collaboration and security contained within an easy to use tool. Glasscubes gives us secure access to a library of documents with a record of related conversations/comments that are accessible from anywhere."
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CLAIRE BLOOMER HR Director, CIPR |
The Challenge
The CIPR Board and Council have a number of external members who reside outside of their corporate network. The objective was to find a solution that would connect this distributed group and provide them access to confidential documents within a secure environment, which also facilitated collaboration outside of their face-to-face meetings.
"We initially explored Dropbox, which solved the issue of sharing documents from our corporate network with external parties. However, it didn’t facilitate a forum for questions and discussions on documents, which often needs to happen outside of face-to-face meetings.”
There were several reasons why email wasn’t suitable for this purpose. Security was an obvious consideration when distributing this confidential information. Storing information locally created unnecessary administration for members and introduced a potential for confusion, as different versions of the same file entered circulation. Large files that exceeded attachment limits couldn’t be emailed and collaborative discussions across the group resulted in large, convoluted email messages that quickly became unmanageable.
The Solution
The CIPR adopted Glasscubes and set up secure online workspaces that Board and Council members were invited to. The groups’ documents and conversations are all contained within these centralised workspaces and are accessible by members from anywhere, using a web browser to login.
"Glassubes allows our Board and Council members to quickly find documents, past papers and conversations from a centralised area without having to search through their emails. With limited time for face-to-face meetings the group can enter into discussion both beforehand and afterwards online. Glasscubes allows you to brand the tool with your own corporate identity and also has a great poll feature for capturing feedback and consensus of opinion across the group. It’s a great tool to support any Board, Committee or Councils activities."
With only ‘one version of the truth’ being stored and shared in a workspace, it guarantees that the entire group are all referencing the same, accurate information.
