Much like some of their students, no doubt, Cheverus Centennial School of Sacred Hearts Parish wanted a new look for back-to-school this year. So Brattle stepped in to completely redesign and redevelop their website, making it cleaner and adding some useful applications. We built a full content management solution, and an online homework tool to keep both parents and students informed about upcoming homework and assignments.

As part of the website design for the school we included a special Homework Helper application. Because Cheverus was having difficulty maintaining a similar program they had in effect, Brattle included this feature pro bono to reduce the school’s monthly costs. This Homework Helper application allows administrators to permit teachers, students, and parents access to the program. Teachers log in with their credentials and create assignments for their courses that students and parents may easily access from home. The ability to review and download homework assignments up to a year in advance provides students more opportunity to stay on top of schoolwork.

This new application is working well at Cheverus and Brattle is looking forward to providing it to other schools in New England and across the country. Homework Helper will be available to all our clients, included in their hosting package. To find out more, contact us at support@brattleconsultinggroup.com or call us at (617) 229-7210.

In keeping with our commitment to remain at the forefront of technological advances in our field, Brattle Consulting Group recently launched a new text message marketing business called SignalSMS™.  The new site, www.SignalSMS.com, will allow any business to create and launch an active text message marketing campaign in as little as ten minutes.

Although it is a fairly new concept in the world of business and marketing, text message marketing is growing quickly. SMS (text message) marketing technology can be used to promote brand awareness, build customer contact lists, and provide additional information to consumers. The process begins with a customer texting a keyword (a seven digit message) to a five digit number. In return, they receive a response text containing a coupon, promotional information, link to a photo, or whatever else the sponsoring business has chosen to be included in said response. As they see fit, the purchaser may update and adjust the response text that mobile phone users receive. They may also offer mobile phone users opportunities to “opt in” for future communications such as text alerts. Businesses may place “codes” in their store, on their website, on fliers, in ads, or wherever they choose.

The most prominent difference between SignalSMS™ and other SMS marketing businesses is our usability. Firstly, SignalSMS.com offers the straightforwardness of a short phone call during which any business may register and prepay for a promotional text keyword and shared short code to send the keyword to. This program, SignalNOW™, allows the buyer to designate a maximum amount of text responses they wish to purchase per month, priced per text. SignalNOW™ can take as little as ten minutes and upon completion the user is left with an active keyword and short code, ready to be distributed. (For our enterprise-level clients, we offer the more wide-ranging and customized SignalPRISE™ — visit SignalSMS.com to learn more.)  Beyond the initial ease of getting started, SignalSMS provides comprehensive assistance throughout your entire text message campaign. As we hope you have already experienced through Brattle, we are proud to offer you both outstanding customer service and qualified technical assistance.

And when we say qualified, we mean it. Bob Cote, president of Brattle, independently developed the technology and system behind SignalSMS™, which means his complete expertise is at your service. Keeping in mind that more people are now connected via their cell phones than through a home internet provider, it is safe to say that SMS marketing is the next step for promotions, mass-communications, and advertising. For more information about SignalSMS™ and how it can work for your business, visit www.SignalSMS.com or call us at 617.401.8733.

Hey Everyone,

Recently at Brattle we’ve been working on a new project involving text message marketing. I’m really psyched about it, but there’s no way I would have learned about how useful and easy it is without working here. So I decided to do a little experiment. I went on a mission to discover how easy or difficult it is for someone to begin a text message marketing campaign for their business.

For the sake of the experiment, let’s say I own a chocolate shop in a small college town in Oregon. I have been trying to find a way to reach the college kids in town and increase younger traffic to my store. So I tried creating a Facebook group and a MySpace page, and told everyone who joined the group that they could come to the store for a free truffle. A fair amount of people joined, but hardly anyone came in to redeem their truffle.

So I need a way to more effectively communicate with college students. I know Obama used texting to tell people his VP choice, and he has a lot of young supporters, so maybe texting is a good solution.

My first resource is of course Google. I search for “text message promotion for my business.” I got a pretty wide variety of results: how to use texts in your nightclub, how radio stations are using texting, how to save on a texting package from Verizon. Not what I was hoping for. I did however read an interesting question and answer about the effectiveness of text marketing, and found it encouraging given my goal to increase younger traffic to my store.

Next I searched for “text message marketing.” The Wikipedia page popped up, so I read through it – informative, as per usual.

My next step was to start clicking on websites of businesses to explore what promotional and marketing options were available. Most of the sites seemed to offer the same capabilities, so I narrowed it down to a few that described promotions that would work best for my store and websites that were entertaining and easy to understand and navigate.

Finally I was at the last stage in my mission: which company should I pick to start a text message marketing campaign? I would have liked to pick it based on a recommendation from a fellow business owner, but I don’t know anyone else getting involved with this technology. And there aren’t many reviews on these businesses because they’re all relatively new. So I created my own criteria: I’m pretty un-tech savvy, so I want an organization with great customer service so I can ask lots of questions. And I want a business with experience, with notable established clients, so I can see they’re not going to scam me. Lastly, my candy store is not exactly booming right now, so I want to get the most bang for my buck as possible.

Only a few of the sites gave prices. Most of them requested I email them my information and said they would get back to me. But I’d rather just call and talk to a person. So I called a couple of the companies and talked to some associates. The first business I called sent me directly to a recording explaining that all their associates were helping other clients or customers and so I should leave a message and someone would get back to me. That’s not the kind of customer service I’m looking for in a business though, so I didn’t even leave my information. Other places I had to dial two separate numbers to talk to tech/customer support and sales for pricing information. The company I enjoyed the most brought me to someone who answered after few rings and answered all my questions in layman’s terms. However, after doing some research after our conversation, it turned out she wasn’t giving me completely accurate information about the technology.

Thus ended my mission. I would say I was left unsatisfied and disappointed. Thankfully, we’re working to combat all of these issues in our new company, Signal SMS. Signal SMS is a new text message marketing resource for any business or organization that wants to promote their brand, broaden their customer contacts, or increase revenue.

We want to be sure Signal SMS meets all the demands that I, as an interested business owner, set. We will have excellent customer service. All of our departments are in-house, which means you won’t have to dial a separate number to reach sales or tech services. And unless it’s outside business hours, (and sometimes even when it is) someone will take your call. No need to leave a message and wait around for us to return your call. As for building a notable and reliable name for the company, there are already several contracts in the works with a variety of local and national publications, restaurants, real estate companies, health care providers, and more. As soon as these agreements are finalized, we will be proud to publicize who we are working with.

To end, I truly do encourage you to do some of your own research as you’re exploring the possibilities for your company. But I must also highly suggest checking out www.SignalSMS.com and/or calling us directly at (617) 229-7210. We’ll give you the helpful service you want combined with the honest answers you deserve.

Cheers,

Valerie

Maybe it’s because we spend so much time working hard in our office, but we at Brattle Consulting Group are huge fans of the outdoors. So we were happy to work with the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education (AORE) to develop their website from the ground up.

AORE’s mission is to provide opportunities for those in the field of outdoor recreation, and also to promote preservation and conservation of the natural environment. They approached us with the initial desire to streamline their manual business processes, so we listened to the immediate and future goals of both the members and board members to create an appropriate plan for the site. We developed a viable solution to exceed AORE’s current requirements, while also constructing a framework for expandability. We helped them streamline the business by introducing web-based automated tools, one of our specialties.

These tools included:

• Online member application
• Secure membership
• 5 tier membership application with unique portals
• Lost password feature
• Online conference registration
• Payment gateway integration
• Administrative membership management tools
• Conference host management tools
• Confirmation notification tools
• Confirmation notification system
• Automated member importer
• Full content management solution

We’re very proud of our development team at Brattle, but the closest some of us have gotten to attending the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was creating their Physical Education and Recreation websites. However, it was undoubtedly an MIT grad-worthy job.

MIT’s Physical Education site was designed prior to Brattle’s involvement, so our task was to maintain the “look and feel” while expanding the current functionality of the site’s design template. We worked diligently with MIT’s Communications Committee to meet their precise needs and create a user-friendly site students could navigate with ease.

The project consisted of:

• template to translation from HTML to .NET
• content deployment
• online course registrations module
• multimedia integration
• content management system deployment
• hosting consultation
• organic SEO consultation

The response from MIT was a positive one. Tim Moore, General Manager of MIT RecSports, said, “Working with Brattle Consulting Group is great! Our process involved the input of a full committee which can be time-consuming. Bob remained patient and extremely helpful during the complete process and remains very responsive with all of our additional requests. In addition, Brattle Consulting Group’s content management solution is an invaluable, robust, and easy-to-use tool that makes our daily task of updating information simple and quick. Their experience and knowledge consistently provides us with the results we need. We have recommended, and will continue to recommend Brattle Consulting Group.”

To view the results of this project, visit http://mitrecsports.com/ and http://mitpe.com/ .

We have been busy here at Brattle Consulting Group this month! Here are some updates on the companies and sites we have developed.

Inkcups Now is a “specialty manufacturer that provides the highest quality supplies, equipment, and technical support for the pad printing and screen printing industries”, and has been a client since Brattle’s beginnings. Since completing the development of Inkcups’ site in March 2008, they have continued to be loyal and enjoyable clients. Most recently, Brattle developed a new application completely unique to Inkcups Now’s entire industry. It is a search utility to find a specific ink pad type to fit any kind of machine that Inkcups Now provides to their market. We are pleased to continue working with Inkcups Now and are proud to have helped them develop this one-of-a-kind application.