Back in the dim reaches of time I used to work at the Radio Academy. It was my first job out of University and it was interesting to say the least. It’s a unique organisation that has to balance (juggle?) an incredibly diverse bunch of people and organisations whilst providing a service to members and more importantly continuing to deliver free wine at the London events.
My job at the Academy was ‘Administrator’ which meant I had to wrangle the membership database, the committees and seemingly continual trips to the Post Office. As the youngest person in the office I was also ‘Head of IT’ and made sure the email worked. I remember the then Director of the Radio Academy, John Bradford, ringing up the Head of Development (or something) at BT (a Patron member and ex-radio person) and asking for this new ‘Broadband’, they popped round the next day and replaced our ISDN internet connection.
As a membership organisation the central hub of the Academy is data. It was troublesome to deal with back then and of all the things that I missed when I left to join GWR, data wrangling wasn’t one of them. However, these things do come back to haunt you as a little while ago, after a Radio at the Edge committee meeting, Trevor kept me behind for a chat. He asked me (and my firm Folder Media) to help with integrating all elements of the Academy’s operations into one lovely, shiny, web-based system alongisde a new website and mailing list service. When we started to get into it, I did have a bit of a movie-style flashback moment. I’m surprised a Pavlovian response didn’t kick in and found me standing in Great Portland Street’s Post Office queue.
We’ve really tried to not to re-invent the wheel with the new site. It’s built on Wordpress with some specially designed plugins to handle specific Academy functions. Wordpress is also familiar to some of the Academy’s staff and designed to streamline the process that allows Branch Chairs and other committee members to join in with keeping it all up -to-date. We’ve also developed a MySQL database that holds your membership details and activity and magically syncs it with an enterprise mailing list system, so we can better stay in touch and protect your data.
Our aim is to centre member-activity around a single email address, ideally your work one. This should simplify booking events or updating any details (including changing that email address) and allows the Academy to keep better track of you. As with all of these things there are sure to be ‘use-cases’ where your use breaks our case, but please email us so we can learn and put some fixes into our next revision.
I’ve also had the, er, pleasure of trying to work out all the email domains that the different staff of our Patrons use (and there’s already over 150!). This is so that any staff of these companies can easily join for free. I’m bound to have missed some, so give us a buzz if you think your membership should be free, but the system won’t recognise you.
Whether it’s in the comments below or a call to the Academy, we’d love to hear what you think and where you want to see the site go.
Matt Deegan.
