Bruntwood is expanding its community programme by launching an exclusive online platform which allows customers to collaborate and connect across buildings, cities and regions.
Known as The Bruntwood Collective, the online gateway is being rolled out across Bruntwood’s portfolio and will be accessible to all of its 50,000 customers.
Bruntwood has over £1bn in assets and more than 100 properties across Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham.
Over 5,000 members have already joined the online community since it launched just three months ago with numbers increasing by the day, as it’s rolled out more widely.
The new platform, which is powered by Hivebrite, is available online and via an app. It offers a broad range of benefits and functionality and is designed to support collaborative communities, help businesses thrive and enhance the customer experience.
The platform has evolved out of the company’s existing community engagement programme, which is curated by a team of dedicated community engagement managers based in Bruntwood buildings and provides customers with access to regular social, well-being and business support events. App users also have access to cultural, charitable and sustainability-focused events across the cities.
The Bruntwood Collective expands upon this programme by offering customers an easy way to meet people, seek out opportunities and explore events and amenities, not only within their own building but across neighbouring Bruntwood buildings in their city region and further afield.
The online community will have access to a constantly evolving host of functions. They will be able to create their own user profiles to showcase their skills and interests, send messages and post updates, search for jobs and seek out specific skills and talent on their doorstep.
The platform will enable businesses to source collaborative partners for projects, promote their own events, offer mentoring and take advantage of business support across the entire Bruntwood network, and advertise roles, amongst a range of other benefits.
On a practical level, The Bruntwood Collective will also offer users a seamless online tool for booking meeting rooms and will enable them to explore and take advantage of amenities across city region building clusters – a customer in one Manchester-based Bruntwood building, for instance, will be able to book a personal training session in another, nearby Bruntwood building. The platform will also be a hub for local retail offers and information about cultural events and experiences taking place in localities.
Toby Sproll, director of retail, amenity and community at Bruntwood said: “Bruntwood is known for creating collaborative spaces where people and businesses can thrive, and The Collective is a really exciting extension of this – it’s a dynamic virtual space designed to enhance the experience of our physical environments.
“What we’re saying to customers is there’s a world of opportunity outside their workspaces to be explored and we can help them to take advantage of that with the online gateway, by offering access to a ready-made, hugely diverse and innovative network of businesses and individuals. We also want to make life easier for them with the practical tools we’ve built in, and to enrich their day-to-day working life by providing information on social events, offers and access to classes and amenities in close proximity.
“The gateway is intended to be user-led and will evolve in line with customer needs. Our hope is that, as an online community, it will grow organically as customers reach out and link to others. We also plan to use it as a way to collect customer feedback – through an ongoing dialogue that will help to inform our business decisions.”
It is hoped that the new initiative will also give customers the opportunity to tap into Bruntwood’s connections across city regions.
Toby added: “We’ve always been heavily immersed in our city regions’ cultures, leveraging our involvement to build strong connections with key community figures and businesses. Our new platform means that we’re now able to share this with our customers and allow them to take advantage of such relationships, which will hopefully mean that they too can grow their networks.”
The Bruntwood Collective will be fully implemented across all of Bruntwood’s buildings by July 2019.
