Client: Fusion

A leisure provider management platform

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Fusion Lifestyle provide sport, leisure and fitness activities to local communities, with over 100 UK leisure centres attracting in excess of 30 million annual visits. In 2014, Digital Marmalade was chosen to become Fusion's digital partner with the remit of upgrading and supporting all Fusion's digital assets and activities.

We worked with Fusion's marketing and IT teams to develop a powerful Leisure Management Platform that caters for all Fusion's online business activities and its customer needs.

The project began with an extensive 'Discovery' phase, in which information was gathered by interviewing key head office staff, local authorities managers and leisure centres teams.

Alongside competitor analysis we audited the existing website's functionality, processes and technology. This information was collated into a customer survey and the results from 3,000 respondents helped shape a digital roadmap for the company.

Digital Roadmap

Fusion operate, on behalf of local authorities, leisure facilities at over 100 locations across the UK. Both customer feedback and key performance indicators highlighted that the websites were not performing well on mobile devices: the booking processes were frustratingly cumbersome and the lack of interactive timetables was a major issue. Generally the design felt dated and clunky, and the back-end systems that powered the websites were limiting and buggy.

To remedy this, whilst ensuring online service disruptions were minimised, we decided that upgrading the entire suite of centre websites was to be split into three phases.

  • Phase one: the foundation phase, was a responsive redesign of the centre sites to ensure they looked great, performed well on mobile devices and were built on a solid development framework and content management system.
  • Phase two: the commercial phase, was to upgrade the timetables and booking processes.
  • Phase three: the personalisation phase, looked to introduce the concept of a 'My Fusion' members area.

Centre management

The leisure centre websites and the content management system that supports them have been completely revamped and upgraded, although the phased rollout across all 100 sites is still in progress.

The new centre websites have a fresh new responsive design ensuring they look that look great on workstations, tablets and mobile devices. UX improvements now make it much easier for visitors to find relevant information. Group activities and leisure facilities are readily accessible and new interactive timetables provide naturally flowing user journeys into the booking process. Online membership sign-up has also been streamlined and improved.

With so many leisure centres to manage and thousands of activities on offer, it was important the Leisure Management platform was built on a solid content management system. The platform provides tools flexible enough to enable Fusion to manage individual centres, local authority grouped centres and global content across all centres.

Fusion's commercial team now have intuitive tools to manage promotions, membership packages, and pricing across their entire portfolio. Banners, promotional pods and interstitial ads enable the marketing teams to clearly target and communicate commercial messages throughout the sites.

Front of house systems integration

Fusion use Gladstone, a third party leisure system, for member management (MRM), centre access control and financial reporting.

The new websites and the leisure management system integrate tightly with MRM to seamlessly bridge the gap between front of house customer service, online member activities and marketing campaigns. This MRM/CMS linking enables the system to auto generate timetables and price products according to membership types.

To achieve the target of 80% of bookings being made online, the second phase of the roadmap is to replace the existing booking engine, Connect 3, with an improved user-friendly booking solution. This will enable us to freely incorporate the booking process throughout the websites, within the members area and directly into promotional campaigns. It also gives us the opportunity to make the booking process mobile friendly.

Digital Marmalade are a small but powerful agency that can really get under the skin of your business. The team have come to understand our (complex) organisational needs and delivered technical and creative solutions to support our digital infrastructure. Through becoming an extended part of our Marketing department, DM have been able to make recommendations outside of their core remit of the website - for example helping us construct a social media ecosystem for a brand campaign. Jeremy is a talented Creative Director who we have come to rely on for brand development work for offline as well as online.

Rose Webb Head of Marketing & Communications

Marketing Campaigns

Alongside managing Fusion's large portfolio of leisure centre websites, the Leisure Management platform allows Fusion to create and manage bespoke marketing campaigns. Throughout the year Fusion create seasonal marketing campaigns to encourage existing members to be more active and to drive new memberships and sales.

Product Attractions

As well as the more generic leisure centre websites the Leisure Management Platform caters for more specific bespoke websites. Fusion operate 'attraction' websites such as lidos and ice rinks, and their own product specific websites such as Swim Schools and High Intencity Interval Training.

Intencity

Intencity is a brand new concept in High Intensity Interval Training (HITT) by Fusion Lifestyle. The innovative class needed its own brand and identity, setting it apart not only from Fusion's other classes, but from all other HIIT classes. The red and black theme is inspired by 'the Red Zone' which is the ideal heart rate you aim to reach in the class as registered by custom chest bands and displayed on screens in the studio.

Swim School

Fusion provide over 3.5 million swimming lessons per year, its Swim School website is a directory of centres that offer the programme. Interactive maps and a postcode finder allow visitors to find swim schools, review timetables and signup to courses.

Total Football

Total Football focuses, you guessed it, on all things football. The site is built around Fusion's New River centre and provides the local community with a platform for hiring pitches and joining mini leagues. The platform manages team applications, fixtures, scores and generates league tables.

King's Cross Pond Club

King's Cross Pond Club was a temporary natural bathing pond in the heart of London. The site is considered as a piece of innovative Land Art and its website reflects this through striking photography, clean design and the use of water effect animations. The responsive, content managed website features a dynamic ticketing engine that combines inventory, memberships, discounts and online payments.