Transforming NUS Extra to TOTUM

Arrk Group has partnered/shouldered with OneVoice to Transform, Enrich, and Maintain a digital platform TOTUM for students and professionals. Before September 2018 this was only a student discount product called NUS Extra owned by NUS – National Union of Students, a non-for-profit organisation.

OneVoice who were already providing digital support to NUS for the UnionCloud membership engagement platform, took over NUS Extra and transformed the old ageing product to a new energetic look and name called as TOTUM – only Discount, Proof of Age ID and Student Life digital platform.

Arrk Group has played a key role during this transformation and enhancement of the platform right from the inception to go live and continue the association to provide more innovative features.

Customer

OneVoice is a vibrant collaboration between National Union of Students (NUS) and Arrk Group, bringing together the best talents of each organisation to build and engage communities of common interest. With a heritage stretching back to 1922, OneVoice passionately understands what it means to collaborate and work together for the common good. OneVoice believes in the positive impact communities and associations have on society and the collective strength when people come together for the common good. The challenge is to harness and unlock this positive power; to amplify engagement and release a community’s potential – to make a lasting difference.

Much more than an award-winning and versatile membership platform, OneVoice provides a suite of additional services, all wrapped around the central tenet of putting people at the heart of all we do.

Vibrant Collaboration

Award Winning

Not-for-profit organisation

Statement

The NUS Extra card was losing its market share in the student discount world due to an ageing app and outdated offers catalogue. NUS Extra faced competition from other players who offered better alternatives in the form of digital services and usage. Furthermore, these competitors also had better reach, penetration and offered best in class student discounts. These issues had a direct impact on the revenues and resulted in users shifting their allegiance to the competitors.

Following a detailed review, OneVoice and Arrk Group decided to build a dedicated student discount platform called TOTUM, comprising of a brand-new front-end website, offer management system and digital app for iOS and Android devices. User retention, revenue generation and ease of use were few of the key drivers that fit in to the long-term vision of the product. These levers had to be supported with innovative marketing campaigns to announce TOTUM’s arrival and begin the quest to become UK’s number 1 student discount platform.

Strong Competition

Android Mobile App

iOS Mobile App

Solution

The solution/services delivered the following:

A complete product strategy was revaluated in terms of not just matching up to current consumer expectations but also looking at beating the existing competition by providing a little more like proof of Age products.
Help the creative and marketing teams to go to market with a rebranded youth-oriented brand
A diverse yet flexible digital ecosystem including
- Brand new native apps to allow better reach and connect in the digital age
- A brand-new website for advertising the product, posting blogs, and consuming content
- A streamlined sales web application capable of catering to the sale of existing and new discount card products.
- A new slick discount authoring system that helped source and add discounts that would need to be consumed by the end users eventually.
- A future proof micro-services stack that supported all functions from card sales, discounts and user management, student verification frameworks and many more.
A best of breed technology stack powering all products. This includes the use of the AWS cloud infrastructure, java microservices, web applications built in AngularJs, ReactJs, VueJs, native apps in Android and iOS built using the best frameworks, use of latest CaaS services like Contentful for easier and powerful CMS, continuous integration and deployment via DevOps tools like Bitbucket, Jenkins, CircleCI, AWS DataDog. In addition to the above we support robust reporting using RedShift DW, PowerBI, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and VWO for conversion rate optimisation.
Integrations with 3^rd party email and messaging services like SendinBlue, OneSignal.
Dedicated product development and support teams including engineers, architects, product owners, and data analysts with DevOps culture
Support to the existing legacy infrastructure in the transitory phase which include ASP.NET applications, and integrations with print partners.

Armed with a product mindset and using hybrid Agile delivery methods, the Arrk delivery team of over 30 people helped deliver this in less than a year with the first big launch in less than 6 months.

Hybrid Agile Delivery

Flexible Digital Ecosystem

Best of Breed Technology

3rd Party integrations

Outcomes

The above services and solutions provided were crucial to keep the business innovating with new product offerings, improving the core discount platform consistently to stay competitive in a notoriously crowded discount and loyalty landscape Important outcomes include:

An active million plus user base.
Ever increasing average daily active user count on apps currently at 10K users inclusive of both the apps.
100000 unique site visitors every week accessing latest discounts on offer
Increase in ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) by creating compelling higher value product offerings and targeting them appropriately at the user base.
Improved B2B product and high impact media offerings for brand partners.

Improved revenues that are driven back to the product development and foster future potential for innovation in the student market.