About the Client

The Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) provides essential coordination and support to the work of its affiliated national and international unions. Through inter-trade solidarity, organized construction workers achieve a powerful voice in government, in bargaining, and in their communities. The BCTD annual Building Trades Legislative Conference provides an important opportunity for key leaders to meet to discuss and progress important issues.

The Challenge

BCTD wanted to bring their conference collateral into the digital age. They provided a printed conference brochure to attendees, which included information about the schedule, sessions, workshops, speakers, and sponsors. The existing paper-based programs served the purpose of informing the attendees about the events in the conference, but were limited in comparison mobile and tablet application capabilities. BCTD sought to market not only its conference information, but corporate information as well. Putting the conference information on each attendee's mobile/tablet device creates a more personal and dynamic experience, while also ensuring that the content is always up to date. BCTD also wanted to leverage this mobile/tablet application to communicate with their members year-round about important issues, news, and additional conferences. To support this on-going communication, they were interested in providing news and alerts that would let members respond to a call to action issued by BCTD. They also needed a mechanism for managing their dynamic content without requiring users to update their application.

The Solution

Segue Technologies® designed and developed a pair of mobile/tablet-friendly applications - one for iOS and one for the Android platform “ that provide a convenient communication tool for BCTD members and conference attendees. A synchronized data platform feeds the devices new information and alerts allowing BCTD to communicate to their members using rich media on their own schedule. As poor and non-existent internet connections are common at conference locations, the applications are fully functional without an internet connection, and grab updates and alerts when connections are available.

The application is available for the Android and iOS operating systems, covering the vast majority of the user community. Since some of the use cases for the application include content consumption and extended reading, the application is designed for use on tablets as well as phones. For development and planning purposes, this effectively required Segue to develop four applications at once.

Delivering the same product functionality to each version of the application required the same backing data to render content to the user. To unify the platforms, Segue used Parse as the content delivery system. However, Parse's caching options did not meet our requirements for offline support so we also implemented local data stores using Core Data in iOS and SQLite in Android. This created an application that is both fully functional while offline and fully synchronized with other installations when online.

Push notifications for the applications are also powered by Parse and provide a common platform for content managers to send updates and alerts to all users simultaneously. Integrated social media options enable users to share and communicate about important issues and events right from within the application.