The Brand Partner Portal – Everything you’ve ever wanted to know

Welcome to the first edition of our six-part series “Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About the Brand Partner Portal”! Whether you’re completely new to the Brand Partner Portal (BPP) and want to learn the basics, or whether you use it frequently and want to know more about its full functionality, this series is for you!

To kick-off, I’d like to introduce myself – I’m Alisa Yingling, the Programme Manager for the BPP and I’ll be appearing in Signpost over the next six weeks to share a series of short articles to help you become acquainted with the BPP and the functions it supports.

I’m writing this series because we know that many of you want to know more about the full functionality of the Brand Partner Portal. We’re also aware that some of you have just joined your organisations and might not be aware of the BPP, or know it only by name. So as the development of the BPP is zooming forward, I thought I would take this opportunity to talk to you about what’s happening and how you can make the most of the functionality that the BPP brings to the Network.

This week, I will be introducing you to the Brand Partner Portal and its functionality.

The History of the Brand Partner Portal

The BPP started as an idea way back before the pandemic began when a pilot programme was established to build a platform to make it easier to work together with brand partners to share data across the Network. Currently, the BPP looks after four functions, though more functions are being proposed and added. We’ll be talking about future development in Week 6 of this series.

The Purpose and Functions of the Brand Partner Portal

The BPP’s primary purpose is:

• to boost the visibility of brand partners’ local services information to members of the public
• to make it much easier to share information with Age UK national 

The Portal currently has four functions designed to support this. We’ll be looking at each of these in greater depth in the following weeks:

• Website Integration – Increase web visibility of brand partners services/shops/events and boost traffic to local brand partner websites.
  
• I&A Integration – Support a referral system from the National Advice Line to Brand Partners to help older people access local support.
  
• Organisational Information – This is a dashboard in the portal that collates headline data about your organisation including the systems that you use. In the not too distant future, we hope this will help ease the current burden of submitting partner organisational information through multiple channels.
  
• Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) – Improve and ease the process of assessment and reporting submissions for the Quality Assurance Framework through continuous assessment. Provides a place to report incidents to the Quality team and seek help if needed.

How to access the BPP / Becoming a User

It’s likely that your organisation is already using at least one of the portal functions and different teams will have access to and use different functions.

We’ve set up BPP access to allow brand partners to manage your own internal users. Each brand partner will need a Primary User within the organisation. This is usually the CEO or a person in a management role and more than one person can be set up as a Primary User. The Primary User has full access permission to view, edit and create records associated with the brand partner organisation. The Primary User will also have rights to invite colleagues within their organisation to be portal users.

If your organisation’s Primary User has invited you to use the portal, you will be a Local Age UK User but you will not be able to invite other users.

If you aren’t sure whether your brand partner organisation has a Primary User set up, our team can help you with access to the BPP. You just need to contact us on portalaccess@ageuk.org.uk.

One important thing to note is that access to the Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) function* within the portal is restricted due to the sensitive nature of the information living here. This is managed through our Portal Access Team only. If you require access to the QAF part of the BPP this needs to be specifically requested even if you are a Primary User.

*Our Quality Assurance Function will be coming online in June 2022 and it will be very important for CEOs to have log-in details for this part of the BPP. If you do not already have a login to the BPP, please get in touch with our team to arrange the correct permissions.

What does the Brand Partner Portal look like?

To access the Brand Partner Portal, just use this link – https://ageuk.microsoftcrmportals.com/SignIn. If you are having any difficulty logging in, please contact us on portalaccess@ageuk.org.uk.

You will then be able to login via a screen that looks like this:

Once logged in to the BPP, the Home Page looks like this:

Until next time!

In the coming weeks we will describe the BPP functions in greater detail including which of the 4 tiles displayed above will lead you to the different functions you require.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about a particular BPP function mentioned above and would like to explore how this can help your organisation, please feel free to get in touch via email on portalaccess@ageuk.org.uk.

Until next week…