Associate feature: VisitScotland heads to the cloud

At VisitScotland we continue to develop and refresh our digital strategy.

Keeping in step with consumers, across all demographics, saw us move quickly to embrace trends in the creation of sharable online content across social media channels.

We were also early adopters of working with influencers to reach new audiences.

Partnerships with global digital giants, including Google, Expedia and Instagram have seen us lead the way.

Many other national tourism organisations around the world look to VisitScotland for inspiration on how to engage successfully with global audiences that have more choice on travel and destinations than ever before.

We’ve also continued to support the 14,000 tourism related businesses across Scotland as they develop their own approaches to digital, making it easier to internationalise their services and products.

Before COVID VisitScotland was well on with investing in new systems to move us away from paper-based systems.

The introduction of our internal business management system in 2019 has seen us reduce time and overheads on vital functions, including finance, individual performance assessment, training and leave.

This has reduced time spent on these processes and freed up physical space, as everything is now stored on the cloud.

When our offices closed at the end of March this, along with our initial use of Microsoft Teams for video calls and document exchange, meant colleagues could work from home immediately, ensuring we could support our industry colleagues effectively and without pause.

With no planned return to our offices until next year, the investment made in our digital capabilities will deliver business continuity for VisitScotland over the next month.

Our digital investment and approach is ensuring that, as an organisation, we can keep colleagues working together in a way that enables and supports them, in all that they do to aid the recovery of our vital tourism and events industries.

This piece was sponsored by VisitScotland