London, 28th April 2010: Cyber-Duck, a multiple award winning interactive media agency (www.cyber-duck.co.uk) today announced that is was the digital agency of choice for the EU’s new website What’s In It For Me, aimed at providing objective information about the benefits to UK citizens of EU membership.

The website will be launched in the summer of 2010. It builds on the popularity of a booklet called “The EU. What’s in it for me?” described as “A No-Nonsense Guide For UK Citizens to What the European Union Delivers”. The booklet was first published in 2007 setting out the ways in which ordinary Britons gain from our membership of the EU.

As demand for the booklet has been so high, the EU has decided to make the information even more accessible to the public by bringing it online, with a website to demonstrate what taxpayers and voters derive from their EU membership, and what they get back from their investment in the EU. It is also designed to enable the EU to engage people with a more immediate, direct and interactive experience when looking for information on the EU.
 
The website is part of an overall strategy to help clarify the benefits of EU membership to the general public in a clear and concise manner. Surveys commissioned by the European Commission in the UK consistently point to an appetite by a large section of the population for information about what the EU does.

The website will be available at www.the-eu-and-me.org.uk offering information, multimedia and news in a concise and accessible format. A wide range of topics will be covered, including the EU contribution to economic growth, protecting consumer interests (e.g. by capping mobile phone roaming charges), fighting crime and policing borders, and making our food and environment safer.

Cyber-Duck’s role will range from strategic planning of the website and analysis of how to make it more accessible to search engines, through to design, web production and creation of multi-media interactive content that actively engages users.

The planning phases will focus significantly on User Experience, including a survey on the information that users find most important and focus groups that will interact with the wireframes to validate the proposed website structure and priorities. The website will also include CMS tools to enable the EU to continue to cost-effectively update future content without the need for agency support.

“The new website is all about making information on the day-to-day benefits of the EU more accessible to the UK citizens, so people can make up their own minds about it. We want to go some way to removing the complexity that so often surrounds the question of what the British public gains from EU membership. Consequently, providing a simple and clear user experience for all types of website visitors was central to the project’s goals” said Antonia Mochan, Head of Media, Representation of the European Commission in the UK. She further added “Cyber-Duck was chosen after a competitive tender. Their user-centred approach and creative dynamism make us very confident about achieving our goals for this project”.

“This project has already inspired our own team to become excited about the EU, even those team members who were initially Euro-sceptic as they had no idea what the EU does for UK citizens” said Danny Bluestone, MD of Cyber-Duck. “It has illustrated the importance of demystifying the EU for the British public, and the new website will be a powerful educational tool in achieving that goal”.