The strategy required approaching as many financial planners as possible all over Italy, but the RIFA Italian office could rely only on a few of their staff. RIFA needed both to create brand awareness around RCM funds and to make people understand technical and qualitative characteristics of those financial products, but it was impossible to follow Personal Financial Planners networks "physically".

RIFA needed an effective tool in order to communicate, share, inform, teach, and promote any useful resource to make Italian Financial planners understand the numerous advantages of RCM Investment funds and to make them able and motivated to distribute those products. RIFA understood that in the target segment there was still a lack of knowledge in the specific financial field and so decided to offer both qualified information and learning resources in order to stimulate interest and participation among potential users.

RIFA looked for a community solution which was able to support both, informative and learning purposes. It needed an easy and scalable tool which was affordable and fast to develop and which could be modified according to ongoing results. Moodle had all these characteristics and was highly personalized, also in the graphic aspects in order to meet the specific needs of the target. Moodle was not only "technical" solution managed by Austrian IT department, but a practical tool that every member of the Italian commercial staff could use according to the predefined roles. Moodle was directly chosen by the staff who had to use it and was not a top-down choice by the central Wien board.

With about two years of effective work, the Italian RIFA team reached the expected goals both in terms of user redemption and brand image awareness, getting a high level of confidence in the use of the whole system (Moodle plus other integrated tools).

Besides, the goals achieved were also in part, reflected in the commercial results of the Italian branch. They were quite good, in spite of uneasy conjunctures.

In order to cope with the goal, Moodle was integrated with other services: Web-conference, e-mail marketing, online rich media editing and delivering solutions, and authoring tools for multimedia content developing. A total of 25,000 potential user database was approached on weekly/monthly basis by mail, in order to inform them about RIFA activities. In this way, some thousands of financial planners logged in the RIFA Academy becoming regular users of the portal or at least visited the public area on the homepage where a lot of Moodle resources were stored.

Besides, Moodle was also used to book and manage website events, both for registered users and for external guests, wrapping up all the staff operational activities and enhancing all the results of the Italian team.

One of the key points of the project was the possibility to segment the audience (Salesforce) in several ways: Companies of the financial planners (potential or actual), hierarchical levels in the network of each company, specific needs of the companies, account manager of the Italian team. In this way, it was possible to create a tailored system respecting the different points of view of the users.

According to this experience, the modular approach was a key to success in the project, considering the actual fast evolution of each kind of the market. In our opinion, it is highly recommended to maintain a flexible way in order to avoid very large investments in monolithic technologies which can result in a failure simply due to fast changes in the market that can not be managed with such approaches.

Due to its huge flexibility, Moodle can be adopted for various functions inside a corporate context, especially in a modern sales force environment where formal and informal training, learning, and information merge in a complex community. This community is continuously changing and evolving through different tools and social media.