World Mental Health Day from Mind
ATBA-UK AGM 2016
We had the Annual General Meeting of the ATBA-UK today to review how this year has been and announce our plans for next year.
It’s been a challenging year for us with a drop in the number of riders attending competitions meaning that this year we tested a single three-discipline event for the first time. The UK Championship was enough of a success for us to build on and improve for next year.
We have also changed how we manage the Instructor Training Programme, also in response to the drop in competitors and lost income from not being able to offer Competition Membership. The plan is to bring the ITP in-house and offer ATBA-UK Instructor Training to activity centre that have mountainboarding as one of their activities.
Next year is going to be very interesting.
What I learned from launching the new Pippa Middleton recipe book
Pippa Middleton has been an ambassador for the British Heart Foundation since 2014 and has done lots of fantastic work in raising the profile of the charity and helping raise money for life saving research. So when Pippa said she wanted to write a healthy eating recipe book it brought together some fundamental threads into a single project. The book, called Heartfelt, is a perfect way for the BHF to leverage Pippa’s celebrity to raise awareness of our work, provide people with over a hundred recipes that we know are healthy, and raise money through the exclusive sale of the book in BHF Shops and our Online Shop.
It was a high profile project, involving lots of other departments across the BHF, and it was an exciting opportunity to show what our small Ecommerce department can achieve when it is more embedded within what other parts of the organisation do. Along the way I thought about and learned a few things.
No one sees the whole
The buyer, the merchandiser, the PR team, the email marketing team, web developers, logistics company, customer services team, etc., etc.; lots of people were involved all doing their own specific parts based on their expertise. My role involved having an overview of lots of what was going on but there were also lots that I didn’t see such as the celebrity ambassadorship, distribution to shops, printing, etc. If a whole is greater than the sum of it’s part (and I believe it should be), how do we achieve this? How much of it needs to be in one person’s head and how much can we rely on the ‘mind of the organisation’ to know what is going on and getting done. Did a project like this require a project manager, or someone else that could be solely focused it? And if so, who would that person be?
Things move fast and change quickly
There we’re lots of moving parts, that were added to and taken away from, and many of the parts we had never used before. Deadlines shifted, priorities changed, and on an almost daily basis. This made it exciting and challenging to figure out how to make all the parts fit together. The thing I learned from this is not to underestimate the complexity, especially when it’s a new thing the organisation has never done before.
In complex a project, goals and objectives are also complex
With so many people and teams doing lots of different things, and with what those people are working on changing so quickly it was difficult to have shared goals and agreed objectives. The PR and Marketing function want to the reach of the book to be was wide as possible as their objectives are around raising profile. Retail objectives are around revenue and return on investment. So, there might be profile raising benefits to selling the book internationally but it also needs to be commercially viable. Although there was no conflict between the various objectives the only shared goal was making the project as successful as possible.
Weeknotes #9
What happened this week…
- Logistics Process Review meeting for Ecommerce and RMSP.
- Began working towards a cross-functional approach to ecommerce marketing.
- Began writing requirements for a Customer Contact Centre.
- Had our Quarterly Performance Review meeting.
- Interviewed three potential Ecommerce Executives.
- Talked more about improving our customer service.
Read this week…
- A tough sell: why Facebook’s e-commerce dream failed to take flight.
- Simple Trello Hack to Supercharge Your Boards (that work really well).
- Why simplicity ensures that bots will kill 99% of apps.
- How Do You Inspire Employees to Care About Customers?
- Facebook’s new Marketplace set to challenge established eMarketplaces.
Doing next week…
- Meeting with Freshdesk to talk about a Customer Contact Centre.
- Presenting a roadmap for Magento development work.
- Meeting with our logistics company to review the previous month and plan for the next.
- Designing Ecommerce future states process maps for RMSP.
- Adding to the Ecommerce customer segmentation strategy.
- Trustpilot Customer Services training.
Interesting stat of the week…
- Comparing the last thirty days with the same time last year, our international visitors have increased 59%.
In the not too distant future….
- Testing telesales for Christmas cards.
The Guardian’s unique approach to recruiting developers
Look at the source code for the guardian website and you notice a cool message, placed in the right place for only those who might see it.
Answering my own interview question
I’ve been interviewing for an Ecommerce Executive and along with questions about the candidates skills and experience we had questions that tried to find out more about things like their interest in the area of work.
How do you stay up to date with what’s going on in the ecommerce industry?
This is a pretty standard interview question, I’ve been asked it in interviews, and if our candidates had answered, “I’m subscribed to Internet Retailing and Charity Digital News emails”, we’d probably have been pretty impressed. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that this question isn’t the real question, it’s one of those tricky inferred questions. And the inference here is not just to say how you stay up-to-date with your industry, but also what you do with that information, what processes do you have in place for being innovative and suggesting changes in your current role that keep the business moving forward.
My answer, having had a bit of time to think about it rather than having it sprung on me in an interview would not be a list of websites I look at or email newsletters I’m subscribed to. My answer would be about looking at what’s going on in the ecommerce industry as three horizons at different timescales.
The first horizon is “Now: What are the leading companies doing that we aren’t?” This might include things that we need to respond to as soon as possible like a Google search algorithm updates and things that we can’t do anything about like Content Marketing (because we don’t have the budget). The second horizon is “Next couple of years or so: What technology, methods and ideas are leading edge right now, might become mainstream, and might apply to us in the next five years or so?” This might include things like changes in consumer behaviour and the increasing growth of marketplaces, and how our company might respond. The third horizon is “Sometime in the future: What could happen and how might it affect things for us?”. These are the big maybes. They would include things like driverless delivery vans. They would affect the entire ecommerce industry (potentially making fulfilment much more cost-effective) but there isn’t really anything we as a company can do about it.
An answer like this shows that you are currently keeping up to date with what’s going on by dropping in examples of innovation, but more importantly it shows that you can create an approach to staying up to date rather than just making it up as you go along, and it shows that you think about how to convert what you learn into benefits for the business.