Testing images for charities

Admin on 06/06/2018

A selection of our images and stock images were tested and this is a summary of some of the outcomes:

  • People look at facial expressions, especially mouths.
  • People facing towards the camera offer better impact and being able to see their eyes to gauge emotion is useful.
  • Images with a clear purpose resonated, for example seeing someone wearing a branded T-shirt helped better connect with a fundraising ask or gave that sense of wanting to help. People wanted to be able to visually identify a charity and will look for badges and logos.
  • When showing a survivor, provide clear visual clues such as scars from surgery.
  • Don’t use shots of people wearing high-fashion (really well-dressed people) as apparently this is off-putting.
  • Don’t show images that could bring people to do the opposite of what you want, e.g. someone eating chocolate when we would want them to abstain –we’re not good at processing negatives.
  • Show images with hope, not shame – people connect emotionally.
  • Staged images weren’t well received – such as a baby dressed up in a Santa outfit. People felt manipulated. There is a fine balance between making people feel bad about themselves, against tapping into emotion to prompt people to react and donate.
  • Images showing concern makes people want to take action, but with a medical image of someone with discomfort made people turn away.
  • Natural poses and settings make people identify and comes across as warm and genuine.
  • Selfies did not read well, as people in them did not comes across as connected to cause.
  • Everyday people were more relatable – not super-fit super models.
  • Moments at the end of the race and demonstrating a sense of achievement were well received (rather than mid-race, partway through ‘the struggle’).
  • Groups of people / crowds tested well.
  • Images of babies tested better than of older children to show a sense of urgency and to prompt donations, as did black and white photography.
  • Real (recognisable) medical equipment tested better than graphics – and even more so if in use in a realistic setting such as a hospital.
  • To demonstrate ‘money making a difference’ images of researchers tested better than images of survivors as the latter give the impression of helping ‘only one person’.
  • Showing several researchers working rather than a single researcher gave the impression that more was being achieved.

Digital Design Principles

Admin on 04/06/2018

10 design principles to help charities build better digital services:

  1. Start with user needs, and keep them involved
  2. Understand what’s out there first
  3. Build the right team
  4. Take small steps and learn as you go
  5. Build digital services, not websites
  6. Be inclusive
  7. Think about privacy and security
  8. Build for sustainability
  9. Collaborate and build partnerships
  10. Be open

From betterdigital.services

Being happy at work

Admin on 27/05/2018

Apparently, according to this tweet, the things that make people happy at work are a nice desk, gym membership, and a paid day off on their birthday.

Being happy at work

Those seem like very superficial things to me, like expecting a new car to bring you happiness in life. And they are things that are separate from and external to your job.

I think we should look to our work to make us happy at work, not chase superficial outside gratification to distract us from our work. It suggests that an attitude of ‘I don’t like my work but at least I can go to the gym for free’ is the route to being happy at work. How can that make sense?

Finding and doing the right work for you will bring you more happiness than a new desk. Feeling meaning and significance in your work is what will make you happier at work. Appreciating how you contribute, having positive relationships with colleagues, learning and growing, this is what will make you happier at work.

The end of the one stop shop

Admin on 25/05/2018

Its a weird time in retail right now. Maplin is closing down, Homebase has been sold, Marks & Spencer are closing stores, and Tesco is shutting down Tesco Direct. What they all have in common is that they all try to be one-stop-shops for the section of the market they operate in. Maybe that’s a bad idea. Maybe it’s no longer what the customer wants. Maybe this kind of big retail operation has had it’s day.

Perhaps the poor economy, the driving force behind these changes to the retail landscape, will force the bigger players to relinquish their hold on each of their markets at the same time that new technologies and digital capabilities enable more smaller retailers to fill the gaps.

The state of the economy doesn’t make it any easier for smaller retailers, but if the idea of being a one-stop-shop, using a centralised operations model and a market-domination-by-being-the-biggest approach has lead to the downfall of the big retailers, then that’s a useful lesson for small retailers.

With growth in the number of stores and people comes increased complexity and the need for more people and more systems to manage that complexity, and with complexity comes cost. Maybe it’s better to accept ten per cent profits on a million pounds a year turnover than one per cent profit on a ten million pounds a year turnover.

Perhaps out of these weird times a multitude of small, more specialist, retailers will have the opportunity to take the place of the likes of Maplin, and rather than trying to be a one-stop-shop where you can get everything they will focus on more specific product ranges and more expert service.

Mental health awareness week: coping with stress at work

Admin on 18/05/2018

Mental health awareness week: coping with stress at work

Does telling people to take time out of their day to play board games really help their mental health? Does having less time to spend doing the same amount of work make someone more stressed? Would helping people deal with being stressed be more helpful than distracting from it? Could a few simple workshop-type activities start to give people the skills for dealing with stress?

I have a few ideas about things that can help our mental wellbeing and cope with stress.

Getting perspective

Sometimes, when we’re really focused on something we can lose a sense of perspective about how important the things that are making us stressed really are.

Write down what the most important thing in your life is. It might be your family or loved ones, or achieving something meaningful to you, but whatever it is let’s give this most important thing a score of 100. Then, list the things that are causing you stress and give them a score between 0 and 100 to describe how important they are to you, not to anyone else, or to your job, but to you. Hopefully, when you add up all those scores they won’t even come close to the most important thing in your life.

Comparing the things that are causing you stress to the most important thing in your life can hopefully put those things into perspective.

Sharing achievements

If we spend our time thinking about all the things we haven’t done, how long our to do list is, and how those deadlines are looming, it’s easy to lose sight of the things we have achieved.

Share with someone (you have to say it out loud) some of the things you have achieved this week. Let them ask you questions about it if they want, but the important part is for you to recognise that you are getting things done and achieving things, even if you still have lots of other things to do.

Recognising and sharing achievements can help us feel good about ourselves as we have to admit that we have have made progress towards our goals.

Be kind

When we’re stressed we can often be quite terse with people, especially if we feel like they aren’t recognising that we’re really busy.

For every person that you speak to that day, try to say something nice, compliment them on something they’ve achieved, thank them for something they’ve done.

Taking the time to actively say something nice to someone not only makes them feel better but makes you feel better about being a nicer person.

Breathe

Just breathe.

National Defibrillator Database: How to do it wrong and how to do it right

Admin on 14/05/2018

The problem

When a person suffers a sudden cardiac arrest every second until they receive a shock from a defibrillator drastically decreases the chances of them making a recovery. Getting a defibrillator to the patient quickly is literally a matter of life and death.

There are lots of defibrillators out there (although no where near enough to really be effective in a sudden cardiac arrest that could happen to anyone anywhere at any time) but no one knows where. The retailers who sold defibrillators know where some are, the fourteen different ambulance services know where some are, and a few other organisations such as charities know where some are. But just knowing where the defibrillators are isn’t enough. To be useful you also need to know if the defibrillator is available at any given time and whether it has been maintained.

And no one knows all of this, so no one is able to provide full and up to date information about all of the defibrillators across the UK for use by Ambulance Services and the general public when responding to a sudden cardiac arrest.

That’s the problem, what gets in the way of a solution?

The barriers

The barriers to achieving this aim come down to two main factors; it’s a disparate space with lots of organisations doing different things, and many of those organisations rely on individuals who have lots of other work to before they get around to entering details about a new defibrillator in a place they’ve never even heard of.

There are fourteen Ambulance Services across the UK, retailers and suppliers, charities, and thousands of parish councils, sports centres, shops and offices that all have a piece of the picture about defibrillator availability and no way of sharing their information.

The second major barrier is that currently creating even the smallest piece of the picture is almost entirely manual. It requires individuals who are already busy with their day job at the parish council, sports centre, shop or office to check the defibrillator, record the information, and send it somewhere. And then it requires other individuals to receive that data and manually enter it into a database.

Building for the past (or how to do it wrong)

If we were trying to solve this problem in the 1980’s we’d definitely build a centralised database, controlled by a single organisation, that requires other parties to send their data to be added to this central system. We’d try to get all those parties to ‘collaborate’ with the central authority (which of course many of them wouldn’t want to do as they have a vested interest in not sharing data to make their solution the one that succeeds), and we’d spend lots of time and money building something that is out of date before it even launches.

If everyone who has tried to solve this problem in the same way, and no one has managed a solution yet, maybe they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe the problem isn’t about trying to get people to cooperate to get all the data in one place, maybe the problem is about getting all the data to all the people so they can do what they want with it.

Building for the future ( or how to do it right)

Decentralise, distribute, and digitise is the future thinking approach. Use Blockchain technology to identify each unique defibrillator device at manufacturing source, record the logistics steps in the blockchain, record the location of where the defibrillator and it’s availability, record regular system checks (without the need for manual inspection), record the usage of the device in emergency situations.

Recording all this data about defibrillators in this way meets the Multichain criteria for choosing blockchain over a relational database: ‘Blockchain works for databases that are shared by multiple writers, who don’t entirely trust each other, and who modify that database directly, and there is some interaction between the transactions created by these writers, and an authoritative final transaction log on whose contents all nodes provably agree is required’.

Blockchain technology has proven use in the fashion industry for ensuring the authenticity of garments. If it works for a shirt it’ll work even better for a defibrillator that has a unique identifier and a proven and vital need to make location and usage data available to other organisations.

So, rather than trying to get fourteen ambulance services, numerous suppliers and retailers, and thousands of defibrillator owners to all share their data on a regular basis to update a single central system that none of them have any stake in, the blockchain approach allows for device to share it’s data to a decentralised ledger and make that data available to all the contributors, so if any of them choose to maintain their own centralised database of defibrillator locations they can pull that data and more from the blockchain, ensuring that all lists are always as up to date as possible.

If the aim is to make more available more data about defibrillators, then this approach achieves that in a way that the old approach could never do.