BIMA Digital Day ’18

Aged 14, I think we can both honestly say that it’d never crossed our minds that one day we’d grow up to work in a digital role. The internet was still in its dial-up phase. And our knowledge of what jobs were out there was limited to the traditional roles we’d seen around us in our day to day lives or on TV. Jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher.

BIMA Digital Day is all about inspiring the next generation by giving them an insight into the work and careers that are available in the digital sector.

It’s a great chance to make students aware of how much technology already impacts them. And provides an opportunity to show them how they can be a part of it. By creating their own digital solutions, it breaks down the barriers they may see in getting involved in the sector.

So, when BIMA got in touch asking for volunteers to get involved in the community and help mentor pupils at a local school, our colleagues from across the technology team jumped at the chance.

Our team of 7 mentors was formed from a wide range of representatives from different disciplines within digital and technology:

• Christina Hirst – Senior Content Strategist
• Catherine Malpass – User Experience (UX) Designer
• Becca Sharplin-Hughes – Associate Product Manager
• Leanne Griffin – Service Designer
• Katie Foster – Digital Producer
• Simeron Taak – Developer
• Caroline Kavanagh – Digital Production Intern

We were lucky enough to be paired with Rooks Heath College, Harrow and 60 of their year 9 students, who're currently studying either ICT or Computer Science.

Across the day, education and inspiration was shared both ways. We came away feeling we’d learnt just as much from the young adults we met, about their perceptions of technology and from their ideas, as they learnt from us.

Here’s a breakdown of the day:

Digital surrounds younger generations now more than ever

To get started, first we wanted to know what the students understanding of ‘digital’ really was.

It was crucial to get students in the mindset of how much they use technology fluently every day. It really set the groundwork for later in the day, empowering them with the confidence to complete their challenges. (And even to help them consider it as a career option later in life.)

From the offset it was clear that the students were very aware of how much digital surrounded and impacted their everyday lives.

The students told us about their interactions with digital, with things like:

• Oyster cards to tap on the bus
• watching YouTube videos (plus the ads)
• morning alarms on their phones
• playing games
• their profiles on various social media sites

– all things they interact with before even getting to school in the morning!

We also learnt about the student’s perception of certain digital features (it turns out they hate YouTube ads just as much as us). And their perception of us as a charity. Reassuringly, they’d mostly heard of Stand Up to Cancer and Race for Life, and were quite excited by what we had to show them!

Students already have an interest in what career opportunities are available to them

The rest of the morning involved us explaining who we were, what we did and what it means to work in digital. After talking to the students, it was time to hand over to them and give them the chance to ask us the questions they wanted answers to.

Handing over the reins to a room of 60 14-year-olds we feared may elicit some less than admissible responses.

But the questions we received were insightful. The most common questions we were asked were:

• How did you get into your careers?
• How old were you when you got your job?
•  Do you enjoy your job?
•  What made you want to work at Cancer Research UK?
• What subjects did you study at GCSE?
• How much can I earn working in digital?
• What grades did you get at GCSE
• What’s fun about your job?
• Do you get to work from home?
• Is your job stressful?

It was uplifting to see the students so focused on areas like wellbeing in work and their determination to enter a career that they were passionate about, for a cause that they could care about.

Answering the questions honestly, our team were transparent about our career paths. It soon became clear that most of us had no idea what we wanted to be when we were younger. When we asked the room if they knew what they wanted to be when they were older, it became clear that the majority of them didn’t either.

Hopefully we’ve given them a message of reassurance for when they get a bit older and feel the pressure that comes with deciding what GCSE’s to study, whether to go to university and what career path to go down.

Taking on some challenging briefs with some inspirational outcomes

Next, the students got into groups and decided which of the 3 inspiring challenges, set by this year’s sponsors, they were going to take on.

Working through materials provided by BIMA, we provided the students with a framework to approach their challenges:

The 4 D’s:

·         Discovery - to gather research for their tasks

·         Decide – to choose an idea

·         Design – to elaborate on this idea

·         Deliver - present it to us and their classmates

All 10 teams pitched their ideas Dragon Den style to us, the panel, and we were left to pick our winners.

It was a tough deliberation but the results were inspiring.

BBC Studios challenge

Promote a new digital-only programme, getting people to tune in every week by developing a new marketing idea

With this challenge, it wasn’t just the marketing ideas that stood out, but their knowledge of social media platforms.

The students carefully considered which social media platforms they were going to target, with Snapchat filters to reach the younger target audience of the programme, to Facebook ads to target parents.

Teams even discussed the advantages that would come with tapping into the popular gaming market by previewing snippets of the show each week on the latest gaming releases (such as Fortnight) with an understanding that the reach would be phenomenal.

Winning idea: Promoting the new show with preview snippets via major gaming releases  

Our winner because: they really thought about their target audience, and what channels would best reach them. In-game advertising via a console isn’t something that is widely known about, and we felt it was an innovative solution to their problem. 

Vodaphone challenge

Broaden the appeal of the UK high street to change the way we shop, using either AR or VR technology

This challenge saw the students really think outside the box.

Ideas varied from helping elderly and disabled people to shop using VR headsets (which had extra  room so you could keep your glasses on) from the comfort of their own home, to mirrors that allowed you to see yourself wearing an item of clothing before buying it.

Teams also considered the problems the UK high street currently faces, solving the problem of closing stores. One team created a design that allowed recently closed high street shops to continue to sell their goods via AR technology. The tech would allow customers to see the items they’re buying in front of them, as if they were in a real shop

Winning idea: A VR headset to help elderly people access the high street from their homes

Our winner because: they really thought about the brief and their target market. They also ensured they were combating accessibility issues in our high street stores by bringing the retail experience to people in their homes.

The Football Association challenge

Increase the number of people following the England Women’s Football team during next year’s FIFA World Cup and encourage girls aged 8-16 to give football a try through using digital

The Football Association challenge saw some truly innovate ideas. Students pitched ideas such as an app, that features videos to teach different football skills. Where other teams thought about celebrity endorsements and giving away tickets to people who tuned into World Cup matches

Winning idea: an app that teaches young girls football skills via video. Users are encouraged to try the skills for themselves, videoing their progress and sharing on their social networks to earn points for the chance to reach the leaderboard.  

Our winner because: we really felt this idea got to the heart of the issue – that girls may be under-confident or discouraged to play football. Incentivising playing and making it collaborative would help young girls to overcome these barriers and inspire them to play football.

It was great to see the challenges bring so much confidence to the students and see how much faith they had in their ideas.

The winning teams were delighted, and some team members couldn’t quite believe they’d won!

The winners from each challenge have now been entered as part of a nationwide competition. 

Winning schools will receive cash prizes, with winning team members getting inspirational prizes from the sponsors.

An inspirational day for everyone 

BIMA Digital Day ‘18 was hopefully a day that inspired the children we met to pursue a career in digital. But crucially, it was an inspiring day for all of us who work in digital. We all certainly learnt a lot as well.

The students we met came up with some truly impressive and outstanding ideas. These students are the potential digital champions of the future. Days like this allow us to inspire, inform and connect with a new generation who might never have considered a future career in digital until now.

It got us thinking. Just imagine if in the future, any of the students we meet decide to work at Cancer Research UK. Well, if that ever does happen, we’ll be more than lucky to have them.

Christina Hirst & Catherine Malpass

Building digital confidence at Cancer Research UK

Back in wintry January we wrote our first blog post about how we’re building the digital skills and knowledge of people at CRUK through our hub and spoke model. We’re doing this to become a more digital organisation and to keep moving towards 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.

When our digital team works with another team at CRUK in a ‘spoke’, we help them deliver a digital outcome. Like increase their digital presence or the performance of their pages.  And just as importantly we help them learn new digital skills and ways of working. This way we’re developing our staff and becoming a more digital organisation at the same time.

But we haven’t stopped there. We’ve provided lots of other ways for people to build their digital skills and confidence.

Digital Talent Development

Through our Digital Champions scheme, we’re giving more digital responsibility to teams across the charity. Following some introductory awareness building workshops with each of our digital Practice Leads (UX, Agile, content, SEO, analytics, production and proposition management), we’ve matched each of our 16 champions with a digital mentor. The mentors help the champions work out an individual digital personal development plan. And offer face to face training to build their confidence.

Senior marketers can attend our Modern Marketing Academy. Over 8 weekly sessions we’ve challenged our marketers to diversify their channels and test more ideas. We've used internal and external inspiration. Including a trip to our UX lab to observe some live usability testing, a speed meeting session with a range of media owners and an analytics and measurement workshop with the help of our in house analytics team. And we saw a big increase in participants' confidence levels. The group reported a commitment to making a change in their area of responsibility of 4.7/5. And they’ve made some important changes. Like setting digital development objectives, building test and learn strategies and introducing UX tools for marketing.

We also run a regular programme of training on everything from agile to UX. We support this with twice weekly ‘Digital Hour’ drop-in sessions. Anyone can come and chat to a generalist producer or a specialist in content, SEO, agile, UX or analytics. It’s working well as a training refresher, a way to get advice on a new idea or a way to get a quick digital task done to a high standard.

Some success stories

Many of the talented people whose digital skills we’ve helped build are creating real change. Several teams have reviewed their structures to make digital more prominent. And to encourage more innovative, ‘test and learn’ ways of working. A member of our internal communications team, Joe, learnt lots about digital while on a spoke. His team have now reshaped his role to make the most of his new skills. He’ll now be leading a review of all of our internal digital platforms and developing a strategy to ensure we’re gaining maximum value from them.

Freya, in our research innovation team, has also been on a spoke. Her team recognised the need to retain and challenge her, to harness her new digital skill and awareness. She’s recently gained a Head role, from which she can encourage digital ideas and ways of working.

Our goal? 3 in 4…

Our digital talent development strategy allows people to get things done quicker and with less support from digital. We’re building the digital capability of our great people so that we can move at pace and make sure that we reach 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.

Are you doing something similar? Taking a different approach to building digital skills where you work? It would be great to hear from you!

Ed Willis

Learning and Development Manager, Digital team

Being a digital generalist in a world full of specialists

I'm Becky and I'm a Digital Producer at Cancer Research UK. You're probably thinking "What's a Digital Producer?". People often don't understand what we do. Our job title is pretty vague. But that's because we're digital 'generalists'.

Back in the early days of the web everyone was a generalist ("Webmaster"): but it became apparent fairly quickly that there's more to creating and running a website than just buying a URL, sticking up some content and clicking publish. There's now a huge variety of ways you can become a digital specialist, from developing to diving into analytics - but being a generalist, like a Producer, is still a skill in itself.

What is a Producer anyway?

Producers have a broad understanding of all the digital disciplines and, while our role is difficult to summarise, we basically help teams understand what a good digital experience is and how to deliver it for their users.

We're responsible for working with our colleagues across the organisation to produce user-centric content, campaigns and products that meet the highest digital standards, follow best practice and represent our brand.

On a day-to-day basis we can be found:

• creating or amending content on our content management systems
• setting up and measuring tests
• facilitating user testing/interviews
• analysing metrics
• writing user stories
• finding great imagery and optimising it for the web
• copywriting for the web
• training people on all of the above, both formally and informally, and
• supporting colleagues from across the organisation during Digital Hour, which I'll touch on later in this post

Team work makes the dream work

Of course we can't do all this by ourselves.

While we have knowledge of things like UX, wireframing, accessibility, content strategy, HTML, SEO, analytics and product development, we're part of a cross-discipline team which includes skilled specialists in these areas and part of our role involves knowing when to call in the experts, utilising their in-depth knowledge so we can make our digital offering the best for our users (and learn ourselves at the same time!).

Greg already shared how we communicate with each other, using software like Slack and Trello, and these free tools are vital in making sure we can work with our colleagues quickly and effectively. We also have regular stand ups and demos where we show what we've been up to and what we've discovered, so we're sharing knowledge, reducing duplication and all learning together.

Variety is the spice of life 

If you talk to anyone in my team, you'll quickly find the thing we like most about our job is that we get to be involved in everything. Really, everything.

We're constantly learning and having the chance to experience working across all the digital disciplines means we can find out what we'd like to specialise in in the long-term. Since I joined the team, just 10 months ago, I've seen 3 Producers move on to UX and Product Management roles. Getting involved is encouraged at Cancer Research UK - and it's really fun to have such a varied role!

We're also helping the organisation become more digitally empowered, which is saving money that can instead go towards our life-saving cancer research. For example, as part of a spoke to improve prospective volunteers' online experience, we built a registration of interest form so that specialists who want to share their experience in things like finance and photography can give us their details: we've seen 4 times as many registrations as we expected and these volunteers are potentially worth a staggering £3m a year.

Training and support

For colleagues who want to improve their digital skillset, the production team hold regular Introduction to Drupal training and, of course, offer ad-hoc help, guidance and support.

We also host Digital Hour twice a week, where people can drop in and see us with queries or refreshers on quick Drupal tasks, such as how to upload a web-optimised image and ensure it has an appropriate alt tag.

Besides the buzz we get from knowing we're benefiting the charity, one of the best things about being a Producer is getting to work with people across the organisation, helping them to realise all the ways in which being more digital can benefit them, the organisation and their users. It's incredibly rewarding and exciting.

Becky Colley
Digital Content Producer

Why should charities use Jira and Confluence to get things done?

I recently spoke at an Open Charity meetup event in London about how charities can save thousands, reduce waste and create awesome digital products using tools made by a company called Atlassian. Here are some of the main takeaways from that presentation. Powerpoint slidedeck can be downloaded here. 

What are JIRA and Confluence?

Jira

Jira is used to track tasks and issues for your project and helps you deliver more work, faster. It is popular with software teams but is by no means limited to them. A team using Jira can easily track many types of work, from simple tasks to bugs and user stories common to agile teams. We use multiple management styles at Cancer Research UK, and Jira is well-suited to many situations. The main benefit of Jira over good old white board and post-its is its reporting capability: all the work your team has ever done is kept in Jira so you can set up powerful dashboards and reports which empower managers to better forecast future delivery.

Confluence

Confluence is essentially a wiki for your organisation. it is a great tool for team collaboration and document management. Have you ever spent half an hour searching for that really important information buried somewhere in your email inbox? Confluence allows your teams to have 'one source of truth' for collaborative documents and meeting notes. Powerful macros allow you to dynamically display content to keep landing pages fresh. If integrated with Jira, you can dynamically link to lists of work items and dashboard widgets (See 'examples of good user stories' Jira widget below).

Why should I care?

If you are a registered charity and you have the capability to install and configure these programs in-house, they are completely free for you. This would include many add-ons which normally cost thousands.

These tools allow teams to be on the same page with high visibility and transparency of their work (see project dashboard below). They are highly configurable such that they can scale from a tiny startup to a massive enterprise-grade company. Dynamic reporting tools and dashboards eliminate what might otherwise be manual effort. 

What about other tools?

At Cancer Research UK, we use a combination of tools for Digital delivery.  We want delivery teams to be free to choose the tool that is right for them. There are competing products but lately we've found Slack, Trello, JIRA and Confluence to be the most useful. But it is a crowded field. Competing in this space are Sharepoint, Yammer, Skype, Hipchat, VersionOne, MS Office and Google Drive to name but a few. For a charity which needs to watch their budget, I recommend Trello, the Atlassian tools, Slack and Google Drive.  Pivotal Tracker is also worth a mention, as they have a significant free plan for non-profits.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a charity of 5 people or 500, the tools described here will help you deliver high quality work, quicker, across multiple projects varying in degree of complexity. See below for further reading and video tutorials. 

• JIRA Software information
• Confluence information
• Atlassian's Youtube channel

Open Charity Meetup

Open Charity is a public meetup based in London. For several years it was a rag tag group of charities and their partners meeting privately, but as of late 2016, their public events feature guest speakers, lightning talks and networking. Their focus is on bringing charities and partners together to collaborate and share open solutions to create value in the digital space. If you are interested in sponsoring, speaking or providing a venue, please get in touch via one of these channels. 

• Twitter: @opencharityorg
• Meetup: meetup.com/Open-Charity
• Web: opencharityuk.org
• Facebook: facebook.com/opencharityorg