One of the tools we used during discovery were sacrificial concepts. They enhanced discussion with participants, and provided a foundation for the upcoming design sprints.
Here, we’ll explore what sacrificial concepts are, and why they are useful.
Sacrificial concepts are a tool originally developed by the design firm IDEO. They are used in early research as a stimulus for discussion, and are different from presenting prototypes later in the design process for the purposes of testing or validation.
Sacrificial concepts are:
Sacrificial concepts can be a powerful tool to enhance discovery. For the health and wellness project, they gave us a deeper understanding of people’s attitudes and needs, which enhanced the research insight, design principles, and set of personas from discovery.
We entered the design sprints with a better idea of how much information different people wanted and why, what type and depth of information they wanted, and how they might want to engage with the service.
Mace & Menter are specialists in service design, user research, discovery and prototyping for public services, health and the third sector.
To find out more, contact us on 020 7193 8952 or email [email protected].
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With home internet usage at an all-time high over recent months, I have been thinking a lot about customer experiences. It’s shocking how many online customer experiences are still slow, clunky and confusing. When you pick apart so many customer journeys you can see that many that look good are filled with sticky tape solutions and cracks that are exposed as you go through.
Customer journeys today are varied but most customers now have a low tolerance for friction. Cult make up site Trinny London has a very well-managed customer journey and provides a great example of the customer experience done well. The site has seamless UX that follows the user across channels to remind them what their colour set is, and what products they’ve already bought. Next also provides a very seamless experience across all channels. The company undertook a full digital transformation early on and can now build on a stable platform. But there are plenty of opposing examples. I logged into Harvard Business Review on all devices but when I click a link from Twitter or elsewhere, I’m still asked for login details. Firewalls are certainly a big source of friction for customers.
There’s also Made.com where a colleague bought a rug and was subsequently sent a reminder email asking if she wanted to buy a rug. She continues to receive rug-focused emails even through the same email address used to purchase.
A common trait among poor customer experiences is that nearly all of them are non-linear. They move from social media to an app and sometimes even to human interaction. Comparing experiences makes the flaws of a platform blindingly obvious. Take logging in to Netflix vs Amazon on your smart TV for instance; Netflix makes you use whatever horrid UX your TV and remote have to put in your full email address and password. On the flip side, Amazon gives you a simple code to put into your phone/tablet/computer and that’s it. Putting the user and their real-world context first always removes friction and this is a prime example of that. So, how can businesses strike the right balance between user experience and strong security? When security is linked to respecting your data and privacy, rather than being bloody-minded or a hangover from legacy systems, then I think customers can be more willing to accept a little friction. They don’t mind logging in again across multiple devices if they know it’s for their own security. If not, it looks like sub-standard UX.
Businesses often fall down when apps aren’t comfortable making use of the customer’s device. For example, I have two banking apps on my phone, one only uses fingerprint, the other allows me to use facial recognition which is much quicker and more convenient.
There’s the expectation that if you share a certain level of data with the brand, your experience should then be seamless. It is vital that you are able to deliver and it’s always been the case. How often have you been driven mad by call centres passing you around departments where you keep having to give the same information? If you can convince someone that they will have an easier life because they told you something, they usually won’t mind telling you. In most cases, handing over data is hope over experience. The trick is for brands to give people a good experience from the start, so they understand what they are signing up for and what the clear benefits will be to them.
Really, Customer Experience (CX) should never be a department, but a state of mind across all business areas. The minute organisational structure trumps the customer experience, it becomes sub-standard. You must always remember to design with a customer-first approach – it sounds trite but is still depressingly the exception rather than the rule. If necessary, share your KPIs across business units to ensure alignment, and force silos to consider the impact of their actions. It’s easy to fall into the trap of different business units actually working to different objectives – for example, one team is tasked with reach, another with conversion when the real KPI is sales.
All decisions made should be in order to remove the barriers between the customer and the goal. There’s also a huge value for working closely with customer service. It gives an invaluable understanding of what real people do when they use products, interact with brands, and so on. Businesses should look outside the standard channels for new employees and find people who have lived the life they are trying to service.
This article was written by Rob Pellow for PerformanceIn on August 25th 2020.
HubSpot customer Indicia Worldwide has seen a huge uplift in website conversions after teaming up with Noisy Little Monkey to design and build their new website.
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“Since our new website went live in HubSpot, we have seen a significant rise in the number of visits to the website and also leads coming to us through the website.”
~ Alan Thorpe, EMEA Marketing Director at Indicia Worldwide
Many businesses in the marketing sector have suffered in the COVID crisis but Indicia Worldwide’s new website has bucked the trend by converting more website visitors into leads at a time when uncovering new opportunities is essential in the business service sector.
An imminent rebrand for the global communications agency meant that deadlines were tight but a novel approach proved fruitful. Rather than simply migrate the existing website from WordPress to HubSpot, Noisy Little Monkey spotted the opportunity to reimagine the site and focus it on the Inbound buyer journey.
This required a redesign and rebuild more substantial than the original client requirement but delivered a huge return on investment, initially in the form of a spike in, and then sustained growth in: incoming enquiries, webinar signups, newsletter sign ups, and so on.
The biggest challenge was merging two established domains onto one, preserving the user journey and existing search engine rankings. Indicia Worldwide also faced several other typical website problems:
The team set to work on a series of audits and workshops to help lay the foundations of what a best-in-class web build would look like for Indicia Worldwide.
Workshops about buyer personas and the buyer journey combined with Noisy Little Monkey’s legendary SEO skills meant that the site’s architecture, content and UX were built around the perfect combination of buyer journey and SEO ranking factors.
In addition to the persona workshops, the team ran an audit which researched the client’s competitors, how their content performed on search and social media, and the effectiveness of their on-site buyer journeys. Armed with information about what made their customers tick, our team were able to bed this information into the briefs for the new web design and contextualise the customer journey for Indicia Worldwide’s highest value personas.
Indicia Worldwide had a tight turn around for the web build. To ensure we were meeting the client’s strict deadlines, our team launched the new site in phases. Within 10 weeks, the team had:
Project managing a web build for a global marketing agency which was in the middle of a rebrand required regular client catch-ups. To keep us on track and ensure we were meeting key milestones, our team set-up:
These meetings helped us address the inevitable bumps in the road and when needed, we would go in and run additional workshops with their senior team to reiterate the value of the inbound approach and keep us all on track.
The website redesign and migration project for Indicia Worldwide was more than just a vanity project; with our help they transformed their website into a lead generation machine.
In a six month YoY comparison, Indicia Worldwide saw a 200% growth in web traffic and a 1250% increase in new leads via the website.
Speak to Noisy Little Monkey about how we can turn your website into a lead generation machine https://www.noisylittlemonkey.com/contact/
Our industry has just experienced its worst quarter ever. With almost 64% of panel members registering a decrease in marketing spend and two-thirds forecasting a pessimistic financial outlook, July’s IPA Bellwether Report has given us the hard data to prove what we have previously surmised.
Agencies need to respond fast or risk being side-lined. Three areas where I think we can make an immediate impact are: measurability, speaking the CFO’s language and the contribution we can make to our clients’ bottom line.
Clients are faced with a bewildering range and volume of different agencies and Covid-19 has given brands a good excuse to prune – as Ramon Laguarta, PepsiCo’s CEO, also says: “Sometimes a crisis helps [a company] to be more selective and to be more impactful, to generate internal momentum against simplification and focus against fewer and bigger. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
There’s also a growing threat to agencies of clients bringing elements in-house – both as a potential cost-saving exercise and as a response to ‘always on’ marketing communications. As Laguarta acknowledges: “[through in-housing] we can actually get the same or more value for less money, which is obviously a terrific outcome for the company.”
However, brands disrupted by Covid-19 need transformative ideas more than ever. Agencies are in a unique position. DDB founder Bill Bernbach sums it up well, gendered pronouns aside; “We think we will never know as much about a product as a client. After all, he sleeps and breathes his product…By the same token, we firmly believe that he can’t know as much about advertising. Because we live and breathe that all day long.”
Historically, our industry has not been brilliant at drawing a line between what we do and things the brand’s CFO would recognise and value. We now need to get better at developing this dialogue. In tough times this is harder, but even more important.
As agency people, we need to ask ourselves if we really understand the goals and objectives of the finance people amongst our clients. Have we got under the skin of their targets? These will be different to those of the CMO.
We need to establish what our common ground is and communicate our value in their language. Marketing done well can make a significant difference to a business’ bottom line. You only need to look to companies like Coca Cola to see how the intangible value of its brand value underpins the net worth of the company.
How much of the marketing jargon that we use in our industry day-to-day resonates with the CFO, and, in turn, how much financial shorthand do we understand? If having direct access to them is proving difficult, let’s look to our own resources. Are we making good use of our own finance people, for instance? They have all been schooled in same language – use proxies where it’s helpful to do so.
Equipping everyone with a basic grounding in the business side of the industry we’re involved in is important – a course like the IPA’s Commercial Certificate can really help with the fundamentals.
Demonstrating measurement and effectiveness is nothing new. However, given that client budgets won’t be getting back to pre-Covid levels any time soon, marketing departments and their agencies will be under more pressure than usual to deliver tangible results. That means even greater scrutiny for every pound spent.
We are up for that challenge at Armadillo. Our focus has always been on cost-effectiveness – it’s baked into our DNA . We are lean and results-driven and have consistently delivered good value for clients which has led to long-term relationships with clients such as McDonald’s and Disney. Despite working with a major client in the severely-impacted eating out sector, we’ve seen them double down on CRM activity. For example, while other channels have been cut hard, our budgets have grown. That’s mainly thanks to proving strong ROIs on a continuous basis pre-crisis.
We believe the goal should be to have an end-to-end relationship with customer – tracking all the way through from first point of interaction through to purchase, to help influence the decision-buying journey.
Now is the time for agencies to create clearly defined market positions in line with commercials. We need to fulfil our role of trusted advisors, drawing on and demonstrating specialist expertise, experience and performance. We need to stay focused and be even more open to collaboration.
Whilst this is not a time to be naive, we must also try to balance our pragmatism with optimism. The world is not coming to an end just yet. Take our worst hit client in the travel sector. We prioritised pivoting to meet a dramatically different set of challenges – by thinking like stakeholders in their recovery rather than hard-done by suppliers, we’ve seen projects start to flow again far sooner than we might have expected.
Agencies must keep scanning the horizon for opportunities and be prepared to move the business in new directions to stay in the game. We’ve long positioned ourselves as nimble and responsive – those that can now display those attributes will prove invaluable.
This has not been an easy time, but we need to avoid giving in to nostalgic defeatism. A crisis like this could kill agencies off, but equally, if we could get more on the front foot, learn from past successes and fuse those learnings with the good things we’re doing now, this could also be the start of our renaissance.
This article was written by Chris Thurling for the IPA on 17 August 2020.
Pre-Covid, creative teams benefitted from being in close proximity. This is mainly because one of the driving forces of creativity is (ironically) its infectiousness.
Being part of a creative idea gaining traction – being able to see, hear, and feel its potential – is why most of us do this.
Now, with the panic of lockdown beginning to fade, and the possibility of remote working remaining part of daily life for a while yet, we’ve been evaluating the ways we’ve adapted over the last few months.
While our technology enabled us to switch locations immediately, our creative habits needed a little aligning to ensure a smooth transition.
Seeing people’s expressions and body language is vital when briefing, sharing, reviewing and presenting ideas.
Being able to notice the difference between silence when they are excited and scribbling ideas, and silence from them drawing a blank, ensures you can keep things moving.
Creativity needs energy and nurturing, and audio alone is not enough.
Creating a way to bounce ideas around as a team when our four walls became two-dimensional was an initial challenge, whether they were conceptual ideas, executional solutions or UX planning.
We found using collaborative programmes, especially Google Chat, Google Meet and Google Docs, meant we could share work straight away.
Sharing screens and documents in small groups for live ideation, or sharing screen grabs or photos of sketches in larger project chat groups, ensured the momentum was never lost.
None of these programmes recreate the beauty of walls covered in layout sheets bursting with ideas; but programmes such as Miro allow us to get nearer to the satisfaction of problem solving with Post-it Notes.
It’s easy to become task-orientated when you can’t physically see your team and without strong intentions individuals can become siloed.
But it’s vital that ideas are seen and challenged by others. A fresh perspective will ensure ideas are robust and refined.
We have staggered project team video ‘scrums’ each morning which serve to not only align us to our goals, but also alert us to opportunities to collaborate outside our initial tasks.
When you’re physically surrounded by creatives the unplanned check-ins that occur when you catch a glimpse of a colleague’s screen, or overhear an exciting idea, are often the times when projects gain momentum.
To attempt to create these naturally and informally without the pressure of a booked ‘meeting’, the team is encouraged to frequently share roughs, and experiments either one-to-one, or in small groups, via screen shares in video chats or screen grabs or sketches in chat groups.
When things get exciting and we want to share wider, the seconds it takes to drop a Google Meet link into individual chats is far quicker than running around a studio looking for other team-mates.
All this constant sharing means that the team has also had to allow for calm times in order to focus and produce the work.
We’ve had to become better at prioritising our time; knowing when to ask for time to focus and how ensure others are getting it.
We’ve found that early afternoon is when we can carve out concentration time; and for this isolated working can be a blessing.
The last few months have affected our work lives more than any impactful event I have experienced during my career; whether worldwide, like the 2008 recession, or the more localised and terrible 2005 London bombings.
Everyone is navigating their ‘new normal’ in different ways, at home and at work. This makes finding the right time to check-in and support each other a bit of a challenge.
But I think our communication and transparency has been forced to improve; bringing us closer, and making us far more efficient as a team.
This article was written by Art Director, Hannah Waters, and first appeared on Mediashotz on 15 July 2020.
Do Something Digital is delighted to announce a partnership with Canadian audio guide tech company Spoken Adventures, in a bid to bring interactive audio to the European market for brands and consumers.
At the crossroads between a podcast, audio guide, and adventure game, Spoken Adventure’s technology offers a new way to experience storytelling by playing a role in the story through voice-based interactions. It can be deployed as a location based experience, just like a traditional audio guide, but runs on guests’ mobile devices, and it’s interactive, enabling users to ask and answer questions about what they see in an exhibit or read in print material. The application is geolocalized, and audio content can be triggered according to a users’ interactions or location.
Primarily developed for entertainment, Spoken adventures is also a game engine and can be used to create gaming experiences such as adventure games, treasure hunts or escape rooms. It can also be played from home using print material including books, posters, leaflets, postcards and inserts via audio capsules that are triggered by naming legends written within images.
Ex-coworkers, Paul Stancheris (Do Something Digital), and Eric Marradi (Spoken Adventures) originally worked together on projects at Triotech, a Montreal-based developer of interactive and immersive family attractions including Merlin Entertainment’s/LEGOLAND’s Ninjago interactive dark ride. They continue to be Triotech alumni members, and are both passionate about interactive media, and the children’s media & entertainment industry.
Paul Stancheris said; “we are excited to reunite for this new venture, and I believe combining our knowledge and experience of creating and delivering projects for publishers, broadcasters, and family attractions will provide a unique route to market, new revenue opportunities for brands, and an enhanced customer experience.”
Eric Marradi said; “Simulated dialogue is a great way to drastically increase learning and retention, and it’s great to be partnering with a trusted partner in Europe to help us educate businesses about the opportunities we can offer.”
Do Something Digital is the exclusive representative across Europe, and is currently seeking brand partners looking to enhance new or existing attractions, products and marketing initiatives.
https://dosomethingdigital.com/interactive-audio-guides
At OggaDoon, we love diving into brands and finding out their stories. Some of the most well known apps, search engines, websites and gadgets have really interesting stories behind their names. We decided to delve in and find out more…
In the 1990s the wireless communication field was being developed. Multiple corporations were competing which led to non-compatible standards of technology. Jim Kardach, an Intel engineer, was working on wireless technologies. He had been reading a book that featured King Harald Bluetooth, the Viking King of Denmark who reigned from 872-930 and united parts of Denmark and Norway. Kardach viewed the king as a symbol of unification between competing parties.
The competing wireless innovators united to form the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which developed today’s Bluetooth standard. Bluetooth was intended to be a placeholder, but the name took off and still remains.
The term WiFi was developed when the wireless industry was seeking a name to refer to technology that adhered to standards known as IEEE 802.11. WiFi Alliance hired Interbrand, a branding agency, to come up with ideas and one of the 10 names proposed was WiFi.
A longer term for WiFi is Wireless Fidelity. This name was given because some members of WiFi Alliance didn’t want a name without a meaning behind it. Therefore, the tagline ‘The Standard for Wireless Fidelity’ was created alongside the name.
Googolplex is the name for 10 to the power of googol. Googol is the name used by mathematicians to reference 10 to the power of 100. Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, liked the name googol because it reflected the vastness of the web.
In 1998, one of Page and Brin’s Stanford classmates, Sean Anderson, wrote names down on a whiteboard, trying to decide on the right one. ‘Googolplex’ was proposed, and the ‘Googol’ part was misspelled as Google, the brand name we know today.
Unlike most other Voice over IP (VoIP) services, Skype is a hybrid peer-to-peer client server system that was founded in 2003. The co-founders, Niklas Zenström and Janus Friis wanted this to be reflected in the name so the first iteration was ‘Sky Peer-to-Peer’ since the connection utilised peer-to-peer technology that worked without wires. This then developed into ‘Skyper’ to make it more catchy. However, skyper.com was already registered so they called their creation Skype.
Despite the fact that the name changed from ‘Sky Peer-to-Peer’ to Skype, Zenström and Friis still kept a nod to the sky element of the original name in previous logos designs that depicted a cloud engulfing the word Skype.
Founder Jeff Bezos originally planned to call his company “Cadabra”, an abbreviation of “abracadabra”. However, when his lawyer misheard this as “cadaver” he decided to think of a new name.
When Amazon was founded in 1994 Seattle, it was advantageous to have a brand name that began with an ‘A’ so it was at the start of the phonebook. This led Bezos to look through the dictionary to find a suitable name starting with ‘A’. He eventually settled on Amazon because it referred to the biggest river in the world. 26 years later and Amazon is one of the biggest businesses in the world.
Nintendo’s roots go back to 1889 when the company produced playing cards. These handmade playing cards were called ‘hanafuda’, or Japanese flower cards. In Japanese, Nintendo roughly translates as ‘leave luck to heaven’ or ‘in heaven’s hands’. However, there has been some debate over whether the translation could be even more literal than this. Another interpretation of the word Nintendo could mean ‘the temple of free hanafuda’, or ‘the company that is allowed to make (or sell) hanafuda’.
Nearly 100 years later, the company went into the toy industry and eventually the video game market.
When the co-founders of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were deciding a name for the company in 1976 California, Jobs was a fruitarian. Jobs often visited organic farms to collect fruits and, when he and Wozniak were trying to decide on a name for the company, he had just returned from a visit to a communal apple farm. This led him to propose the name ‘Apple Computer’ as he believed it sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating”. Another reason for choosing the name Apple was because, similarly to Amazon, it meant it would be at the beginning of the phonebook. In 1980 Jobs said his company is called Apple “partially because Apple is ahead of Atari in the phone book and I used to work at Atari.”
eBay started as ‘AuctionWeb’ in 1995. AuctionWeb was a website dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an open and honest marketplace (so not much has changed there).
AuctionWeb grew in popularity and led to founder Pierre Omidyar’s internet service provider informing him that he would need to upgrade to a business account due to the high volume of traffic to his website. When this happened, Omidyar decided to spin it off into its own entity called ‘Echo Bay’ after his consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group. The domain name echobay.com was already taken, so Omidyar shortened it to eBay.
We bet some of those surprised you. For more tech chat (and a bit of digital marketing and PR thrown in for good measure), follow us Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
“I come from a creative and entrepreneurial family originally from St Thomas, Jamaica. My granduncle founded the Voice newspaper, my grandfather is a Reggae artist and my Mother is CEO of her own fashion company, so I like to think that influenced me to pursue my own dreams and carve my own path in life.
“Like most boys growing up in the 90s I was a big fan of anime. Shows like Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon and Naruto were regular scheduled programming at my home in Fishponds. It was my desire to recreate these shows in my spare time, through pencil and paper, that led me into art.
“Drawing wasn’t my strong point so it was hard to excel in art class, probably in part to me only being interested in drawing characters from my favourite tv show at the time! I was also into video games but, oddly, because I thought they were such a cool medium. I think I grew up in a time where video games were just beginning to be acknowledged as an artform, much like film and tv, and not just something that turns kids into ‘mindless zombies.’ I loved how video games placed you in the mind of the protagonist and allowed you to put yourself in situations you could only dream of before.
“Fast forward and this underlying love of psychology, art and computer screens coupled with a strong sense of ambition is what led me to where I am today – seeking to explore a career in UI/UX & Tech.
“Growing up I knew very little about the creative industries in Bristol. I think that’s what pushed me to study in Cambridge (Lord Ashcroft International Business School), but it was being away from Bristol and coming back that really opened my eyes to how vast and booming the city is which is why I moved straight back. So when I found out about the BMAA and that it was essentially a nosedive into the industry, I knew I had to apply.
“The biggest challenge I faced in my career was definitely making my first ever film, especially when it’s for a nationwide platform like the BBC and will be watched by thousands of people. The opportunity came about through the BBC New Creatives scheme. Managing a whole crew and cast of around 20 people whilst writing and directing a film is about 100 times harder than it sounds! But it was fun and the end result was well worth it.
“Now that I’ve won the BMAA and am travelling to Texas next week it’s hard to pin down what I’m most excited about. The food, talks, art exhibitions, film screenings, the robots… Or the world renowned ‘Southern Hospitality’? Honestly, I’m not too sure. But what I am sure of, is that I am excited. Funnily enough, I’m not really nervous about anything. My perspective is just ‘enjoy it’, take what comes with Texas and the internships as enjoyable experiences which I no doubt will learn and gain a lot from.”
Upon his return from SXSW, Okori and the BMAA runners up will have the opportunity to take part in a series of paid internships at local agencies. For more information about supporting the BMAA and offering a paid internship for Okori and the runners up, click here.
Bristol Media would like to thank our 2020 headline sponsor, ADLIB, for supporting the BMAA. Thanks also to Babbasa and the growing list of agencies who have committed to making a difference: Armadillo CRM, Tallt Ventures, McCann Bristol, Mr B & Friends, Oakwood, Immediate Media, Epoch Design, Halo, Torchbox and Diva.
The Centre for Creative and Cultural Industries, Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, creative writing incubator Paper Nations, and Oxford-based cutting-edge AI company To Play For, are offering up to ten fully-funded places to writers under-represented in the publishing and gaming industries in the South West who will use AI to revolutionise how we interact with characters in stories from games to movies and apps, in mobile, VR online and more. Up to three of the writers may go on to paid, five-week placements with To Play For.
From talking to Alexa, to using virtual reality and tech in immersive theatre, to the way we interact with characters in games, to innovations in TV narrative such as Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch, a revolution in creating stories and characters is underway.
This revolution is driven by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Innovation in machine learning will see stories told where the audience becomes part of the story and can interact with characters who have their own voices, emotions and memories, and who make their own decisions.
The opportunities are limitless, but the worlds of writing/storytelling and tech are still quite. separate and writers in the South-West for the most part have yet to explore everything AI has to offer.
Bambo Soyinka, Paper Nations’ Executive Development Producer: “We are collaborating on these workshops to bring interactive writers and the AI storytelling experts together. Like particles colliding, we believe new and amazing things will happen. We want people with experience in theatre, comics or gaming; writers who work in performing and telling stories in a range of ways, who can breathe new life into their characters and stories with AI.
“We don’t expect them to be tech-magicians, only to have basic computer skills and a keen interest in how we can use AI.
“We’re also acutely aware of the lack of diversity in the world of digital storytelling. Creating opportunities for writers of all backgrounds is at the heart of our mission, so we’re particularly keen to hear from people from under-represented backgrounds in the South-West.”
The workshop will provide a masterclass on the Charisma.ai platform, giving hands-on experience to the writers of how to adapt existing stories as well as create new ones.
To Play For Creative Director Guy Gadney: “What’s really unique with the platform is how we can use AI to create characters that adapt, learn and act based on events the audience or player controls; characters with their own voices, memories and personalities.”
The workshop is a new and exciting opportunity for writers in the region, a chance to work in the cutting-edge, rapidly evolving world of digital writing driven by AI.
The application process is now open on http://papernations.org/writing-for-all/call-for-action/ai-story-lab/. Applications close at midday on Thursday 12th March.
A new growth programme for South West-based technology start-up founders is set to launch in March.
Loop works by giving participants structured access to practical, helpful advice from local experts across a range of business services. These include investor relations, product development, human resources, marketing and PR.
The programme, for which participants are only charged a nominal fee to cover its costs, consists of nine monthly sessions. Each one focuses on a specific area of business, and is led by the specialist(s) in that field from Loop’s panel of experts. All of these individuals have been carefully selected due to their experience not only in their sector, but also in working with technology-based start-ups and scale-ups.
Loop is a collaboration between two Bristol-based organisations: accountancy specialists Affecton, and creative marketing agency Workbrands.
They realised that many founders find the task of setting up and running a small business quite challenging. Particularly when it ends up distracting from their true passion, which tends to be the product or service they’ve created.
Loop aims to change that by arming its participants with practical knowledge and advice, provided directly from trusted experts and structured to enable maximum benefit.
Workbrands founder and director Nick Farrar said: “We’re thrilled to announce that Loop is open for applications. During our seventeen years in Bristol, we’ve witnessed at first-hand the phenomenal growth of the famous South West tech cluster, and supporting its continued development is something we’ve spoken about for a while. So it’s great to launch a programme like Loop which offers so much value to founders.”
Roy Millman, owner and director of Affecton, added: “Start-up founders interested in participating in the inaugural Loop programme are invited to attend the official launch of Loop at the Engine Shed in Bristol on Tuesday 25th February.”
Interested parties can also visit loopbristol.co.uk to find out more information and register their interest in the programme.
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