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One dose can relieve symptoms of painful patient management issues

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Indigo Multimedia’s technical and design expertise are the active ingredients in our solutions for developing award-winning healthcare apps.

Are you working in or with the NHS at the front line of developing new solutions to medical challenges and patient care across the board? We work with clinical commissioning groups, private practitioners and med tech start ups to develop apps that improve outcomes for patients and improve healthcare service efficiency.

Our health sector clients come to us with brilliant ideas, and we provide the tech support and UI/UX expertise to make them a reality. We’ve helped create apps that cut costs, ease workload, improve efficiency, empower patients and deliver better services. Some of our work has been recognised with prestigious NHS Innovation awards. More importantly, all of our apps have benefited both patients and healthcare providers.

Indigo developed the NHS Common Childhood Illness app, which is intended to reduce unnecessary contact and improve signposting to local services for parents of young children. It won Innovator of the Year at the General Practice Awards 2016 and has been widely praised for its user friendly design.

We also developed ActiveME – an app for CSF/ME patient self-monitoring activities. The ActiveME app won an NHS Bright Ideas award and is highly valued by both patients and clinicians.

We are always happy to meet to discuss healthcare app ideas in principle with no obligation, and we have developed a highly effective methodology for creative idea generation and co-creation which can have a transformative effect on concepts.

To arrange a free consultation on the technical aspects of your healthcare app idea contact info@indigomultimedia.com or call 0191 209 2100 and speak to one of the team today.

We need to be patient about patient data

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NHS Digital “working through” healthcare IoT complexity

The interconnection via the internet of computing technology embedded in devices (including wearable tech and mobile phones) is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). There are obvious and compelling reasons why the IoT could transform healthcare, for example by monitoring drug compliance, activity, heart rate and any number of other things that might enable a patient to be supervised at home rather than in hospital. But if one thing can prevent the IoT from transforming the way we live and work, it will be a breakdown in security and lack of patient trust.

As Digital Transformation Director for the NHS, Beverly Bryant recently spoke about the complex issues surrounding patient data, and how these are slowing the pace of digital healthcare transformation.

As NHS Digital begins to consider options for incorporating the use of wearable and smart devices to support aims for more personalised care, Bryant believes it is vital to introduce a means of allowing patients to individually control how their data is used.

“[The patient] will decide and choose what happens to their data about them.  However, there are complications and the National Data Guardian review is looking at how, as a society, we can improve health services and use the data that we have,” she said.

Since NHS England announced in July 2016 that it would be dropping its care.data project, which was designed to make use of patient data extracted from GP records with the aim of informing clinical planning and other health initiatives, authorities have yet to respond to a consultation on sharing information and allowing individuals to opt out from sharing.

Patient data is seen as a key component of NHS England’s ‘Five Year Forward View’ plan for pursuing closer integration of  health and social care through technology and information sharing to better handle operational and cost pressures facing the NHS.

To help meet these aims, Bryant outlined considerations for the potential use of wearable devices and IoT to support patients to better manage their care, based on the data they generate.

“This has a huge potential for patients, for frontline staff and for the system.  We could reduce hospital stays when people are only staying in for supervision,” she said.

Bryant argued that governance around liability for both the data and decisions made around sensor-led technology would need to be finalised if IoT technologies are to be prescribed by staff.  Although a complex issue, she said it was in the process of being worked through.

She said, “Why can’t we have a discussion about the future potential of technology, but at the same time have a talk about how we make sure to do this in a safe way with consent so that individuals and clinicians know what they are getting into?”

Our experience at Indigo working in the digital healthcare transformation realm with clients including NHS and med tech start ups, very much backs up this principle. Should these data security and patient trust objectives be met, it would be possible to hook up NHS services to support wider self care and prevention aims, as well as allowing patients to access their records via apps and make use of additional services to reduce the pressure on hospitals and front line staff.

Indigo developed the NHS Common Childhood Illness app, and it is easy to imagine that parents and NHS services could benefit even more if they were able to link up with children’s medical records within the app. We won the NHS Bright Ideas in Technology Award for the ActiveME app for patients with ME, but the app could be such a rich source of research data if it interoperated with patient data throughout the UK.

However, until data security and patient trust issues are worked through at policy level, these developments remain future goals to work towards for those of us keen to develop the digital healthcare revolution.

Culture & Tourism – focus on video

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If you work in arts marketing and audience development, you will be constantly on the lookout for new ideas on how to attract and engage audiences. As a marketing and audience development specialist working primarily with digital, I and the team at Indigo are often tasked with bringing innovation and thought leadership to projects.

Rich media such as video has long been a key driver for audiences to engage with content, and Indigo has produced video for a number of culture and tourism clients such as National Trust, The Bowes Museum, Alnwick Castle, Gateshead Old Town Hall and Live Theatre.

With the development of better and faster cellular networks, mobile is now a key delivery platform for video. While expectations of quality for longer form ‘produced’ video such as trailers is still high, there is increased acceptance of and engagement with informal, spontaneous and more personal video content.

For arts organisations, this provides a good opportunity to sweat their biggest asset – creative content. Here are two key trends in video we’ve been exploring lately:

Micro Video

Micro video app Vine introduced a whole new paradigm to creating video content. Within a time limit of 6 seconds, sports events, comedy sketches, dance moves and all kinds of arts events were presented in a completely new way to a completely new audience. Although Vine has been discontinued by its owners Twitter, the principle of the micro-clip will live on as a native app within the Twitter platform. We are encouraging clients to experiment with micro-clips as an augmentation to their content strategies. There’s no doubt that video garners more and deeper engagements on Facebook, and by tailoring video to micro format for Twitter, we will be hoping for the same effect.

Live Streaming

Periscope proved the concept of a live streaming app would work and was wanted, at least with 10 million leading edge tech savvy mobile users. With the advent of Facebook Live, the technology has launched itself into the hands of 1.7 billion people. We have had really interesting results from live streaming dance rehearsals, performances and events – reaching hundreds of people from all over the world. We’re now working on integrating live streaming into ongoing creative content strategies. Areas to focus on are:

  • Raising awareness of one-off streams in advance
  • Developing a regular core audience
  • Telling a story through creating an episodic narrative
  • Linking live streaming activity to other multi-channel marketing campaigns

Other key ways we’ve been deploying video to develop arts audiences include the increasing use of video in Facebook ads. There is no doubt video is the most effective driver for Facebook ad engagement and arts organisations are missing a trick if they aren’t using it. Video blogging, or Vlogging, is also a key trend. Offering audiences behind the scenes, intimate views of arts venues has long been recognised as a valid way to spark engagement (see Heritage Open Days, and other open rehearsal festivals for evidence). Vlogging allows arts organisations to open up year-round, and can provide a fascinating archive of video content for viewers to explore.

In summary, get shooting!

Caroline Greener

Marketing & Social Media Specialist

caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

Arts & Culture – building resilience through digital

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Arts and cultural organisations are under pressure from major funders including the Arts Council to develop and (crucially) implement digital policy and strategy. Indigo has supported many venues and arts sector clients to move forward with digital and we can vouch for the powerfully transformative effect digital can have. In other blogs we will look at digital marketing, audience development and creative practice but here we’ll concentrate on how digital can build resilience and sustainability.

Digital media and technologies can help you to operate more efficiently and effectively. Here are some ideas to consider:

  • When starting out on a digital initiative try not to duplicate what is already out there. Try to build on, and add value to, what already exists (by using open source software, for example).
  • Can you automate processes, such as ticket sales, to reduce the cost of sales?
  • Could you use cloud internet services? Options here are wide ranging and usually customisable to different needs. They might include pay-per-month licensing for desktop software, cloud based file storage, CRM systems, HR systems, internet hosted telephony and website hosting. Switching to these services could improve staff effectiveness and reduce the need for up-front investment in IT hardware and software or onsite support. Per-month-per-user billing allows additional flexibility in your overheads.
  • Can you link systems to reduce the need for manual data handling? Tools like Zapier and IFTTT allow you to easily automate processes between different commonly used business tools. This can free staff from laborious, repetitive tasks, to focus on areas where they can add more value.
  • Could you replace offline options with lower cost online services – for example, online job listings and recruitment services, or replace physical newsletters with email newsletters? Could you use digital to improve team communications and reduce travel and office overheads? Whilst there is sometimes no substitute for face-to-face meetings, there are many tools designed to enable more effective communication and collaboration. These might include a team intranet, shared calendar and documents or chat/collaboration apps. Adopting these may help your team to work in different locations, using different devices, and reduce the need for fixed office space. They might also enable more effective project communications with partner organisations and freelancers
  • Rather than expensive capital purchase of digital equipment, could you consider short-term rental arrangements, or share equipment between partner organisations that have similar occasional requirements?

Digital can help you generate additional income and diversify revenue streams. Here are some areas to consider:

  • E-ticketing: you may want to implement e-ticketing for the first time or improve an existing system by optimising the purchase funnel or the collection of customer data
  • Sponsorship: if you have a creative project that is digitally innovative, you may attract support in cash or in kind from a technology partner that is looking for high quality creative content to showcase their capabilities
  • Fundraising: you might invite donations through online and mobile channels or raise funding through online campaigns, tools and services, such as the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform
  • Product sales: sales of physical products and merchandise could be increased via an online store
  • Digital content sales: − Paid-for mobile apps, in-app purchases, e-books, music and games all present potential revenue streams − There may be opportunities to sell your live-streamed or on-demand content directly to consumers, or to syndicate it to third parties with established distribution networks e.g. online, through on demand TV or event cinema.

Indigo worked with Live Theatre to develop an innovative e-learning environment for budding playwrights. It allows the renowned course to be distributed worldwide through video lectures, live chat tutorials and online submission and marking. The online platform has increased income and provided a unique and scalable revenue stream.

Indigo supported Mslexia to develop an online content platform for its writing magazine product. Mslexia Max is a new subscription for transmedia content including the printed magazine, access to a closed online community of writers, with e-books and unique features like live streamed surgeries with agents, editors and published authors.

With both of these projects, and the others you can view by selecting ‘Culture and Tourism’ in the portfolio, our team has brought ideas, insight and innovation to the table. We are passionate about the arts and the potential that digital has to improve the sustainability of the sector.

Experimenting with Digital Audience Development

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Using lean or agile techniques means adopting new ways of working based on experimentation, rapid iteration and continual testing that involves audiences and users at every stage of the process. For arts and cultural organisations this can be a daunting prospect, seemingly filled with risks – wasting precious time, making embarrassing mistakes, over spending the already tight budget…

However, we at Indigo encourage clients to embrace agile because, for digital projects in particular, it is the best way to minimise all those risks.

But don’t take our word for it – there is plenty of evidence in favour of lean approaches to digital audience development in the arts and cultural sector provided by CultureHive’s Digital Marketing Academy (DMA).

The DMA is a central point for knowledge exchange within the cultural sector — Fellows share their learning with each other and across the sector. This promotes an experimental, evidence based approach to digital marketing. The DMA itself was developed through a ‘lean’ methodology (and hence low cost). It is operated entirely online and involves senior arts marketers and CEOs from across the UK. The annual reports are a goldmine of interesting experimental case studies that provide inspiration and guidance on what worked, what didn’t and what is possible with digital audience development. Interesting experiments include:

  • Development of a prototype platform that connects schools with arts organisations.
  • Creation of a fun, game-like quiz to gather qualitative audience insight and aid in segmentation
  • An experimental approach to increasing online audiences through live streaming and ‘added value’ digital packages

The DMA offers Fellows a Mentor to support them to develop and implement experimental ideas. It’s interesting to reflect that we at Indigo fulfil a similar role with many clients, and enable them to take risks, experiment and stretch the boundaries of what’s possible with digital. From the creation of a transmedia visitor experience, to a virtual exhibition and an e-learning platform for playwrights, Indigo is continually supporting arts and cultural organisations to experiment and succeed with agile approaches to digital.

Top Tips – Arts & Cultural Digital Planning

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If you work in the cultural sector you will be aware that Arts Council England is now strongly encouraging all organisations to make a digital plan (it’s an application requirement for band two and three organisations). This is a smart move, since although there’s a credible school of thought which argues that digital shouldn’t be hived off and treated as some special case, the reality is that as a sector, the arts is some way off digital being so integrated that it negates the need for a stand-alone plan.

As an audience development specialist working in the digital sector, I have developed numerous digital plans for arts and cultural organisations both large and small. It’s never easy but it’s always worthwhile because digital offers so many low cost and low risk opportunities for experimenting and playing with audience development and creative outputs.

As with your audience development plan, your digital plan needs to sit comfortably with your overall organisational aims, other aspects of the strategy, your structures and resources. It usually makes sense to integrate both plans into your overall strategic plan.

If you have anxiety about writing a digital plan, because of a lack of internal knowledge and resources, it can be a worthwhile investment to bring in an expert consultant who will be able to maximise the impact of the process while minimising the time and stress for the organisation. A good consultant will leave a legacy of internal development. I always include creative idea generation workshops and staff training as part of a strategy development project because I want the team to be able to implement the plan once I disappear into the sunset!

The Arts Council’s Digital Policy Guidelines has some good advice about how to approach a digital plan, and make a good starting point for organisations going it alone. I would also suggest setting time aside to consider the following pointers:

  • Pinpoint the challenges facing your current organisation and consider how digital might help mitigate some of those challenges.
  • Identify the areas where you feel your organisation is currently weakest: that might be digital marketing, or a good CRM, or using Google Analytics effectively. Prioritise this list. Yes it would be great to do everything but you have to be realistic, so your plan needs to tackle things step by step.
  • Identify what is stopping you tackling those weaknesses tomorrow: is it due to lack of skills? Lack of resource? No idea of what tools might be able to help you achieve a particular aim? In each case, you need to figure out how to remove the challenge. Need to up-skill? Make training a priority. Limited resource? Consider how others within the organisation (or external resource) may be able to help you. And so on. Apply ruthless common sense to this process.

If it all feels too much however, don’t be afraid to seek help: there are lots of useful free resources online (for example, CultureHive) and I am always happy to offer a free initial consultation and quotation for taking on the task. Indigo’s relationship with National Glass Centre began with the development of a Digital Strategy. Strategic digital planning has also been central to wider projects with Northumberland National Park, Middlesbrough Council, Mslexia, and Live Theatre among others.

In short, take heart! In terms of the opportunities digital technologies afford, we’ve never lived in more interesting times. Digital transformation won’t happen overnight but small, significant steps will set you on the right path.

You can find the Arts Council England digital plan guidelines here (opens a pdf).

Caroline Greener

Marketing and Social Media Specialist

caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

 

Targeting the Unusual Suspects: a paradigm shift

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I’ve been working with cultural organisations since 2005 as an audience development specialist, supporting clients to reach, understand, develop and hold onto audiences. I have always had a particular interest in how digital fits into this mission and so have been observing with interest the progress and outcomes of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts. This fund was administered by Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) in partnership with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

£7 million was made available for projects between 2012-2015 up to a value of £125,000. The fund was for projects which involved collaboration between the arts, digital technology providers and the research community in order to undertake experiments from which the wider arts sector can learn. 52 projects were funded and the learning recorded and made available on the fund website

One of the key learning themes of the initiative was Data, and a particularly interesting project was undertaken in Newcastle and Gateshead which may impact the way that arts organisations develop new audiences all over the UK and beyond.

The Unusual Suspects was a collaborative project between Newcastle Gateshead Cultural Venues (NGCV) ten of the major cultural institutions in Newcastle and Gateshead and it had a radical intention to challenge seven of the most deeply held assumptions around arts attendance and data sharing:

  • That cultural organisations should concentrate their efforts on the existing core audience of high-frequency usual suspects
  • That past attendance behaviour is the best guide to future behaviour and that these behaviour patterns are largely immutable
  • That past attendance is a reliable basis for segmentation
  • That each cultural organisation should build and defend its own market share
  • That sharing data would undermine attendance and income
  • That we should see audiences as customers
  • That this relationship is best sustained through a sales-focused approach of serial transactions and discount incentives

Instead, the group set out to test an alternative approach, based on an alternative set of seven principles:

  1. That effort should be focused on the high-potential audience of infrequent, lapsed and would-be attenders – the unusual suspects
  2. That past behaviour is a very poor guide to future behaviour and these patterns can change
  3. That the most effective basis for segmentation is deep-seated beliefs, values, motivations and needs
  4. That rather than pursue individual market share, cultural organisations should recognise that they operate in a shared market
  5. That sharing data and curating the audience will grow the market for everyone
  6. That we are seeking deeper emotional relationships with audiences, building brand equity through a sense of belonging and a desire to support
  7. That this relationship is best sustained through rich, personalised interactions based on audience profiling and insight.

To test this approach, NGCV members shared, profiled and augmented their data to create a Data Commonwealth (or shared audience database) and undertook a series of carefully designed and fully-evaluated experimental campaigns to test the efficacy of new approaches to audience segmentation to change people’s default patterns of venue and art form attendance.

Specifically, they sought to re-activate lapsed attenders, improve levels of retention, increase rates of frequency and encourage people to trail new venues and new art forms.

The full report on the project is available here but the headline is that the project provides proof of concept for the benefits of city-wide (potentially region-wide) sharing of data for cultural organisations. The project shows a way to overcome some of the thorny political, legal and technical barriers towards data sharing. Fundamentally, the project moves beyond old-fashioned orthodox arts marketing into a new, post-marketing era where digital technology enables a new kind of audience engagement which is more personalised, and reaches the unusual suspects just as effectively as the usual ones.

The Data Commonwealth created during the project now has a legacy in the form of The Insider – a curated email database which provides NGCV with segmentation options for targeted messaging. A carefully designed sign-up questionnaire provides data-crunchers with a myriad of options for picking email recipients based on attitudinal as well as behavioural factors.

The value of this project for digital agencies like Indigo, is that it provides invaluable intelligence into how to build a shared database for digital marketing. The trials and tribulations, the how-to and how-not-to information is incredibly valuable and potentially project-saving. And this is just one of the 52 projects made public through the Nesta Digital R&D Fund. With the rich learning resource of these experimental research projects, I and other audience development specialists working in digital are armed with a whole host of new advice, guidance and inspirational ideas which we can pass on to clients.

Targeting Unusual Suspects therefore earns its place as a key concept in Indigo’s ever-evolving Transmedia Engagement Toolkit.

Caroline Greener

Marketing and Social Media Specialist

caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

Arts and Culture as Social Bridges – both off and online

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At the Arts Marketing Association conference 2016, Nina Simon gave a couple of interesting talks about her work as Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and how she has embedded within the Museum her ideas about participatory practice and community engagement.

One of the concepts that stood out for me was her description of the Museum as a ‘social bridge’. The idea being that people from all walks of life may come to the venue for quite specific community-driven reasons based on geography, identity and affinity. They come to see an exhibit that they find particularly relevant or interesting to them. But if the venue offers meaning for a range of communities, then they will inevitably collide/cross/meet.

The Museum becomes a social bridge. People are connected through a common bond of curiosity.

For me, this is a new way of looking at a phenomenon that has long been a key driver for online communities of interest and the success of social media networking sites. On Flickr for example it doesn’t matter where you come from, what religious or political beliefs you have. If you love taking photographs of sunsets you can join a relevant group and create an instant bridge to a new social crew. I have personally witnessed the powerful effects these novel social bridges can have on people – from weddings to restraining orders!

At Indigo we have encouraged our cultural and tourism clients to use digital to develop audiences in an organic, highly personal way with the development of online communities of interest. For Mslexia we developed a closed social network for women writers. For National Glass Centre we developed a nodal website connecting a global network of glass and ceramics research. For Northumberland National Park we developed a personalisation framework which allows visitors to share tips and recommendations.

It is interesting then to hear Nina turn these web 2.0 principles on their head and apply them to a physical venue. It resonates with my thinking around digital and its push-pull influence on audiences and institutions.

Social Bridging therefore earns its place as a key concept in Indigo’s ever-evolving Transmedia Engagement Toolkit.

 

Caroline Greener

Marketing and Social Media Specialist

caroline.greener@indigomultimedia.com

omni-channel retail

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Omni-channel retailing is the evolution of multi-channel, which is concerned with making sure that consumers have multiple access points to products i.e. physical shops, mail order, online shopping and social media are all routes to sale.

With omni-channel we are looking much more at making the whole shopping experience seamless for the consumer, and of equal quality through all channels. This is not to say that the experience is the same, but that the approach is maximised for different audiences with different expectations.

At Indigo we do a lot of research during digital projects, looking at consumer trends as well as technical solutions. The best starting point for any business aiming to grow and/or diversify markets is to take a detailed look at its target audiences and how they shop. If your core audience is ‘leading edge’ in terms of internet use, then social media will be a key channel, and not just for communicating but increasingly for sales, customer service and even delivery.

Even a ‘late adopter’ – someone who doesn’t use social media and is rather conservative and wary in their online purchasing habits – may be an omni-channel customer through researching products online (a huge driver of brick-and-mortar sales) and also through ownership of a smartphone which can be targeted through in-store Bluetooth sales promotions or loyalty apps for example.

Indigo works with a number of retailers – building websites and back office systems which are either bespoke or using flexible and powerful open source platforms like Woo, Shopify and Magento. We add value to our clients through our strategic approach and can offer expertise in Social Media and the full range of Digital Marketing opportunities available.

Omni-channel retailing requires a new mindset, but it can be a highly effective growth strategy, and is driven directly by demand from the ‘Connected Consumer’.