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Suggest a space on Ready for Ten
We’re very excited here at Made by Many to announce the second release of Ready for Ten. It’s got a new look and plenty of exciting new features!
Ready for Ten, a parent-powered website for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds, was created in January 2010. It started as a blogging platform stacked with tips, conversation and support for parents. In the past few weeks we worked on growing the platform, developing new features and evolving the look.
The Skillscape campaign is the most exciting feature of all. The aim of this campaign is to create a map of the UK’s best spaces for kids to play and practise their skills, from parks and playgrounds to sports clubs.
Skillscape homepage
This page gives users detailed information about the campaign. It shows how many places have already been submitted to the Skillscape and encourages users to suggest a new space.
While designing this page I wanted to make it look friendly and inviting. It is important that users feel welcomed and that they immediately get the sense of what they can do there and what they can achieve by taking part.
I’ll go through the design process here: Read full post
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A platform for parents – Ready for Ten presentation
Slideshare has been busy overnight putting our presentation through some kind of virtual conversion wringer, and it’s now ready for your enjoyment.
Here’s the presentation that Tim and I presented with our client, Chrissie, in the Digital Strategy Theatre at the NMA Online Marketing Show on Tuesday. It gives an overview of the strategy, approach and working processes we employed within our cross-functional team with BBH and Britvic to create Ready for Ten.
Ready for Ten – a peer-to-peer parenting platform for Robinson’s Fruit shootWe’re looking for other opportunities to talk about the platform, so please drop me a line at charlotte@madebymany.co.uk if you have an event you’d like to invite us to. -
Ready for Ten Skillscape – a utility for parents of 6-9 year olds
Last week saw the second release of our engagement platform for Robinson’s Fruit Shoot: Ready for Ten. The build up to the release was short — only five weeks — but in that time we achieved an awful lot. A complete evolutionary turn on the visual design, plus introduction of new features for our members including a VIP Club, enhanced profile pages and most importantly, the Skillscape campaign.
Ready for Ten homepage
What is a Skillscape? Well, it’s something we’ve devised to help parents find the best spaces near them for kids to play, practise and learn new skills. From talking to parents, Read full post
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When blogging met Twitter: meet Ready for Ten
We’re now the proud parents of a site for, well, parents. Ready for Ten is a conversation space for mums and dads of 6-9 year olds. We built it for Fruit Shoot, which is the UK’s top brand for kids of this age group, and as such, wanted to create a resource for parents. Ready for Ten is a website that brings together the best of the web — blog posts, links and tips — for parents of kids in this age group.
All the content on the site is generated by the parents who use it: by the mummy bloggers who write regular blog posts on parenting, by the parents in the Ready for Ten Twitter stream, and by the people who comment on these posts and tweets. We refer to Ready for Ten as being parent-powered because the conversation on the site is steered by these parents, rather than an editorial board somewhere, without a parent in its ranks.
The site has been live for just over a month now but it only came out of private Beta this past week. Take-up has been good thus far, with more and more people following on Twitter, reading and commenting. We’re excited about the site as it’s a real departure for an FMCG brand to use Twitter this way — we think it’s pretty forward-thinking of Britvic, the company behind Fruit Shoot, to connect with their audience like this.
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It’s OK to fail
Years ago, when I was a teenager working as a summer camp counsellor, I was given a very valuable lesson in the expectation of success. (Full disclosure: I have yet to actually learn this lesson, but I’m trying. Lordy, am I trying.)
I was caring for a four-year-old whose mum had gone on an overnight trip, and as the day grew darker, my little charge became more and more anxious. I cuddled and soothed her, but nothing helped — she wanted her mum.
Her whimpers turned to full-on crying and I, agitated at the prospect of failing my job so completely, began to shush the poor kid. Obviously, this didn’t help, but I was dogged in my determination to ‘make it work’.
So I kept on. The harder she cried, the more I shushed, until the child astounded me by pausing mid-sob, staring me straight in the eye, and hollering at me with absolute righteousness,
“Don’t you know?! It’s OK to cry!!”
I was speechless. Of course it’s OK to cry — especially when you’re four. Who the hell was I to insist this kid buck up and ‘make it work’ when, clearly, it just wasn’t working? Read full post
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Measuring
I’ve been thinking of how to measure engagement in the digital space for a while now, so I wanted to aggregate my thoughts and put them in one place. This post is intended to be provocative and get people thinking about how the current thinking of measurement of social media should change. It isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution – more an articulation of things that people should consider more and more when they embark on work in the online social space.
Assessing necessity
Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.
Defining engagement
Defining what engagement means to you as a brand at the outset is important. Is it having a certain number of comments? Getting people to contribute ideas to a wiki? Making sure they spend x amount of time on a site? It is only later that the ‘how’ of engagement should come into play. The answer to ‘how can we measure the impact of our website/community’ can only be given when you answer ‘what exactly am I looking for’ first.
Areas of engagement
If brands do engage online, where they engage is more important than how many places they are active online. I’d rather pick my battles (Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example) and fight them well rather than have my social finger in too many pies (all the above plus MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut etc.) and not be able to have meaningful conversations with anyone. Of course this depends on where your audience is. They could well be in Second Life and Vimeo, and if they are, then that’s where you should be – not Facebook. (more after the break)
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Tear down this wall! Crowdsourcing comes of age
Hello. I’m Sara and I joined Made by Many last month. My forte is content, so it seems appropriate that my first post should be all about conversation… specifically the two conversations that go with just about every digital project.
Never simple, is it?
The first of these is all about the customers, the people for whom we’re building this product or service. This conversation is pretty user-centric: essentially, what do they need? What are their problems, and how can we help solve — or at least minimise — them?
Then there’s a second conversation — the behind-the-scenes, creative-type stuff about how things actually work. What functionality do we offer? Do our user stories tell the whole story, and does it have a happy ending? What about typeface and layout? And finally, how the hell do we iterate this beast? Read full post
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Protect The Human – new designs for Campaign pages
Protect The Human is Amnesty’s International UK site. It’s designed to engage people to stand up for humanity and human rights.We’ve recently redesigned and launched new campaign pages on Protect The Human. The aim of the redesign was to improve the user experience and usability, which would lead to the increase in numbers of people getting involved in the campaigns for human rights.
Campaigns play a crucial role on Protect The Human. They are designed to highlight the ongoing problems happening in the world. Each campaign has a range of actions for people to take in order to fight the injustice.
To improve the campaign pages and increase the number of people taking actions, we’ve done some major changes. We started with the campaigns index page.
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Metrotwin Mumbai is now live!
We've been really busy the last couple of weeks working on a new project for British Airways - a follow-up to Metrotwin, which we created last year.
British Airways wanted to follow up on what Metrotwin started by extending the concept of twinning to their second most popular route after London-New York, namely London-Mumbai. Except we decided to go with a blog this time, for various reasons, the most significant of which is that India’s blogosphere is an extremely active, growing place and a blog would be a great way to document the best of both cities while attracting the right audience at the same time.
We rounded up a group of some of the best bloggers out there, from both Mumbai and London, and the fab folk at Agency.com helped us build the site.
Metrotwin Mumbai will cover the best of what Mumbai and London have to offer. They are both similar in so many ways – both are vibrant, diverse, and have a huge history of art and culture. I often have problems deciding which city I like more. Our bloggers, all talented cityfolk who love their urban surroundings, are going to highlight their favourite things to do and places to see in either Mumbai or London (or both!!). The best places to eat Indian food in London? The best places to hang out after work in Mumbai? What’s the equivalent of London’s Kew Gardens in Mumbai, to soak in some greenery? The answers to all these and more are forthcoming. Just stay tuned to Metrotwin Mumbai.
A huge thank you to everyone involved in this project, especially Julia who came up with the very smart design for the site.
What are you waiting for? Head to Metrotwin Mumbai and check it out!
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Climate Squad: from social media to social movement
Made by Many is pleased as punch to announce the launch of climatesquad.org.uk, a platform for joining and organising actions to halt climate change that’s also the first of a series of initiatives by V to change the way youth volunteering works in the UK.
V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.
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