All the latest news and updates from Comic Relief's technology team.
Kids are my favourite kind of user. I haven’t yet met a user with more honest feedback than a pre-teen. And there’s no shortage of it: they always seem to have a lot to say for themselves!
This year our tech team created Comic Relief’s third version of a digital interactive story for teachers to use in primary school classrooms – and it’s the best one yet (not that I’m a proud Product Manager or anything).
Structure makes all the difference when it comes to making digital content engaging. Nobody wants to be hit with a giant wall of text.
In my role as Head of Product at Comic Relief I currently have one overarching goal: to embed Product as a way of working. This is in order for Product to provide value to the organisation and it is underpinned by developing a high-performing team.
As part of our objectives in 2016, we set out to solve a recurring problem at Comic Relief: how can we build an engaging, fast and secure fundraising campaign website – the likes of rednoseday.com and sportrelief.com – in a couple of months? How can we make sure that editors are able to create compelling landing pages that reach their different audiences?
One of the goals we set ourselves for 2016 was the re-architecture of our Fundraising & registrations platform and moving to micro services. The team has been busy on that this year and the work will continue well into 2017 too. Here is a small rundown of our journey so far.
At Comic Relief, we have 5 core values that we aim to achieve in everything we do; Bold, Creative, Fun, Trustworthy and Engaging. These values can be seen front-and-centre in our campaign activity, but we also embrace these values in how we optimize our digital product offering to ensure that, as well as hitting our campaign targets, we can continue to innovate.
Have you ever experienced a situation where your employer has done a bad job of motivating you? I can think of quite a few situations where an organisation’s attempt has failed, or even had the opposite effect. Despite this, the same motivation practices continue to be used, even though much more powerful solutions are available. Here’s a simple example of one.
Every Friday at 5pm we have beers in the office. It’s nice, we clink, we pat each other on the back, we ask about plans for the weekend.
One Friday our Head of Design said:
“Hey, who fancies a 10-minute challenge?”
Imagine the situation. You’re in a race. A running race. But you have to wear a blindfold.
