Optimistic about our future optimization
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.
Motivating your team – so simple, so powerful, so underestimated
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.
The Friday 10-minute challenge
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?”
Running Blind – a metaphor for Agile Delivery
Imagine the situation. You’re in a race. A running race. But you have to wear a blindfold.
Mockery: not just for Red Nose Day
We’re big on mockery at Comic Relief. Usually it’s celebrities poking fun at themselves. Sometimes it’s for unit testing.
PHP in Comic Relief
I’m a little late in writing down some thoughts from my Friday at PHP Conference 2016. Fortunately the delay has given me even more to tell you about, as our progress with PHP marches on!
This post is a lightning overview of a couple of conference highlights we’ll be learning from, and our wider progress with PHP & related technology.
Crafting content for impactful campaigns
As a self-confessed content fiend, even just seeing the word content in the title of this meetup got my creative brain cells suiting up and in the mood for a night out.
Not long after arriving at Manifesto’s office in Farringdon, my fellow digital-charity nerds and I were introduced to three speakers who went on to share the secrets of some of their most prized content possessions with the group. As I found their words of wisdom so useful I thought I’d pay them forward; I hope you’ll find them as helpful as I did.
Video backgrounds
A breakdown of our video background implementation on our events page which began as an experiment this campaign to provide something more dynamic.
The year that was, and hello 2016!
One of Comic Relief’s strategic vision is to make the organisation fully Digital and creating a permanent team to make that happen. Suffice to say there has been a lot of focus on the Technology department, and 2015 saw a lot of hiring activity in our department. Here’s a summary of how the teams have shaped up so far:
We hired:
- A new WebOps team
- Two developers for our Fundraising platform
- A Technical Lead for our Drupal team
- Stronger Drupal team and a new Senior front end developer
- A permanent QA team lead
- Two highly talented Scrum masters
