Consulting for Companies & Organisations
Helping you to help your users
We understand the internet. And we also understand that seizing its exciting possibilities can be difficult for managers within large or complex organisations.
Our consultancy operates within corporate realities. We find ways past the obstacles, to help you deliver a great online experience.
Tell us what you need. We'll show you how to get there.
Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg (CC)
Features Remedies for your digital headaches
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Smarter digital procurement
No-one can see the future – that’s why investing in big new technologies can feel like a frightening gamble. With every prospective contractor telling you that they have the answer, how do you know you won’t be taken for a ride?
mySociety will help you make better procurement decisions, and can teach your organisation the skills needed to make better decisions in the future.
In short, we remove pain and risk from the procurement process.
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Smarter digital recruitment
Choices about how to use the web were once the realm of communications teams, and held little interest for senior decision makers.
No longer. Organisations of all kinds now realise that they need to re-structure themselves around the realities of the internet age.
This can mean making difficult decisions about digital leadership roles and delivery functions. mySociety will help you make the right calls to structure and staff your organisation appropriately.
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Quality design and user experience
Are your websites and apps so enjoyable that your users come away feeling positive about their interaction with your organisation? Excellent design and usability can ensure that happens – every time.
High quality user experiences start at the planning stage. We’ll assist with your first concepts – or we can come in at any stage of your build, to provide wireframes, mockups, front-end design or even entire functioning web and mobile applications.
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What does success look like?
Organisations frequently commission websites and apps without having clear success criteria defined first.
This is understandable: digital projects do not always have an obvious return on investment. mySociety will help your organisation develop an understanding of what success looks like, and how it can be measured in the digital realm.
Case Studies:
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Passenger Focus, independent public transport watchdog
Anthony Smith, Chief Executive at Passenger Focus:
We asked mySociety to give us an outside perspective on two things: how we might boost the usefulness and transparency of our research, and how we would make it easier for passengers to use our services. They worked right across the organisation, talking to our communications, complaints, research and policy teams.
"It really got us thinking about how we use IT, our website and its role."
The consultation was very valuable. The breadth and level of experience, plus a preference for simple solutions, was really refreshing. The result was lots of good ideas on how to make our research more accessible and useful to stakeholders. It also really got us thinking about how we use IT, our website and its role. It was just as valuable to have confirmation that we are doing some stuff right!
We got good value for money, and personal service. Best of all, the final report was readable - and mercifully short .
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Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity
Campaigns Manager, Shelter:
At Shelter we wanted people to enter into informed conversation with their councils about the levels of affordable housing they delivered. mySociety showed us how to make local housing data relevant to people so that they took action, and it worked. Thousands of people whose councils just weren't getting affordable homes built asked their councillors to do better.
"mySociety lead the way on creating online accountability tools."
Localism needs a new style of campaigning and mySociety lead the way on creating online accountability tools that let local people challenge their council's performance. That's why Shelter worked with mySociety when they wanted people to lobby their council about the levels of affordable housing they delivered. With their guidance Shelter was able to motivate 1000s of people to contact their council about their house building record.
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UK Online Centres, helping communities tackle social and digital exclusion
Helen Milner, Chief Executive at UK Online Centres:
We brought mySociety in for a strategic assessment of our technology. They looked at our practices and our needs, and made a number of recommendations, and then we chose one of them to take forward. The consultative approach - meeting and discussion, prior to any specifying - worked really well for us.
"It's rare to find people who can piece together the strategy and the technology."
mySociety are willing to challenge your assumptions, but constructively. We didn't want a company who would just agree with us and sell us what we thought we wanted - some would build you a bicycle without wheels if that's what you specified. And it's rare to find people who can piece together the strategy and the technology - you usually get one or the other.
We chose to go ahead with a project which captured vital management information, but without it getting in the way of our clients' learning or requiring volunteer tutors to fill in forms. The result was a tool which generates certificates for learners on our Online Basics course.
As far as the user is concerned, they're just putting in motion something they need - a certificate - but the back-end collects their name, contact details, and learning achievements so that we can make meaningful contact in the future. For example, we can email to ask how they are getting on with whatever they learned - like Facebook or Skype.
mySociety are always thinking about function, and the experience for the end-user - in this case, that's both our learners and the people who will use it internally. So we end up with data in a format that internal staff can understand and use.
Good technology is a bit like a swan. In this case, the bit the learner can't see, beneath the water, is working incredibly hard to do the things they need, but all they see is a graceful interface.The whole tool is completely consumer-focused, really simple and really clever.
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London Borough of Barnet
Chris Palmer, Assistant Director of Communications at Barnet Council:
Working with mySociety is challenging, in a good way.
"It's changed the way we’re using the information on our website now, and it’s informed how we’ve built our new website."
The key challenge for us is making information available to the relevant people - that may be a community of adult social care users, or it may be the community of a certain street. mySociety has been tremendously helpful with defining communities and making information available to those communities. It's changed the way we’re using the information on our website now, and it’s fair to say it’s informed how we’ve built our new website.
We asked mySociety to review our customer services processes, and the information we were presenting on screens to the people answering the phones was ridiculously over-complex. They just stripped out that complexity.
Because of the nature of the projects we've worked on, it's been quite testing - mySociety have pushed us in one way, we’ve pushed them another way - we’ve worked together - which is how innovation happens. We’ve had an incredibly positive relationship.