Our Double WIN

November 26th, 2009 - 5:37 pm

We were honoured to be shortlisted for the Women Into the Network (WIN) awards last month. The awards celebrate achievements of businesses throughout the North East, and we were delighted to be considered for not one but two awards – Best Small Business and Entrepreneur of the Year.

cynergyAwardsWeb

The awards ceremony took place last Friday. The Cynergy team dressed to the nines and went along to the Newcastle-Gateshead Hilton full of hope, and above all, pride to have been recognised as being among the top businesses in the region.

The evening was a great opportunity to find out about what is taking place in our region. We all felt inspired when we heard about previous winners, including Susan Dobson, who won the very first Entrepreneur of the Year award before sadly passing away due to cancer.

When the award winners were announced, we were delighted to find we had won Small Business of the Year, as well as the headline Susan Dobson Entrepreneur of the Year award! We were all very proud of each other, as well as our MD Rebecca, who gave a gracious speech thanking everyone, including her dad, who was there showing his support.

The judges especially praised Cynergy’s efforts to make a difference in the health and social care sector, and not accept corporate work. Our team are all extremely pleased to not only be recognised, but to know we really are making a difference to people’s lives.

We’d like to say a big thank you to WIN, and of course a huge congratulations to our Rebecca!

Events for sustainable survival

August 24th, 2009 - 12:26 pm
Events for sustainable survival
In the current financial climate, however important or worthy a service offer, no sector is immune to the collective belt tightening of supporters, donators and potential stakeholders.
Expensive mass media campaigns to raise awareness and promote services are out of reach for most organisations. In fact, evidence is showing that very few of these approaches, however well funded, controversial or emotionally moving, have proven successful.
The fact remains that the need for awareness, for support and to raise issues with the public has never been greater. Campaigns and initiatives need to be both economical, specific and highly successful, and rightly so. If you take time to get  something right first time, to make your message meet a human need, it should not need doing again.
Organisations and those who operate on their behalf can no longer create complete systems purely based on opinion to distribute to enthusiastic audiences in the vague hope that there will be a percentage of uptake. The collective trend in both private and public sector is, provider looking to those they serve for new direction, and finding success in co-creation and participatory development.
Events and consultations are a becoming a far more suitable proposition for transferring information, quickly and efficiently to large audiences. They not only allow distribution of key issues but are ideal for discussion, debate, workshops and lateral thinking exercises, all far more effective ways of resolving issues and discovering creative solutions.
Conferences that include service user speakers, public consultations and staff taking part in formulating ‘vision and values’ all conclude that if you want something to work, ask those who are going to use it. If you want to change a community for the better then consult them on what is wrong with it and help them to uncover how to put it right. This is putting the power back in the hands of those who need it most, communities gathering around a cause and resolving it, a kind of ‘collective self care’.
So the role of the health and public sector communication is shifting from a position of distributing advice from above, toward being amongst those they serve and listening, learning and providing support for the kind of services they need.
If the formulation of new initiatives are structured by users and are implemented with feedback and evolution platforms in place, allowing continual involvement, they will become self supporting. If users participate in creation and own the project it may go beyond sustainable and do more than you could ever of anticipated.

wood

In the current financial climate, however important or worthy a service offer, no sector is immune to the collective belt tightening of supporters, donators and potential stakeholders.

Expensive mass media campaigns to raise awareness and promote services are out of reach for most organisations. In fact, evidence is showing that very few of these approaches, however well funded, controversial or emotionally moving, have proven successful.

The fact remains that the need for awareness, for support and to raise issues with the public has never been greater. Campaigns and initiatives need to be both economical, specific and highly successful, and rightly so. If you take time to get something right first time, to make your message meet a human need, it should not need doing again.

Organisations and those who operate on their behalf can no longer create complete systems purely based on opinion, and distribute to enthusiastic audiences in the vague hope that there will be a percentage of uptake.

Events and consultations are a becoming a far more suitable proposition for transferring information, quickly and efficiently to large audiences. They not only allow distribution of key issues but are ideal for discussion, debate, workshops and lateral thinking exercises, all far more effective ways of resolving issues and discovering creative solutions. Rather than acting as a climax to a campaign, these events needs to sit as a significant point of a expanding circular process. Developing a programme based on delegate involvement, acting to shape the process during the event and evaluating based on feedback to develop a continual programme of activity. The key to this approach being a changing mindset from events for dissemination to opportunities for collaboration.

Conferences that include service user speakers, public consultations and staff taking part in formulating ‘vision and values’ all conclude that if you want something to work, ask those who are going to use it. If you want to change a community for the better then consult them on what is wrong with it and help them to uncover how to put it right. This is putting the power back in the hands of those who need it most, communities gathering around their own cause and resolving it, a kind of ‘collective self care’.

So the role of the health and public sector communication is shifting from a position of distributing advice from above, toward being amongst those they serve and listening, learning and providing support for the kind of services they need.

If the formulation of new initiatives are structured by users and are implemented with feedback and evolution platforms in place, allowing continual involvement, they will become self supporting. If users participate in creation and own the project it may go beyond sustainable and do more than you could ever of anticipated.

We love the NHS

August 17th, 2009 - 4:51 pm

IHeartNHS

A message posted on the social networking website Twitter with the tag ‘#welovetheNHS’ resulted in tens of thousands of people responding with positive messages of their own experience.

People were defending the British National Health Service from American criticism aimed at it during the Town Hall debates on National Health care reform. Those twittering included, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron who were both quick to add their voice to the debate. Brown has since written to have been profoundly moved by the enormous groundswell of support.

There are obvious pros and cons to both the UK and US health systems and the media is having a great time in putting them in opposition. European countries are also being included in the debate, as a potential way forward, having systems that thrive on insurance input yet still ensure every patient is covered if they cannot afford it.

What I thought was great was the loyalty of the British public for an organisation which is so often condemned in the press as being below standard, riddled with infection and full of over worked staff. The general consensus seems to be that when the National Health Service works – it works very well. This is a national institution that people hold dear to their hearts especially those that have been saved from desperate situations.

This publicly generated, self initiated campaign is something that marketing agencies and communication departments would have loved to have instigated, let’s hope the complex ‘Twitter opinion’ data can be filtered into some sort of consensus to assist in a user driven positive system change.

Link to the twitter feed

Playlist or catalyst, what am I?

August 13th, 2009 - 1:51 pm

Vinyl collection

A new free web service and a lot of research into social marketing this week has got me thinking about ownership and authorship.

A couple of weeks ago the Cynergy studio was introduced to Spotify.com (thanks Dave) a free web service which allows you to listen to music from a massive database spanning decades, genres right up to recently released material. Our studio has always been proud of operating to the tune of a diverse, eclectic collection of music. We believe it enhances the exchange of opinion, ideas and creative expression of our individual and mutual personalities. The inclusion of spotify has just added range to this practice. The itunes database we collectively cultivated so proudly is in danger of becoming cobwebbed.

So how does this affect ownership? Since the late 70s I have collected music, on whichever formats were the current trend, even recently succumbing to MP3s has maintained a sense of the ‘collection’. But with a web service that offers most of my CD collection, the vinyl slowly warping in my loft and all the new music I haven’t got around to purchasing yet, who needs a collection? A broadband connection, a couple of decent speakers and you’d never need to visit a record store again, real or virtual.

There is obviously the factor of taking your music away from your computer but more importantly for me this service throws up interesting dilemma around ownership. The music I have hoarded over the years is precious to me, it is part of me. Is that to be reduced to a mere playlist, a set of data that merely links my email address to some files on a hard drive? Is that what I am to become?

These questions of ownership have coincided with a lot of recent work we are doing which highlights the developing role of the designer and creative agency in propagating ideas that live and survive rather than delivering stationary slabs of information which simply exist to communicate a linear message.

There is a natural urge within graphic designers and the agencies they work for to maintain a sense of authorship. Even the most altruistic of us struggle to suppress the desire to ‘do things their way’. In most cases a comfortable balance is found which draws upon the clients aspirations for their project and the agencies creative expertise, a healthy compromise is set on a need for each other to reach a worthwhile solution.

Hence a designers need for authorship is met and a clients problems are solved, everyone is happy, that is until we start including the end user (the projects primary audience) in the dissemination of the initiative.

Social marketing – using creative marketing for behavioural change – is becoming an increasingly common approach in the projects we are engaging with. Events in particular are by their nature inclusive of research, discussion and consideration of a target audience or encouragement of a specified act. This method of approach is however renowned with moving in directions previously unimagined. Once an individual or community is provided with the tools and information to self manage their issue how they use it is out of our control. If a social marketing initiative is successful designers may take credit for the initial idea, the client for the drive to solve a social/health problem, yet once in the public domain ownership is well beyond both our grasps.

So now I no longer own my music (or the music available for me to listen to), and the creative ideas that I formulate with great thought and care are up for grabs for anyone to mold to suit their needs. Maybe the focus on the structure and meaning behind an initiative will become increasingly important factor. Design that is solid, iconic and comfortably adaptable will be more prevalent.

Maybe their is some merit for clients and agencies alike in launching our ideas from the nest. Confident in our nurturing their strengths and proud in their ability to take flight and hopeful of their healthy growth and longevity.