Well, what a great week we’ve had this week! We have been super busy at WellChild HQ with the Festival supporting WellChild and the WellChild Cheltenham Gold Cup; that still sounds so surreal to say! Our families have been entering competitions, sharing their journeys to help raise awareness of what life with a child who has serious health and complex needs is like, and have been helping celebrate what was a great event with us. It’s been fantastic to have a such a positive event to help take minds off lockdown!
This week, Andy and Shivy from Sidelabs have been creating a dummy group in Facebook. Giving us a platform to test all the solutions they have researched so we can work out which is the best fit for our families.
We want our group to be functional, engaging and simple to use and who knew you could do so much with Facebook!
After some initial discussions we quickly identified which type of group we wanted to go with, and the team walked us through the new features that come with it. Our top tip — there are so many different types of Facebook Group make sure you have a clear idea of what your users want and research them all, there’s bound to be one that suits their needs and even gives you more features to grow into. We’ve picked one that allows maximum community engagement through badges, post types and events but also provide us with a quick to find, easy to use section for storing information — a must for our users.
Our next job is to test these features, get to know and understand how they work and how we would like them to work for our families.
We hope these changes will improve the experience for our families and add some real value to the group.
In our Sidelabs team catch up this morning Jemima raised the need for us to future proof the group and make sure we have backups of the information being delivered to users if Facebook should crash. A risk we had identified in our earlier Discovery Phase, which in part led to the design of our ‘multi-faceted’ tool — where users engage with us over multiple platforms from events (virtual and physical), our website, social media and our private Facebook Group being central to this. If one element fails, the others are there to support it and store/share the same information within them.
Our project is in a great place, and we hope in the next week to get some substantial content onto the dummy group, make sure we know how to manage and update it and then we can start to implement some changes in the WellChild Family Tree. How exciting!
