Case Study: Changes East Lothian

Changes is a community health project in East Lothian, which works to help people in the county achieve and maintain positive mental health and wellbeing. In this video, CEO Caitlin Rodgers talks about the contributions of Scottish Tech Army volunteers across a range of activities, which resulted in more financial support from local businesses, more requests for support from younger people and greater confidence internally around cyber security.

View the transcript below:

My name is Caitlin Rogers. I'm the Chief Executive Officer at Changes East Lothian. And we're a mental health and wellbeing charity supporting adults across the county. So before we knew about STA, we had been talking about how we could rebrand ourselves internally, what kind of skill set did we have within the team. And we've certainly got lots of creative people, and lots of people who are hugely passionate about what we do and want to get that word out. But we just didn't have the skill set or the expertise.

So without the help of the STA, maybe we could have completed a rebrand but it certainly wouldn't have been to the standard and the quality that we've been able to achieve. So really, we did need that help. And we've benefited so much from the support from the STA.

So Changes worked with Inspiring Scotland, and we will we did a piece of work honing in on our vision, mission and values and the values that we agreed, were and are welcoming compassion and community. And these really sit at the heart of everything that we do at Changes.

Initially, when we made contact with the Scottish Tech Army we were introduced to Marina Ramsey, so Marina is a digital marketing expert there. And she was initially the lead for the connection between STA and Changes. Marina helped with our digital presence, so she took on the role of increasing our communications reach online. And that really included website content, a newsletter, our Facebook, and our Twitter pages and now also a LinkedIn profile, following Marinas involvement with the STA and that piece of work, and she asked Changes whether we would consider keeping her on a roll as a Changes volunteer. And obviously, we were absolutely delighted at this. We worked with a designer Anka Janas. And Anka was just incredible. They work worked with us to really capture what we wanted the brand to look like and how we wanted the brand to feel.

So Anka delivered a session for us with the staff team. And we had some volunteers along as well. And that was really about profiling. Who are the community that we want to reach? And how do we want to present ourselves to them? How do we want them to feel when they engage with Changes or when they kind of register and, see our publicity. So their role was really that that part that process around working with us talking to us, learning from us about who we are and how it feels to be how we want people to feel when the contact or are in contact with Changes and Ankas role then she she very quickly put together a number of different logos for us. And again, there was there was more collaboration and participation throughout that process. So we were able to narrow down to a kind of final two and then the staff team were very involved in that process of agreeing the final logo. So that really helped to ensure that it feels like our logo. It doesn't feel like something that was outsourced or commissioned to someone else. It feels like something that everyone was a part of and everyone feels connected to.

And then there was Katie Dickerson. So Katie was responsible for the user experience and the therapists design. And so she did a lot of work on the website. And she reached out to a group of user testers. So it was a really rigorous process of ensuring that the experience for anyone visiting the site was an easy one, and was a clear and concise process. One of the key takeaways from Katie was she really handed over a toolkit to us. So whenever she made changes, she also handed over a bit of a how to guide so that we could continue to make those changes ourself as and when you know, new services were introduced. And so that's been really, really helpful from the point of view of my learning. and Changes ability to sustain the new website.

And then finally, we were introduced to Steven Ramsey. So Steven is a software developer and he gave a huge amount of tech support, he was very much the behind the scenes tech support. So he worked closely with Katie and Katie and Steven talked about what was needed from the users perspective, and then what that required from the backend side.

So Steven really ensured that the website runs smoothly, and that all those cogs are in place. And that's probably the bit that feels the most kind of complex and often, like another language well, I suppose it is another language of coding, and that has just been brilliant to be able to reach out to Steven and ask for his support.

One of the one of another key takeaway from all of this is that Steven has continued with Changes as an ad hoc volunteer. So whenever we have a concern or a question around the website, we know we can contact Steven and he'll, he'll get back to us and support us through any kind of further changes that might be needed.

One thing that we have noticed as an increase in requests for support from younger people. So previously, the age group 18 to 25, was a group that we really didn't see many requests for support coming in. And we've got bits of funding, which are specifically intended to target these age groups. And a lot of that has been through using online promotions and communications, to make sure that people are aware of those, those new services that are available to them. And we've also seen over the past year or so an increase in donations from local businesses and some financial support from local businesses. Again, it's always quite difficult to know exactly where that came from. But I think we can quite safely assume that our online presence and our digital presence have been increased. People in the community are much more aware that we exist that we're here. And and people often comment when they get in touch with us that they really felt that welcoming that our value of welcoming compassion and community, but actually the brand really has that vibrancy and that welcoming feel that has seemed to draw people in.

The Scottish Tech Army, were working with a local college and they were part of a cybersecurity project that a group of students were undertaking, and they asked, they invited Changes to be part of that as a pilot. So we were really pleased to do so. And cybersecurity obviously, is something that is at the forefront of all organisations minds at the moment, we got an excellent set of recommendations from them as to how Changes can improve our cybersecurity. And the great thing about that was a lot of the actions were in fact really simple. And we were able to just implement those changes straightaway and really feel quite assured that we've got we've got quite a safe and secure cyber structure in place.

Another piece of work that that has led us back in contact with the STA has been around our search for a new CRM client resource management system. So we had put a call out on social media saying that we were looking for a systems analyst to help us identify what type of a CRM we might need. And that's really been the result of increased demand for our services and a recognition that we wanted to explore whether the current CRM database system that we were on whether that was fit for purchase or whether we need to look at other options. So we reached out to the STA and we met with a woman called Jean Ferguson, who's business is Lean Jean and Jean supported us through that process. She's helped us to identify that yes, it was appropriate for us to seek out a new CRM system and we're currently still in that process.