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A powerful campaign highlighting medical progress.

Signal really, really care. The people are very talented, they work well together, and they embrace us as a client working as part of a small, family-like team.

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At the IOF recently I overheard a few senior fundraisers stating how their intuition was core to making large scale future fundraising investments. 

And this of course is nothing new. One of the benefits of being an experienced fundraiser is having a well-honed gut instinct for what works well and what doesn’t.

There’s no doubt that intuitive bets have paid dividends for many charities in the past. And in a stable and established charity sector, following your instinct is a sure-fire way to success based on a well-worn feel for what worked in the past.

Today, however, relying on hunches alone has become increasingly risky. 

When intuition meets increasing complexity

Fundraising is fast becoming convoluted and complex. The variety of ways audiences support and engage is evolving and, as a result, decision-making based based mostly on intuition is less assured and less likely to succeed. 

As this trend continues, many senior fundraisers are in a tricky position, where even with years of experience and knowledge on their side, acting on gut instinct can be a bit of a gamble. 

It makes a lot of sense then to combine that hard-won intuition with a more evidence-based approach, leveraging insight derived from data. 

So why aren’t fundraisers already doing this across the board?

Most charities have a wealth of data but not always at their fingertips. Putting this data to practical use for decision-making is often the biggest obstacle.  Maybe it takes months to compile a post-campaign-analysis simply because that’s always the way it’s been done. Perhaps you are able to only look at channels in isolation, or your reports don’t roll up to give a high-level view of performance against priorities. 

Or maybe it’s the fact the mosaic of performance measures available is blinding you to what’s working, what isn’t, where you should invest and where you might want to optimise. 

Whatever the reasons, it takes a concerted effort to embed usable views of performance derived from data. 

In our experience this is best delivered via browser-based dashboards – highly accessible and easy to consume reports in a graphical format – which, when delivered collaboratively, can fast become an invaluable source of actionable insight across your organisation. 

These well-designed visual dashboards work on a number of levels, helping you gain a clear picture of key aspects of performance, so you can unpack activities and optimise spend. 

Track the KPIs and insight on what’s business critical

Make business decisions supported by robust, accurate insight

Visualise moments of truth, customer journeys and future contact strategies 

Instill governance and controls - all from a single source of truth

Deliver automated and real-time insight directly to every user’s device.


It’s also important to remember that effective visualisations, when done right, are about more than the tool itself. Poorly designed and over-engineered dashboards can actually cause more confusion than illumination.

Effective dashboards, delivered collaboratively, help create a common language for fundraisers based on your most important objectives.

Properly scoping this will help narrow your focus to what will speak to and support the priority functions in your organisation, rather than over-engineering your dashboard with too many sanity and vanity metrics and filters.

Just as important is how you use the dashboard to inform your decisions on an ongoing basis. Regular check-ins and cross-discipline analysis sessions are a must.

Summary: If you’re not effectively measuring, you’re mostly guessing

In an evolving charity sector, it’s crucial that intuition is not your sole decision-making source but is well supported with data and insight. This begins with metrics and KPIs, delivered via easy to consume dashboards. 

Effective dashboards are much more than numbers and dials. They are a means to ensure shared comprehension of performance and engagement. And they help you make more informed decisions on future activity to repeat, reshape or discontinue.

Intuition should play a key role in driving your strategic direction. But with metrics and insight at your fingertips, it’s time to lose the gut and take the guesswork out. 

Want to make more confident decisions and turn insight into action? 

We help fundraisers build a powerful shared focus around the metrics that matter.

Get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Fundraisers: Let’s take the guesswork out

Intuition should play a key role in driving fundraiser's strategic direction. But it is no replacement for data; it’s time to lose the gut and take the guesswork out. 

For fundraisers, acting on gut instinct alone can be a bit of a gamble. Instead, intuition combined with a more evidence-based approach can lead to more informed decisions. 

Fundraisers: Let’s take the guesswork out | Signal Blog 

Last year we took part in BIMA’s Digital Day for the first time, sending our volunteers out to Queensferry Community High School. It was a great success, so we knew we wanted to do it again. 

However, this year we thought we’d step it up a gear. We volunteered to be paired with not one, but two schools. 

Digital Day links digital professionals up with 13-16 years old students from schools and colleges and gives them an insight into the world of digital careers, showcasing the huge range of opportunities available for young people within the industry. Agencies present to the students to share what they do, what kind of clients they work on, and help students to solve challenges as part of a nationwide competition - with cash prizes for the winning schools. 

It’s a great initiative. Even though the digital industry is booming, there is a real skills shortage and Digital Day is doing its bit to help fix this issue - something we believe strongly in as an agency. 

We were matched with Stirling High School (for the first time) and Queensferry (once again). 

So we sent our Digital Director Gregor to Stirling High School, and our UX Designer Lauren and Senior Designer Jen to Queensferry High School, to share their career experiences and help the students with the challenges. 

They came up with a great mix of creative, experiential and app ideas. From live events designed to get people interested in digital careers in a hands-on way, to clever consideration of how partners and sponsors could be used to increase the impact and reach of our apps. 

As well as this, they demonstrated an understanding of the importance of education in helping change people’s behaviour. For example, they suggested that gaming would be a good medium to help stop the pollution of our oceans, because it would get the message across in an interesting and entertaining way.

The students showed enthusiasm and resilience, coming up with ideas on the fly and in a group setting which can be tough, and they all played a part in researching and bringing the group’s ideas to life. 

Some teams demonstrated a professional level of preparedness when it came to presenting their ideas to the group, others drew on their creativity and on-the-spot thinking abilities to deliver a more relaxed pitch. 

A lot of hard work and effort was put in by all the students - best summarised by this quote: “If I didn’t have football tonight, I’d just go straight home to my bed”. 

Mr Andrew Douglas, Queensferry Community High School's Computer Science teacher said: 

“In school, students rarely get the opportunity to learn about the different roles within digital, and that they can be anything from the technical side to the more creative route. BIMA, alongside Jen and Lauren from Signal, have opened lots of student's eyes to the range of opportunities and different career paths that are available to them."

Everyone made us feel very welcome and they showed a genuine interest in our roles at Signal and the types of clients and projects we work on. 

In fact, later on in the evening, our Design Director Gregor received a message from the mother of one of the students. She wanted to reach out to tell him her daughter could not stop talking about the amazing day she had. 

We could not have asked for a better reaction than this.

Initiatives like Digital Day are extremely important. They give students an insight into a professional world they didn't even know existed and they get to hear first hand about all the different and rewarding career paths available to them - something that many current professionals (myself included) simply did not have growing up.

 They educate and inspire students about the digital sector and the breadth of roles available, ensure future talent and reduce the skill shortage faced by the industry. 

It’s for all these reasons that we can’t wait until Digital Day 2020. Will we stop at two schools? You’ll just have to wait and see. 

BIMA Digital Day 2019 - Bringing digital to life for the next generation

Signal volunteers visited Queensferry Community High School and Stirling High School to inspire students about digital careers.

Ben Hunt-Davis MBE is a big believer in focusing on the metrics that matter. 

He was part of an underachieving British rowing team who came in last place at the 1996 Olympics. But his team went on to achieve a remarkable turnaround, winning Gold in Sydney four years later. 

How did they do it? By organising themselves around one simple question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ 

Hard work, determination and training were all still required, of course, but all those efforts were directed towards one clear purpose.

Ben’s story beautifully illustrates the power of being laser-focused. But with the charity sector in the midst of an unprecedented period of change, it can be tricky for fundraisers to identify such a simple route to success.

We know that ambitious fundraisers are exploring new recruitment channels and products, and new ways to deepen engagement and value from supporters.  

Making that shift can be risky however, without a clear view of the right metrics at the right time. And the reality for many charities is that it can take months to analyse their results and make recommendations for future activity.  

However the same basic principle applies to charities as much as it does an Olympic rowing team - decisions are made much easier when you have access to the right metrics to steer the ship.

When we talk about the ‘metrics that matter’ it’s not about saying some of your KPIs are unimportant. It’s about being clear which metrics are most important of all. And giving internal teams a way to easily communicate (and understand) how you’re tracking against them.

Getting the timing right is also crucial. I’ve heard too many stories of charity teams getting a shock when unexpected results are unveiled to them months down the line. Not only that, but the time it’s taken to produce the results means a lot of missed opportunities.

For example, one Head of Individual Giving recently told me that they almost fell off their chair when the charity’s data agency presented the ‘latest’ view of their Weekly Lottery retention performance (which was actually 6 months old).  

The expansion of recruitment channels had dramatically increased attrition, but their teams were operating for months without this knowledge and repeating costly mistakes over and over again. 

Putting a stronger performance culture in place

Thankfully, charities that cultivate a strong performance culture can avoid this situation.  By establishing a shared view of your charity’s most important metrics, all in one place, at a glance, fundraisers will benefit from:

Improved accountability across internal teams, with a common language and a genuine reason to collaborate

The ability to make better, quicker decisions, enabling meaningful progress against big strategic challenges.

The insight to turn off, or reshape failures as soon as they become apparent, and build on successes as soon as they show a significant uplift. 

All hands on deck - collaboration is critical

As my colleague Sam points out, well-designed visual dashboards can provide these benefits, but tools alone don’t guarantee success, especially if bought ‘off the shelf’ and left to gather dust.

The most important part of cultivating a performance culture is making sure all the key end users/stakeholders (IG, Data, Digital teams) are together from the start, to discuss, challenge and agree on the common insight view that will drive performance forward. 

This co-creation means that internal charity teams have the reassurance of a common, agreed-upon results view (via a tailored dashboard) that they can use to minimise risks. This facilitates leaner working practices, and continual testing and learning.  

This on-going lens into the latest results can be liberating. It strips dangerous delays and a reliance on outside agencies (and their reporting routines) out of the process. 

In a sector where every pound spent on fundraising is (rightly) scrutinised, placing bets should be as informed as possible. And with a little bit of effort upfront, it is possible for charities to track the most important metrics and therefore make better decisions.

Just as Ben Hunt-Davis’s ‘big question’ kept the whole British rowing team on track for Olympic success, charities that prioritise performance measurement in this way will be able to make quicker progress against big goals. 

It should also help fuel appetites amongst internal teams to work together for further positive change, and make the job of fundraising much less frustrating and more interesting for everyone involved.

Do you want to improve your fundraising results? 

We help charities create a powerful shared focus around the metrics that matter.

How fundraisers can make faster progress by tracking the metrics that matter

A shared understanding of the latest key metrics is central for fundraising success

Charities can make better decisions when they have access to the right metrics, but what do we really mean when we talk about the ‘metrics that matter’. 

 How fundraisers can make faster progress by tracking the metrics that matter | Signal Blog 

On Wednesday 6th November, we welcomed a packed room of senior marketers and business leaders to our sold out ‘Agile Marketing for the Real World’ event at CodeClan Edinburgh.

Agile Marketing is a powerful idea. It promises a more fun, collaborative and effective way of working that helps marketers get better results, faster. But with so many different approaches and methodologies, it’s not easy to know where to start. Our hashtag for the event perhaps puts it best: #WTFisAgileMarketing?

To help shed some light on this, we invited three speakers to share their extensive and varied experience adopting Agile ways of working in the ‘real world’ of marketing.

Our keynote speaker for the evening was Neil Perkin (digital consultant and bestselling author of two books on Agile), with Kate Bordwell (Creative Lead at RBS Open Experience) and our very own consultant David Hammond (previously Accenture) adding their unique perspectives. Read bios for each of our speakers here. 

The evening kicked off with a bit of informal networking (accompanied by lots of wine and cheese).

Guests might also have noticed a bit of a visual theme (one or two Post-Its were involved.)

And before the talks kicked off, a few attendees shared with us what the concept of Agile meant to them on our Wall of Agile.

It was soon time for the main event, which our CEO John Rowley described in his intro as “something of a journey through the key principles of Agile, its development and deployment in the real world.” 

First up was our keynote speaker, Neil Perkin, on the topic of Agile Marketing and Transformation.

 “There’s nothing wrong with linear ways of thinking, but too many companies do 95% linear, and maybe 5% iterative and Agile. There really needs to be a bit of a rebalance here, because the context is that we are in environments which are complex and adaptive." Neil Perkin

John set the scene for Neil’s talk by introducing him as a “taller, better-looking Yoda”. And Neil did indeed have a ton of wisdom to share with us about Agile Marketing, based on his experience helping a wide range of organisations adopt Agile ways of working (outwith technology teams). This included a stint at Time Inc. when the magazine giant was transitioning from print to digital. 

Neil’s half hour presentation was densely packed with insights and information, focusing on the massive impact that digital innovation has had on the competitive landscape, and how Agile ways of working (and thinking) can provide a way through.

He quoted Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, whose phrase ‘Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast’ encapsulates the key concepts of Agile. And he highlighted why each element is so important:

“You think big, because you need that good sense of direction. Being Agile is not an excuse not to have a plan. So you have a good vision and sense of direction, but in order to get there, you start small so that you can learn fast and you can scale fast. That way, you’re able to take account of the rapidly changing context.”

He also outlined the three core principles of Agile that he considers critical for making it a success within marketing teams: 

Manageably-sized multidisciplinary teams (6-10 people)

Finally, he pointed out that data has to be refined: "data is the new oil, in that it's toxic unless you refine it". Firstly, it needs to be turned into information, which in turn can be converted into knowledge and ultimately wisdom that drives organisational change. And he suggested that marketers would benefit from being more open to adopting some of the methods used by product marketing and service design teams. 

Next up was Signal’s David Hammond to give us the lowdown on ‘Agile Marketing in Practice’.

David also cited The Lean Startup, which he discovered in a previous role at Accenture, as a key influence on his career. 

Like Neil, he has also worked as a consultant, advising a wide range of business and marketing teams (as well as technology and product teams) on how to apply Agile principles to get better results.

One example David shared to show how effective Agile can be, covered his experience working on a project with McDonald’s:

“Their VP of marketing in the UK wanted to trial out new coffee products in some of their stores. But she was told it was going to take over a year to test that through their normal processes. So I worked with her and her team to develop an Agile marketing approach and get a trial out in the space of 3 months.” 

He also outlined seven very practical steps of how to get started with Agile marketing:

Form an Agile Marketing team (with tips on what good teams have in common)

Rather than conforming rigidly to any one methodology, David advised that in a marketing context, an ‘a la carte approach’ usually works best. Echoing Neil’s 3 key principles, he recommended 3 things in particular that he finds work well for marketing teams; Kanban boards, daily stand-ups and regular retrospectives.

“If there’s only one Agile practice to implement within your marketing team, regular retrospectives is the one that I’d recommend. Because it’s the one that allows teams to evolve their own way of working with more Agile practices in general." David Hammond

For more details, you can read David’s recent article: Agile Marketing (What it means in practice) 

Our third talk was an entertaining finale from Kate Bordwell on Becoming Agile. 

“For me Agile isn’t about Scrum and Kanban and all that, it’s much more about the core principles and values, and that collaboration, that team. It's the fact that you can bring the right people together in the room from the beginning, plus the fact that you can involve customers at every stage of your process, that you can co-create with people. That’s what motivates me and that’s what I think gets really good results.”

Kate talked us through her journey from solo planner to working within a collaborative Agile team and how she went on to become a fully-fledged Agile Practitioner. 

"I don't call it a 'war-room' because I'm a pacifist. I call it a 'mind-palace' instead."

She shared the different methods she’s used in different roles, from ‘a crash course in design sprints’ at Nile, to navigating tribes and guilds with Skyscanner, to her current role at RBS, where innovation is defined as ‘new ideas that have meaningful impact on customers’.

She also gave us advice on how to ensure there’s space for marketing fundamentals such as developing insight and ideas in an Agile environment, plus a whistlestop tour of some of her favourite Agile tools and techniques.

“There’s often a myth that being Agile means you don’t need a strategy. In fact, being Agile means you need a robust strategy based on data insight.  And for marketers that means you’re still having to think about what your brand is, what your core purpose is, who your target audience is, how you’re positioned and what your core proposition is. And you can and must build this into the Agile process.” Kate Bordwell

To close out the evening, all 3 speakers took part in a lively Q&A session with some challenging questions and fascinating answers that took in tree metaphors, data ethics and research methods.  

And the lively conversation continued afterwards with more informal networking, plus more wine and cheese, of course.

 You can find all of the presentation slides on SlideShare or embedded below:

Agile Marketing For The Real World event - Signal - 6th Nov 2019

Photos by Louise Brown (and Milo McLaughlin)

The team at Signal who organised the event and helped out on the night (especially our Marketing Manager Lauren Cormack!) 

All the staff at CodeClan Edinburgh - who made us all feel very welcome (this was our second successful event of 2019 at the same venue, following our Accessibility event in May).

And everyone who came along and made it such a great event.

Agile Marketing for the Real World - a summary of our sold out event

WTF is Agile Marketing? We asked three experts to share their experience.

We welcomed a packed room of senior marketers and business leaders to our sold out ‘Agile Marketing for the Real World’ event at CodeClan Edinburgh to discuss all things Agile Marketing. 

Agile Marketing For The Real World - Event Summary | Signal Blog 

Personally I’ve grown to hate the word Agile. It’s become a ubiquitous buzzword, which has taken on a vast variety of connotations. 

For the uninitiated, dipping a toe into the swirling pool of Agile-related content and training that’s on offer can be a confusing and baffling experience. 

This is an especially pertinent challenge for marketing leaders who need to quickly identify which aspects of Agile will best work for them and their teams.

If this is you, take comfort in knowing you are not alone. A 2019 survey indicates that 50% of marketing leaders in traditional companies are looking to adopt more Agile ways of working, and 32% are already on the journey.

To clear up confusion around what Agile means for marketing, I often start consultancy engagements by asking the teams I’m working with to each write on a post it what Agile means to them. It’s a simple but interesting exercise, and very quickly enables me to flush out common misconceptions.

Try, it. Take 30 seconds and jot down what Agile means to you. 

I’ve found the same things come up time and time again:

Agile is going faster - An especially common misconception. Doing the same stuff as normal just, you know, faster! 

Agile is a specific practice - Sometimes people write Scrum, Kanban, Sprints or Stand-ups on the post it. Not necessarily wrong, but quite a narrow definition of what Agile involves.

Agile means no planning - It’s not that Agile doesn’t involve planning, just that their plans are designed to change.

So, if these are misconceptions, what is the right answer? What does Agile Marketing actually mean?

There has been a growing effort to clarify this. In 2012, a group of around 20 forward thinking marketers gathered in San Francisco and produced the Agile Marketing Manifesto which sets out 7 foundational values of Agile Marketing. One of the authors has since refined this to set out 6 values and 4 benefits for adopting Agile principles within marketing teams.

As interest in Agile Marketing has grown, consultancies have tried to apply these values to the work they do with clients, and even their internal marketing teams. McKinsey have set out an Agile Marketing approach that focused on cross-functional collaboration and iterative experimentation. And Deloitte have transformed their internal marketing team to work in a more Agile way.

With many alternative definitions, and conflicting perspectives, it feels like the exact definition of Agile Marketing is still very difficult to pin down, so here is my take on the 5 pillars that are that are key to actually doing Agile marketing.

Agile Marketers put the customer front and centre of everything they do. This may sound obvious, after all, what kind of marketing ignores customers? But often marketing teams are  guilty of operating one step removed, devoting their energy to managing the brand, or churning out campaigns to schedule, and it is easy to lose focus on who it’s all for.

The question Agile Marketers should aspire to answer, is how best to engage customers at every stage of their journey. This isn’t normally a question that marketing teams can answer on their own, so collaboration with other business functions is a cornerstone of any Agile Marketing approach.

Exactly what collaboration looks like will vary depending on the circumstances. For marketing teams attempting to integrate Agile into their daily operations, collaboration may be as simple as inviting a non-departmental colleagues to meetings, or re-arranging where teams sit. 

For a marketing executive attempting to instigate a bigger change, collaboration may mean reaching out to form a trailblazing multidisciplinary project team - with a remit to tackle a tricky problem that would otherwise fall between organisational cracks.

Either way Agile Marketers must set out to be inclusive, and recognise that they can’t and shouldn’t want to try and do everything on their own. 

The collaborative nature of Agile teams is reinforced by setting objectives and goals at the level of the team rather than the individual. This type of goal-setting is supported by the notion of servant leadership, in which the leader of an Agile Marketing team won't prescribe what to do, but rather focuses on making sure the direction is clear and removing impediments to progress. 

This leads to a very flat hierarchy, with little micromanagement and empowered team members who are all working together to achieve the same things. 

What the goals are will vary depending on the context, but it’s important that an Agile Marketing team is measured on outcomes rather than output. It shouldn’t matter how much content is produced, or how busy the team seem to be, what matters is whether they are able to achieve the goals that have been agreed. 

It is of course an important prerequisite to make sure that goals are actually measurable. This means deciding in advance on the exact metrics that will be used, the benchmarks for success, and technically how data will be captured and managed. 

Once goals have been set, the overall strategic direction should be clear. Now the tactics used to get there are up to the Agile marketing team. Based on the agreed goals, the team is responsible for managing their own priorities and workload. This is usually done by creating a ‘backlog’ for the team, which is essentially a ‘to do’ list of everything that ought to be on the team’s radar.

Things in the backlog will be of different sizes, and it’s normal for a backlog to include big initiatives, processes, tiny tasks and experimental ideas. This variation is acceptable, since the backlog isn’t a static plan that’s produced once and referred back to like gospel. 

Instead, it is fluid and is constantly being updated by the team. New items can be added, half-baked ideas can be fleshed out, and things that are no longer relevant can be removed. 

Since the backlog is a constantly evolving artifact, it needs to ‘live’ somewhere. For some teams this will be a physical space, for example a Kanban board on a wall, but most will maintain a digital version using established Agile software like Jira or Trello. 

The backlog needs to be prioritised, and this is something the Agile marketing team will need to devote regular time to. There are no hard and fast rules for how to do this, and teams will adopt their  own frameworks for prioritisation. While clear goals provide a useful reference point, most teams will find they need to strike a balance between working on business-as-usual type tasks and devoting space to customer tests and ‘growth hacks’ that could open up new areas of opportunity. 

At first, figuring out what to prioritise in the backlog will involve some guesswork. This is because there may be initiatives in there that nobody is sure how to tackle, or experiments with totally unpredictable results. 

This is ok, and Agile marketing teams shouldn’t try to tackle everything at once. Instead, they will work iteratively. In practice, this means regularly pulling the top priority items from the backlog, working together to plan in detail the specific tasks to be done, estimating how long they will take, and deciding who will do them. This is a team-led process and requires constant communication, which is enabled by regular planning sessions, and daily stand-ups. 

This is where the concept of ‘sprints’ is potentially useful. Probably the most heavily adopted (and abused) piece of Agile lingo, a sprint is just a timebox in which the team agree that an amount of work will be delivered. At the end of the sprint the team should have something to show for it and be able to demonstrate that progress. 

There are two big reasons that working in sprints is effective. The first is Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. Setting a clear deadline, as with a 2 week sprint, focuses minds on the priorities at hand. So long as the team is free to manage its own workload, this can lead to rapid, but consistent progress without the risk of burnout.

The second, and probably the most important reason, is that working iteratively leads to a shorter feedback cycle. At the end of each sprint, the team is able to produce something that they can learn from. They can evaluate what is working, and adjust priorities for the next sprint, shifting focus to make sure that they are continuously progressing towards achieving their objectives. 

Interestingly teams that work iteratively will soon find that there isn’t always much correlation between the complexity of items in the backlog, and the results they deliver. It is important then for Agile Marketers to allow statistics to trump opinions and conviction. Sometimes, an analysis of the data shows that the simplest things lead to the best results. Since the team are regularly evaluating results, it is easier to double down on what works, and de-prioritise less valuable activities. 

Making decisions with data requires a very high level of transparency. Everyone in an Agile marketing team should have access to the data that is being used to track progress and measure success. Results should also be readily shared beyond the team.

For some Agile marketing teams transparency may mean getting decorative, and covering the walls of their office space or project room with the results of their work. Digital tools such as dashboards and scorecards can also provide a flexible way to share results seamlessly across the team and wider organisation. 

A focus on data over instinct can mean that creative impulses need to take a back seat, or that the highest paid person in the room harrumphs with frustration at not getting their way, but in a world where marketing activity is increasingly measurable, faith in data tends to be borne out over time. 

For some marketing teams, internalising just one of the principles above will give them the sprinkling of Agile they are looking for to achieve a change. However, it’s important to understand that these are really interlocking pieces of a wider philosophy. The best results are achieved when a marketing team makes strides towards embracing an Agile mindset as part of a new way of working. 

Is embracing Agile Marketing something that you need to do? Increasingly it may be. It is now difficult to find a major company that isn’t using Agile within software development. Agile wasn’t a fad within technology, and while development methods continue to evolve the core principles behind Agile look like they are here to stay. 

In an increasingly fast paced, and digitally driven world, no marketing team has the luxury of operating in a silo, or simply sticking with the approaches that worked well in the past. As organisations increasingly experiment with the idea of adopting Agile practices beyond technology teams, it will be the marketers still gazing at their reflection in the pool, rather than diving in, who are left behind. 

Agile Marketing (what it means in practice)

What does Agile Marketing really mean in practice? David Hammond shares five principles for success.

The organisers of Accessibility Scotland describe it as “a friendly, affordable, and informative day focused on digital accessibility and inclusion.”  

The event has grown bigger every year, with both the 2018 and 2019 events taking place at the expansive Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC). 

Signal’s senior UX Designer Lauren Bowen and myself were fortunate to be able to attend this year’s (fourth annual) event, which was completely sold out, with around 250 people in attendance.

As well as the welcome sight of some familiar faces, it was pleasing to see that there was a real effort to make the entire experience as inclusive as possible. The venue and room layouts were fully accessible, and there were BSL (British Sign Language) interpreters and live captions for all of the main talks. 

There was even a simple code of conduct: 'be nice'.

It's a single-track event, so there was also no issue with catching all of the five main talks. These were loosely tied to the day’s theme of ‘Accessibility and Ethics’ but were wide-ranging in terms of subject matter, and all very interesting and thought-provoking. 

Below is a short summary of each, plus links to the slides.

1. Accessible public services – Are we there yet?

 Cat Macaulay, Chief Design Officer, The Scottish Government

This was a refreshingly honest account of the huge challenges (and opportunities) involved in designing inclusive public services, specifically Scotland’s newly devolved Social Security agency. 

Cat told us that she has multiple sclerosis, so is well aware of how difficult applying for benefits can be. “Applying for DLA & PIP is one of the worst experiences I’ve had in my life and I spent most of my 20s working in a war zone.”

She admitted that “we’re still pretty rubbish at designing public services and don’t get it right often enough”, in part because the public sector has traditionally tended to design services based on the internal structure of the organisation, which results in fragmented experiences for end users. 

However, her team's high level mission is to “ensure everyone in Scotland has the chance to be part of designing the public services they need and use.” 

The new agency gave them the opportunity to put this into practice when designing a completely new end-to-end service (of which digital is only one aspect) from scratch. It also helped that ‘treating people with dignity and respect’ was part of the ministerial remit for the service. As a result,a large scale user experience panel has been  at the heart of the process, made up of “thousands of people with lived experience of applying for benefits”. 

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Milo McLaughlin

Agile Marketing for the Real World - a summary of our sold out event

David Hammond

Agile Marketing (what it means in practice)

Milo McLaughlin

What we learnt at Accessibility Scotland 2019

Lauren Cormack

Signal bolsters new consultancy proposition with third senior hire

Louise Brown

Accessibility is a serious business - how brands can get it right

Lauren Cormack

Join us at our Agile Marketing event in Edinburgh

Indya Barefield

Sparking behaviour change - a five step process for strategists

Cheltenham

Edinburgh

London