Pandemic Updates

Hello!

It's been a while since I've written an update as we've all be super busy helping clients with business continuation through the pandemic and lock down, so here's a quick insight on just a couple of projects we've been involved in.

Impact Mental Health is a social enterprise who provide amazing courses and programmes to help people suffering from mental health issues. They also provide support and courses for other organisations and companies who are keen to provide their staff with the tools to better manage their mental wellbeing.

We've worked with Impact for several years and have built up an intimate knowledge of their organisation and the courses they offer including attending their courses. Like my father always used to say, "know your product!".

Up until the start of the pandemic, the majority of their courses were run in groups, face to face in the community and Rubber Duck Digital built their web application and course booking systems using WordPress as the core CMS. We also built their very own social media platform called BaseCamp to allow staff and members to keep in touch and provide peer support online. This has become even more important through lockdown and the pandemic.

Then everything changed. Lockdown came along and Impact were faced with a major problem. How to change everything so that courses could be run online, remotely so as to safeguard their staff, volunteers and of course, their learners.

After discussing the requirements in depth with the Impact team, we built a fully interactive Learning Management System and Booking System, incorporated live video using Zoom and Google Meets and built a small "studio" with broadcast quality cameras, lighting and video kit, including the amazing Blackmagic ATEM Mini (an awesome bit of kit for the money). All socially distanced and fully hygienic, of course.

In addition, we assisted their team in optimising local, in home networks so that video and audio would be uninterrupted and the best possible quality.

We turned everything around in few weeks so there was no down time in providing services. Something I'm exceptionally proud of.

BaySixty6 is a community skate park based in West London and is famous for being one of the few open air, but covered skate parks in the UK and has been featured in many TV shows over the years and currently features in an TV ad for Virgin Media.

They are another client who entrusted us with their digital presence several years ago. We built their current website and e-commerce application in 2017 and we've worked with them since to scale the app and server infrastructure over the last few years, including migration from shared a shared server to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloudflare with Google Workspaces in the mix as well.

When lockdown came in to force we used the time wisely and worked with the B66 team to to spec and build a new registration and booking system which would prove to be vital in complying with Track and Trace guidelines and capacity limits once lockdown restrictions were eased.

The next batch of features and requirements for the application are now being worked on for release later in the year. Some cosmetic and some functional, so watch this space.

Within just a few weeks of launching the new features, and with lockdown being eased, the system had registered several thousand local user accounts with hundred of transactions a day.

As with all our projects, I'm immensely proud of the work we do with all of our clients, but even more so with Impact and BaySixty6 and I'm pleased we were able to help them continue to provide the local communities they serve with outstanding services.