Myplace Weeknotes: Week 4
Furthermore and the Myplace team at the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, have embarked on a new project with support from Catalyst and National Lottery funding.
Myplace is a green prescribing initiative run by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust which aims to increase mental wellbeing through connecting clients to the natural environment in a group setting. It is predicted that due to COVID-19, almost 20% of the population will need either new or additional mental health support making initiatives like Myplace essential in supporting community mental health provision.
The aim of the current project is to increase the number of people who move from initial enquiry or referral to actually joining Myplace and experiencing the benefits of connecting with nature via ecotherapy.
To share our journey with others we’ll be drafting weeknotes describing and reflecting on our work over the past week:
This week Rhoda Wilkinson, Project Manager at Myplace gives us her take on the fourth week of the project:
This week has been all about getting to grips with everything we heard in week three when the Furthermore team interviewed people who’d dropped off at different stages of the onboarding process. What was the reality of our learning and the insights we’d picked up? As part of this we spent a really interesting session with the Furthermore team understanding the opportunities we had identified as part of our customer journey mapping exercise.
Whether it be the practical journey of transport to a physical site or the digital journey to Zoom, or a lack of data, it’s really important that we factor this into our solutions. We also broke down some of what we heard about wellbeing and the challenges in successfully engaging a really diverse group of people in a way that is meaningful for them and gives them the best chance of success. Here there were some really interesting points.
Where is the line between enough information to understand the programme and expectations, and too much information? Should we continue to send out communications to people who haven’t immediately onboarded? At Myplace we’ve always wanted to ensure that people were able to make their own choice without pressure to participate, however some feedback demonstrated continued gentle communication meant that people who weren’t immediately ready still had the opportunity to pick up engagement in their own time.
Setting clear and simple expectations throughout our communication, as well as using carefully created copy to celebrate wins when people progressed through the onboarding journey also look key.
We then had a creative session exploring all the potential solutions and opportunities to address those moments in their journey. Large or small, this was something it was really exciting to have a digital partner for, there were definitely solutions in here we wouldn’t have considered left to our own devices.
Next came a bit of reality checking as we took our creativity through a process of prioritisation. What was easy, impactful, hard, or less impactful and started to get a feel for where our direction might take us.
And here we are now, drafting our design hypotheses and timetabling the creation of prototyping and testing- exciting stuff. Nearly exciting as the longer daylight hours which accompany tantalising hints of spring as snowdrops peak through this week.
