Blog

I’m thrilled to be leaving Helpful in the hands of the people who have built it over the years with me and the rest of the team.

Seven areas to look at to answer the question: how well does our website do its job, and what improvements do we need to make?

We had a little retrospective last week to reflect on some of the highlights of the year in our website build and support work. We’ve built several sites we can be really proud of this year. We’ve made big leaps in our process and ways of working with separation of front and back end development,…

It’s a hot week, so here’s my heatwave-hot hot takes on where digital comms under Prime Minister Boris Johnson might go. Given the Cabinet clear-out and the style of Boris and – crucially – his team, this feels more like the start of the Coalition in 2010 than the start of Theresa May’s government in…

A tweet from Dave reminded me how hard it is to actually work out loud. Since writing this at the end of March, I’ve been able to do precisely nothing about it! ? https://t.co/Eb8ffBEG2b — Dave Briggs (@davebriggs) June 17, 2019 For a start, you need the time to write something for yourself which nobody…

Chez Gray, we’re into our cooking. Not like crazy obsessive, but we’ve always enjoyed making interesting food. So over time, we’ve accumulated quite a lot of recipe books – over 80, actually. But despite them being to hand, and full of interesting recipes, we found we weren’t using them much. Some sat on the shelf,…

Like a lot of people, I ldentify strongly with the idea of no-nonsense. Being practical, and down to earth and rooted in experience and hard work. Not pretending to be what you’re not. When I started a business, I used ‘for people with more sense than money’ as strapline, which seemed to resonate. But a…

I don't tend to feel I can write much here about the other side of what I've been doing these past nine years - our crisis simulation work. But here's a little flight of fancy into what simulating social media crises has to do with planes. Or something.

Bureaucracies are quicker to mandate common solutions than they should be. Set common standards and require interoperability, for sure. Insist that teams achieve benchmarks and hygiene factors, but make the space for different approaches to compete within broad rules.

2008-9 was a good time for me. I was a few months into an amazing new job thinking about how a government department might use social media creatively for communications and policymaking; and in the early months too of being a new dad. Work-wise, our little team did some amazing things that year, from low…