Fortnightly EHQ Staff Pick: The Women's

When we're looking for staff picks, we usually seek out projects that clearly deploy great methodology and/or look terrific. Often these projects need significant development time before launch. This fortnight's staff pick is a little different. The Women's engagement team had to create a project about staff name badges quickly and did a terrific job; with over 500 responses in less than a day!

Client: The Royal Women's Hospital, Victoria, Australia

Project: Women's staff name badges

Publish Date: 07 March 2016

Topic: The Women's are designing new name badges for staff and volunteers and are asking all stakeholders including staff, volunteers and patients for their input on four different design options.

Tools: Survey

Widgets: Signup Banner, FAQ, Who's Listening, Facebook

We love:

1. The turnaround time: This project was created and published very quickly. It shows you don't always need a long-term engagement strategy or to overthink outcomes before launching a project. Sometimes it's good to just get out there and engage quickly.
   
   
2. Innovative use of the survey tool: This is a simple survey with just two questions. The Women's used a HTML-enabled 'radio button' in order to include images of the proposed badge designs.
   
   
3. Human touch: The 'Who's Listening' widget is slowly turning into one of our top three widgets. The widget shows who exactly is managing the consultation and provides a human face for interaction, which is especially important when consulting in the health industry or about health matters.
   
   
4. The page balance: This project has the perfect page balance between the left and right columns, which are the same length providing symmetry.

For further consideration:

1. Badge Designs: With some more time, the team at The Women's could have created more attractive badge designs, or perhaps asked their community to co-design the badges.

2. Links to other projects: This is a popular and well-viewed project, which could have provided a starting point for participants to visit other consultations had the appropriate links been included. A well-executed project always provides the opportunity to cross-promote other consultations. You already have the community's attention, don't lose the chance to retain their interest.
   
   These other project links can also appear in the 'thank you' message of a consultation rather than in a widget or the navigation bar.
   
   

OVERALL: This project proves you don't always have to spend weeks of development time before launching a project. Sometimes it is better to launch quickly and gather participant responses straight away. This doesn't mean not thinking it through but rather understanding the parameters required for a consultation's success. It is apparent the Women's have quite a bit of experience working with EngagementHQ and executed a fantastic project. We'd love to see more of the same!

NOTE: The article above is based on a visit to the site on 09 March 2016. Changes made to the project after that date may have altered the appearance of the project.