169 – Marketing IDEMS: The Website Redesign

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Johnny: Hello, welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Johnny McQuade, a software developer at IDEMS, and I’m here with Kate Fleming, one of the directors. How are you doing, Kate?

Kate: Hey, Johnny. Doing well, thank you. I should also say that part of your title for the sake of this conversation is designer, graphic designer, web designer, that you bring that skill.

Johnny: Yeah, occasional designer. 

Kate: So yeah, our conversation today, what we decided to talk about is the challenges of, I guess I would put quotes around it, “marketing IDEMS”, because I think one of the things that we’ve bumped up against is, you know, what does marketing look like for us? It’s certainly not something traditional that people would recognize as advertising or the easy forms of marketing.

So how do we chart our own course in talking about IDEMS, telling our story, all of those [00:01:00] different pieces. So yeah, I guess in terms of where we start, I mean, we’ve been on this journey together. It’s been very collaborative, it’s been very slow as we try to find time among other pieces of work. So I guess just like big picture as you think about what we’ve been trying to accomplish, what do you see we’ve been doing? 

Johnny: Yeah, it’s always the way with internal projects, isn’t it? That they get deprioritized as other things come in. So it’s been going on in the background for quite a while and I think a big part of it is kind of figuring out how to tell the IDEMS story, which I think has been discussed on previous podcast episodes before. I know a lot of people have had the experience, and my experience before I joined IDEMS, and when I was applying for a job and looking at what IDEMS was, I went to the website and I tried to find out as much as I could. And because of the nature of [00:02:00] IDEMS and the kind of breadth and depth of what we do, that really wasn’t represented well in the website and it took me a long time to understand really what the organisation was.

And you know, in some ways there’s good reasons for that, it can’t just be simply communicated in a couple of words. But there’s all kinds of people who we need to talk to about IDEMS. And I think one of the things that was lacking on the website a few years ago was really shouting about the successes and the amazing work that IDEMS is doing. It’s one thing to try and describe what an organisation does, but often it’s a lot more effective to just show examples and have people kind of get it from that.

So I think we could talk about the different kind of audiences that we’re thinking about [00:03:00] talking to when we are talking about kind of marketing IDEMS or explaining IDEMS or something.

Kate: I would also say that underpinning what you’re talking about is our core observation or just understanding or assumption, that for the kind of work we do, for the kind of business we are, social enterprise, our website really is the representation of us. It’s also the place where we have a lot of space where if we organize things well, if we can break things out in a way, it can make what is overwhelming in any other context actually feel quite logical, and this makes sense and I feel the flow of things.

So that was a core, that’s the core assumption of all this, is that our website is the number one place where we are addressing these problems, solving these problems. So yes, that’s where, you know, thinking about the audience, that became really important. And I will say, I think the website has in many ways been an [00:04:00] exercise in trialing other things that are happening, you know, this is the business strategy, this is how we’re prioritizing activities, this is where we want to grow to versus where we’ve been.

Those aren’t website design problems. They’re overall enterprise, social enterprise, impact, technology, there are these bigger questions. So we’ve kind of been mashing into what we describe as the website project, actually, many of these bigger issues. And I think it’s part of why it’s felt so challenging and part of why I’ve been aware, and I think you have too, it’s really been a project for the two of us because we can’t just go to somebody else and say, well, I want you to do this thing.

It’s quite collaborative, it’s a lot of workshopping things as we go. You know, in a normal company, normal is the wrong word, but in a bigger company with more team, you would have a lot of things that are siloed where it’s like, okay, the CEO and the executive team made these [00:05:00] decisions. Then that got pushed out as, like, here’s the brief for marketing, and obviously like the CMO would’ve been in that meeting.

And so then the CMO goes off and they set up like, okay, these are the activities we’re doing. I already know exactly what we need to accomplish. My goal is now just messaging and audiences and what’s the right medium, all of those kinds of things. And so yeah, we’ve been often going back and forth on things, where we will have conceived something, kind of mocked it up or wire framed it in some way, and then we’re like, ooh, that doesn’t work.

And I think this is a common startup problem, the website becomes this proxy for many of these other things that you were trying to bring structure to in the business.

Johnny: I think that’s very well put. And I think it certainly touches on business strategy and things, but even thinking about just design, like in the broadest sense, like good design does go quite deep, doesn’t it? It’s not just about aesthetics. And [00:06:00] so yeah, seeing the website as this kind of proxy, if the website lacks structure and clarity on a more than just an aesthetic level that reflects something about the organisation.

I do have some design background, and it was mostly when I was working freelance, was kind of posters for events and low level bits of branding and things that I really enjoyed. But I think something you and I both share is real strong opinions on what we do and don’t like when it comes to design. And I think that’s the most important trait really in being a designer. Like taste, but it’s deeper than taste because it’s about really, how something reflects on what information it’s trying to get across. That was definitely our experience when we started scratching the surface of improving the website, it certainly wasn’t just about visuals.

Kate: I [00:07:00] think this does bring up what often is a design problem, that you have designers who are designers, but they don’t actually understand the business, they don’t really understand the other things that are happening that you wouldn’t think would so inform design, but they really do.

I don’t even think I realized that you did design. Right after I joined, I was just going through all of our files and I realized, oh, there were these really good design sort of brand style guide. Someone had created this. And I was like, oh, it was Johnny who created it. And I thought it was really good at sort of capturing a feel, the fonts felt right, it’s like these small things that I think a lot of people don’t notice. But actually, I looked at them and I was like, oh, here’s somebody who is kind of getting, or at least we share, maybe it’s just that we share something.

But certainly from where we’ve come from, I think our team is very mathematical, they’re brilliant. But I think that sense of where the brilliant meets just the average user or the lay [00:08:00] person audience, sometimes there’s a gap there that can make something, can make what we’re doing feel very incomprehensible, very unfamiliar, very academic.

I think that’s something we’re aware of as a challenge is how do we start to shift from something that has felt more researchy, more academicy, and show that we are really a social enterprise and we hold that enterprise side as well where we have an understanding of how things meet a market.

And even if something is for impact, users are still a market, they’re still people who, you know, have the same needs, behaviours, various things as a commercial audience. So a lot of those things are things that we need to be aware of. So that was where that design piece came in. I keep thinking like as I’m talking, oh, there’s so many layers that we could talk about here.

I think our biggest challenge as we really tackled this and started [00:09:00] again taking the website as a proxy for kind of marketing and how we tell our story to the world. I think our biggest challenge was how we take where we’ve been, and that was very much represented by the old website where you felt a lot of pieces of what IDEMS’ origin was. And it also had been cobbled together where it’s like people were just adding pages as something came up.

And I would say to some extent, that’s the origin story of IDEMS, where there was an element of a core problem or interest, which was like maths education, and then really branching out where it’s like, well, this relates to these technology issues and we could use technology for impact. So there was a lot of stuff that was happening that was all very clearly related if you were working behind the scenes.

But as you’re just adding these things to the outside eye, you’re looking at a website where it just feels like chaos. Like, there were some pages that are just sort of the cohesive piece of like, okay, [00:10:00] this is what Danny and David’s original vision was. But then you can see that as things got layered, it’s harder and harder to make those pieces logically fit together for an outsider.

And it’s harder and harder to see why we’re doing what we’re doing in the future or now compared to where we came from and what we were in the past. So much of it is how do we create that narrative of past to where we are now, to where we want to go. We were talking before this call, and I made the point of sometimes you don’t wanna over confidently own something you’re not doing yet. But at the same time, it doesn’t make sense if you are like a, you know, cereal company that decides to launch a phone. It’s just like, what? How did you get from point A to point D or Z?

And so, you know, that’s where we are. It’s like how do we signpost these developments, achievements, [00:11:00] milestones, which are really around tech innovation for impact. Those are the milestones, where increasingly we are realizing, oh, these are common problems, there are these major gaps, this isn’t just a gap in this one place. There are gaps everywhere. And so it’s kind of bringing this entire suite of things that all do relate into a cohesive structure that somebody else can find their way into.

Johnny: Yeah, and I think a big part of it is offering people a way in, because there is all this information that is so valuable and interesting about IDEMS and part of that is the, like Open by Default principle of we want to be open with all kinds of aspects of the organisation. So there’s loads of information that is important to someone, but it’s not always important to everyone.

And that’s a little bit like the process of building those brand guidelines, which were very rough, [00:12:00] really, but just having some structure. Once you see something complex emerge, you can then figure out what the structure is and name it really, and define it in such a way that there’s more clarity in how that’s then presented. And I think we have all this amazing information and there’s decisions to be made about how we allow people to interface with it.

One thing which maybe we don’t want to necessarily go into detail now, but the podcast was a great outlook for that, of there’s all these dense conversations happening and we want that to be public as much as possible. There’s all kinds of things that could interest someone. And so the podcast is served as a kind of repository for a lot of those conversations and information. But if every podcast script was just consecutively written on the front page of our website, it would be completely, yeah, it would be unusable and irrelevant.

Kate: Oh, you mean like the podcast page when you land [00:13:00] on it now? The podcast is a great example of there’s so much in there and there’s so much that’s rich, that’s varied. But right now, I think we’re up to what, 160 episodes? Something like that. It’s unwieldy, it’s hard, it’s hard to find your way in.

So I mean, that’s one of our tasks that’s on our list is like, how do we start to bring the podcast into whatever the structure is that we create for the website, where podcasts aren’t just like you’re on a podcast journey and you decide to listen to all the podcasts, but instead you’re on a, oh, I’m really interested in agroecology and West Africa journey. And then you can, you know, be reading things, see case studies, see different projects, see the innovation that’s emerged, and also then listen to the podcasts that are related to that, where then you’re just, you’re bringing so much dimension to this specific story. 

Johnny: And it may be worth saying now that we’re very much having this conversation [00:14:00] in the middle of a process, we haven’t completed redesigning the website. I mean, not that the website is the full extent of what we’re thinking about when we thinking about marketing, but, we’re checking in as we’re working through this process. We haven’t solved all the problems yet, but we’re in the process of doing so.

And I guess, maybe going back to the kind of marketing angle, we’ve kind of pulled out these examples of some of the work we do to highlight on the website homepage, which I think was a really big change in our thinking of how we could present information, where we were looking for examples of how websites might present information and it was quite hard to find similar organisations or think about how we want to look.

Because something we’ve both been very clear about is that we don’t want to present ourselves as a straightforward digital agency because that’s not what we are. And there’s all kinds of examples of slick digital agency websites that exist [00:15:00] to create leads and get commissions for designing any particular digital product that people might want.

And it wouldn’t be right to present IDEMS in that way. So it was a bit of a process of finding, well, how could we, how could we present what IDEMS does without having that kind of angle. And we ended up finding examples of a more editorial magazine kind of style, where there can be this depth of different stories that people could explore about what IDEMS is doing. But at the top interface level you’re being taken on a journey of kind of, thematically or, I dunno, maybe you could put this into, in a better way.

Kate: Well, there are a couple of things that you brought up in there. One, I think that that idea that a website for a business exists to generate leads, that’s true across tech, well, particularly anything that’s B2B in the sense that the people who pay us for our work are not the end [00:16:00] users. So there’s always sort of this intermediate, is it a government, is it a, you know, academic institution? So we are not, but we build those collaborations. They’re long built, they’re kind of incubated.

Well, one, we’re not generating leads through users, and two, we don’t really just want people coming in the door and saying like, let’s do this thing. We really need people to, they need to be more thoughtful. And so one of our big challenges is that we needed to set up a structure where people could self-identify as like, ooh, I’m working on like a grand challenge research project, we have this innovation, it is unable to scale with existing tech. Like we need someone who has seen and experienced these problems. That’s our best collaboration, and that’s where we find that we are able to develop the innovation, that’s really what we’re working on.

Also, I guess thinking about leads, part of this also comes back to resources. You know, we don’t have our [00:17:00] sales team standing by to like vet. Yeah. So I think our discussion was really about how do we show the kinds of things we’re doing, you know, that this is slow hard work, that there are clinical trials, that there’s research, this is actually a lot of money, a lot of people, these big collaborations over time. Or someone’s really self-identifying as like, oh yeah, that’s us. We work with NGO partners. We’re working with local communities. We are just lacking sort of the technology that lets this all be activated in some way.

So yeah, I think we see down the road, it would be great if we started having some more inbound interest, but we’re just not set up to handle that right now. I think we came around to, as you were saying, we do need this more editorial approach, we need ways to tell what are quite complex stories, multiplayer [00:18:00] stories, not necessarily linear case studies where it’s like, we built this product and it had this many users.

There is often, you know, a trial happening here, an adaptation happening here, this team in this country is doing something really interesting we wanna feature. There’s just so much more that could at any moment be highlighted. So I think those were the kinds of things that we were thinking about in our work.

Johnny: Yeah, and some of it is about starting to shout about our successes as well, isn’t it? Which, you know, most of our team we’re very technical and we’re sometimes concerned in the day-to-day stuff we’re doing. And actually we are having amazing results through these collaborations that deserve to be highlighted and celebrated.

Kate: You also bring up, I think what’s such a good point that, because our whole value proposition is we’re kind of these [00:19:00] humble mathematical scientist collaborators, where normally tech is like we’re like muscling everyone out of the way. Like we’re the star of the show, we made this happen.

We’re always so conscious of no, no, no, we’re behind the scenes. Yes, we’re making this happen, but so is everyone else because so is everyone else and we wanna give them credit. But it does mean that we’re not owning wins that really are, they’re not only ours, but they’re partly ours.

And also I think so much of what we are very aware of is behind the scenes, there is real incubation and R&D [research & development] happening to proper core technology innovation. But if we’re not owning the things that are happening, you just, you can’t see that we’re making that progression. You can’t see how these mathematical scientists embedding are leading us to become a technology company because we’re really developing this very novel infrastructure to support these.

You just see like, wait, I [00:20:00] thought you were kind of an agency. So that is so much of what we had to get at too is how do we really own that this is like a deep tech innovation team and company? And this comes back to my point of the cereal company to launching the phone. This was a lot of our thinking, how do we show that there has been this incremental work happening? So when we burst on the scenes with like, oh, we have this tech, it’s not that we’re just bursting on the scenes, it’s no, this has been in development for five or six years and trialed and working and in use and all of these things.

I think we’re increasingly feeling like it’s coming into focus. This has been a really good exercise for us. It’s not just an exercise, but so much of it has been thinking about, well, who’s the audience, how does the audience here learn about things? I think we trialed some things with our non-executive directors where I could see conversations I had where they weren’t getting it, where they were pushing at things. And I’m like, that’s not right, that’s not right, and then I felt like I was being adversarial, but I couldn’t [00:21:00] quite explain why.

And then, you know, we sort of started making progress where I would present something and they’re like, oh, okay, I get it now, I get why you’re, you know, working in these collaborations. I get why you’re working in many collaborations across different contexts and fields. This is making sense to me.

And so I think there have been all of these things that have just been, well, I guess this is also justifying why the website is taking us a while, that in addition to the resources, we’re actually doing a ton of other work around, you know, getting this to where it needs to be. And I think I said this at the very beginning, that it’s actually an exercise in many things, and, you know, thinking about fundraising and how our organisation grows and what our priorities are. All of these things have been part of what we’ve had to factor in to our website.

I will say, even as I’m saying this, I get so frustrated with myself and the slowness of this ’cause I just think, oh, if our website was ready, I want our newsletter to be [00:22:00] going out and I want all this stuff to be happening. But I do on some level feel like the slow, that we didn’t just make a mad rush to get a website up has really served us quite well.

Johnny: Yeah, and our thinking has evolved through the process, hasn’t it? We weren’t able to sit down and do it all from scratch because we were still kind of defining the problems we have to solve. And there’s various different problems, there’s various different kind of strands to hone in on.

Kate: Yeah, I would say our biggest, the biggest sense of urgency is when we think about our audiences, I think we are most aware that funders, in particular, I think grants, we have space, we can explain ourselves more, but I think for private funding, impact funding, mission aligned funding, that’s a challenge because those kinds of investors that are most likely to be aligned for us are probably more interested in impact than they are in technology.

And [00:23:00] so we’re walking this line and trying to get to the place where a lay person, investor, who just happens to really care about, they might care about technology, they might care about more equitable systems, but like how do you make this really accessible to somebody in a way that’s not like, I need you to be a technology expert? I guess that’s it. When we’re applying for an EU grant and it’s in some category, the people who read that are experts in that category, it gets handed out to somebody who understands like biological modelling or whatever it is that’s the underpinning innovation.

Whereas when you’re talking to a foundation or you know, whoever it is, they’re really not necessarily experts in biological modelling, but they do care about the public health impacts of climate change or, you know, whatever the application is that our technology will enable, that will deliver impact.

And so how do we put that all together in a way where we’re [00:24:00] credible, where they get it, but they don’t have to get too much? And then if they really are interested and we peak them, peak their interest, which hopefully we will, then have we got a bunch of stuff for you, listen to these 20 podcasts. So yeah, that has been our challenge.

I guess, when you think about how things are going, do you have, do you feel confident that oh, this is gonna start, we’re kind of hitting some point where this is gonna start moving much more quickly? Or do you still look at it and think, oh, this is gonna continue to be a slog?

Johnny: Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t feel like a slog. I think already we’ve had a lot of exciting successes in terms of what we’ve achieved with presenting IDEMS and articulating things and visually presenting things. I don’t think there’s gonna be one day where the penny drops and the job is finished because it’s gonna constantly be evolving. But I think even, looking back over the last few [00:25:00] months, we’ve got a lot, we’ve got a lot to present now that we didn’t have previously and in a much clearer way.

And hopefully it’s something that everyone who works at IDEMS can feel in touch with and feel like they’re proud of being able to express and share what IDEMS does and is.

Kate: Yeah. And you brought up employees at the very beginning, just from your own experience. I do think if you were looking to work at IDEMS, even now, because we have our team up, we have the new profiles, I think it’s easier to understand if you might fit in at IDEMS. I mean, I think there’s still more for us to add, but our incremental changes are making a difference.

And actually, I guess for both of us, we see that there’s kind of a finite number of pages that once we get those live are going to do a lot of heavy lifting of telling our story. And then the other things we start to add are building out colour, are building out, you know, different [00:26:00] sort of categories that we’re working in or, you know, getting more into products and innovation.

But at least if we’ve got that core story down and we’ve got our team up, and I do see the podcast as like bringing the podcasts into a more navigable, manageable structure. I think that will be very nice. There’s just, there’s so many interesting conversations, but it is, I wouldn’t know where to begin if I were just landing on our podcast today. Except with this podcast when it’s the newest podcast, which will be very unrepresentative of the podcast, actually. It’s kind of a very different topic.

Well, I guess, do you have anything else? I feel like we should probably wrap up, I think we’ve chatted on, but is there anything, when you think about this, that you would wanna add that you haven’t? 

Johnny: I don’t think so.

Kate: No, I think we’ve introduced people to the challenges. 

Johnny: Yeah, there’s [00:27:00] specifics when it comes to design and web design and things that we’re interested in, but maybe we don’t need to share. 

Kate: We could do a podcast on web design challenges, but that would be more of like a startup, challenges for like, not, not startup, but challenges for companies that are just embarking on their branding and positioning journey. 

Johnny: I would say, one of the reasons it’s been so interesting and kind of compelling to work on is that we have been, goes quite deep, you know, and collaborating with you as a director, yeah, I’ve really enjoyed that it’s not been a superficial exercise. It’s not been about making something look shiny, there’s no pretense here. We’re really trying to do something of value that reflects the work that IDEMS does. And I think that’s been really, really rewarding.

Kate: Yeah, I agree. And it [00:28:00] feels authentic to what our team and just who we are collectively.

Johnny: Thanks very much and we’ll talk again soon.