Roundup for 2024

2024 has been quite a strange, yet exciting and productive year. We’ve spent time investing in ourselves as a company, improving our skills and processes, and have rounded out the year working on some of our biggest projects to date. As if that’s not enough, we’ve continued building relationships with our clients, brought on new ones, and have started a brand new service.

TLDR: We’ve had some amazing projects come through our doors and have put learnings into practice to make some exciting improvements to our business.

The early months of the year afforded us time for learning and growth. We spent time taking stock of our current marketing and project management processes, and how we can improve them. Earlier in the year, we started working with a business coach, which enabled us to improve our sales and marketing strategy. We’ve made excellent progress in these areas by dedicating ourselves to working through a mentoring plan over 3 months called ‘Nail It & Scale It®,’ created by Sian Lenegan. All of this work and knowledge investment has resulted in the last half of the year being super busy on some of our biggest projects yet, a trend which looks set to continue into the new year.

We’ve made a commitment towards becoming a more sustainable business through a number of methods: we’re beginning to move our clients to green hosting platforms, such as Katapult, a B-Corp registered company that uses green energy to power their platform. Currently, the team works remotely, which means we’re bringing down our daily emissions by taking out our commute and saving on office costs. We’re also continuing to support Protect Earth and Ecologi, and the important work they do via monthly donations.

“People who work remotely all the time produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of office workers, according to a new study. Employees in the US who worked from home all the time were predicted to reduce their emissions by 54%, compared with workers in an office.“ – Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via The Guardian)

Projects we’re proud of

Two of the projects that we wrapped up in early 2024 included First 5 Lambeth and HALO Hub. Both were highly satisfying to complete, particularly the First 5 Lambeth website, as it marked the formation of an incredibly useful support resource for children and families, highlighting the amazing services available to the Lambeth local area. The HALO Hub is also a great resource for those within the environmental industry, showcasing sustainability projects, events and discussions.

We’ve continued to collaborate with the United Nations on the Sparrow project, helping them to navigate the changes X has implemented, as their platform historically heavily relied on Twitter for its data. We’re also excited to be working on a new project with them, which we’ll be able to talk more about in 2025.

In 2022, we created a learning development system for Alitex. This year, they approached us to implement functionality within this platform to enhance their employee development in a way that aligns with their organisational values. We’ve recently upgraded this system to allow for bi-annual employee reviews to take place using all of the learning and development data stored on the platform, a significant efficiency boost for their senior leadership team, as it was previously very labour intensive. These improvements were a very big priority for Alitex as a company, so we’re incredibly proud to equip them with the tools to achieve success. Keep an eye out for a new case study we’ll be sharing for this work early next year.

The L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI) in India is a renowned eye care organisation that’s committed to eliminating preventable blindness and vision impairment through providing accessible and affordable eye care to all in society. Because of the nature of LVPEI’s work, accessibility is of the utmost importance, and unfortunately, their current website is incredibly slow, inaccessible and outdated. So far, we’ve been undertaking a series of discovery workshops, with wireframing and beginning the design process. They’re a fantastic team to work with – the collaboration between both teams has been excellent and we’re excited to continue this work into the new year, as we start development.

The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) is also a new client of ours. They want to develop a Vision Atlas that will be a comprehensive and authoritative source of global eye health data, and supports their 2030 ‘In Sight’ strategy. This project is very important for a conference the organisation will be holding next year. Although it’s early days, it’s already proven a great opportunity for us, as it allows us to showcase our expertise with interactive maps, and has given us a challenge in terms of the complexity it brings. We’re working with their team based in Australia on this data and are using a platform called Flourish to bring some exciting data visualisations to life.

Our key learnings and achievements

What we’ve learned

Earlier this year, we started working with a business coach to help improve our strategies for sales and marketing. This is something we’ve always wanted to learn more about and decided to take the plunge to get some extra support. We’re grateful to now be in a much more sound place with these strategies, in large part thanks to Strategist, Consultant and Business Coach, Sian Lenegan. Working with Sian has enabled us to boost our social media strategy, start our Bureau for Good newsletter, gain more leads than ever, and most importantly, win bigger projects! We look forward to continuing this trend into 2025 and will be consistently building upon this learning in the future.

What we’ve done

We’re in the process of rolling out our new website auditing service. As part of this, we’re building an automated system that will enable us to provide our wealth of expertise to clients new and old – we hope this will assist them in understanding how well their current website serves their organisation and their audience. Recently, we delivered the first audit for an American non-profit, WITNESS: as part of this work, we discussed with the client what problems their current website was experiencing, and looked at how we could factor improvements for these issues into a brief for a replacement site. It’s an exciting prospect for us to bring to fruition. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Bureau+ is a service we provide clients we’ve built a relationship with to offer ongoing support and hosting after completing a website build/redesign project. However, in November, we landed our first direct client for this service: The Complete Works, a London-based charity that educates children who struggle to remain in a state schooling situation for a number of reasons. We’ll be starting work with them in January 2025, beginning with an on-site visit to London. This is part of a project ‘kick-off’ week, where we’ll be onboarded into it’s workings, discover the needs of the team and their project requirements, and get to know their system in person.

We ran some in-person workshops with clients, which was a great change after the majority of them had previously been run remotely. We’ve also had some team changes and are excited to have recently welcomed a new Developer, Tom Hayes.

Hopes and plans for 2025

Thank you so much to all of our clients for your support over the year and for continuing to build strong working relationships with us. We’re very grateful to all of you and can’t wait to keep moving forward with your projects.