Provider digital stories: a historical blogcast about clearer choices

The ID Crowd are a team of adult educators in the online space. We’ve been having a lot of great conversations about the NDIS and the relationship between providers, participants and planners. We understand that planners and participants might need a little help in better understanding the services offered by providers to make better decisions in planning. We also get that disability service providers are operating in a new space, needing to adapt to changes in disability funding. This got us thinking.

We want to collect provider’s ‘Digital Stories’ to help NDIS participants and planners to understand their options and choose the right services for them. This is an opportunity for a provider to explain their services and how you help improve the lives of their participants.

You may know of Hands On SA, a Disability Service Provider, offering supported employment to people with a disability in Adelaide SA. They have worked alongside The ID Crowd to help develop our model for this project in the form of the attached animation. We truly appreciate the support they have provided in this project.

So, we are proud to share our new digital marketing tool – ‘Your Digital Story’.

Please take a few moments to discover who we are and what gets us excited in the learning space. Listen to Nicole and Andrew in conversation with Kim from Branded Podcasts or read the transcript below.

Transcript:

Nicole: The ID Crowd was something that was born 4 years ago. We wanted to start creating materials that were actually going to have an impact and make a difference for the people that they were targeted at. We started doing that with corporates and have been quite successful with our corporate clientele – we’ve found ones that really care about those sorts of things. They care about what we care about. But it still felt like there was still a little bit of a niggle in terms of what we could achieve and in terms of making a difference with learning. That’s when we fell into the not for profit space.

Kim: That’s important to you, making a difference?

Nicole: Yeah, if you think about learning as a thing and the change that happens when you learn something new – if we can help to really channel and target what that change is, whether it’s about making more funds for an organisation or whether it’s about creating a behaviour change or whether it’s making more sales, there’s so many different things that we can shape and mold.

Kim: Andrew, as senior designer at the ID Crowd, what do you like most about working with the company and with Nic?

Andrew: I really like the variety. I look at my screen and you see all these characters that we’ve created for CSIRO, AGL and Fairfax, and then for a company called Good Return, we’re doing a micro-finance piece where we’re doing an animation to explain their process of micro-finance for women in Cambodia. I love the variety and I seriously love the colour of it. I’m really fortunate because we’re pushing the boundaries.

Kim: Nic mentioned the need to give back in that learning environment, which is why she’s so attracted to not for profits. Is that something that connects you and Nicole?

Andrew: It’s the not for profits who are absolutely so excited about what they’re doing. We’ve had a couple of conversations this week with people who think this is the best and most exciting thing they’ve ever been involved in. And that really rubs off on us as well.

Nicole: I think I’d add to that as well, I think what we’ve done with our corporate clients, we’ve found corporate clients who have been able to see the excitement behind a project.

Andrew: You could be working one day with ABLE or another day working with CSIRO or working with the University of Sydney or Fairfax.

Kim: What are you working on now that really excites you?

Nicole: We had a client come in this week and we spent time with these guys to find out exactly who they are, who their audience is, what their environment is, what paying points are. We spent a good three hours with them… when we left, they told us they thought their project was in safe hands, which melted my heart. I mean, that’s what we’re trying to do! We want like this little egg of a project that everybody cares about equally and that we’re entrusted to take care of and bring to fruition.

Andrew: As far as our mantra goes, Nicole’s mantra is that we’re not allowed to be average. If you think too 1993, then you just get spanked.

Kim: …I think you’re anything but 1993 because I think you’re one of the first people I chatted to about when I was trying to do this and the opportunity for audio or an instructional designer in an e-learning platform. Are you constantly on the lookout to be 2021 rather than 1993?

Nicole: Big time. I’ll be very careful because one of the first things I learnt as an instructional designer from the people I’ve learned from is that the technology is never first. The technology is the vehicle for the idea, so you learn about the audience, you learn about what it is they need to achieve. Is it a behaviour issue? What are the sensitivities? You come up with a concept and then you come up with the best possible way of delivering that concept – and that’s the technology.

Kim: Tell us about your relationship with Hands On SA and what we’re hoping for with that?

Andrew: In October 2016 I sat down with Andrew Ramsey who’s the CEO of Hands On SA and some of his staff and we talked about what they were doing with e-learning. But the moment someone mentioned NDIS, that’s the direction we took. We found that all the disability service providers we talk to, all of the health clinics (we do a lot of work with Aboriginal health services and the Aboriginal Health Council of South Australia), everyone wants to talk about the NDIS. The providers gave us the feeling they felt a bit left out of the NDIS. All of a sudden, they were on a mission to market themselves, because the individual is being funded rather than the company being block funded or the provider being block funded. All of a sudden they’re stepping out into a new world of marketing themselves. So we sat down with Hands On SA and created this beautiful animation called Your Digital Story. We used podcasting and went in and recorded the CEO, Andrew Ramsey, and a couple of the employees, and then we put together this beautiful animation. We would love to create as many of them as possible because they’re lovely.

Nicole: It’s not an advertisement. It’s a story and calling it Your Digital Story is a great way to put it. If it was just Andrew, it might be a bit ‘sales pitchy’, but because we’ve got stories in there from guys who are working there and obviously loving it, that’s where the warm and fuzzy came from.

Kim: Anyone that’s listening to this, what’s your call to action?

Nicole: I think one of the things that’s come out of the digital stories piece is that, with these changes and the way funding has been structured, it’s kind of thrown these service providers and often smaller organisations are affected more by these changes… [marketing] isn’t something they’ve necessarily considered before and now they’re having to now [and storytelling is key].