It’s that time of year when we look back and reflect – and what a year 2017 has been for Mind Of My Own.
It began with the launch of Express, which has turned out to be a great hit and is being used regularly by children as far afield as New Zealand, helping children as young as three and those with a learning disability to participate in their care and have their views heard. Read more about the first half of our year here.
In the summer things were hotting up (unlike the weather)and we recruited our next account manager to help manage demand and keep our high standard of customer care. Beatrice, who had been the very successful Mind Of My Own lead for Havering, joined us in August and has helped us greatly to improve the advice we can offer for successful implementation of Mind Of My Own. Around the same time we moved further north with Perth and Kinross going live and leading the way for Mind Of My Own in Scotland. We have been super impressed with the priority given to the voices of children and young people there.
As it is four years old now, we started a major piece of work reviewing One app and creating a vision of its future with groups of young people in Lancashire, Sunderland and Auckland. They gave us loads of insights on utility, functionality and design – what they like and their ideas of what they would like to see changed, so look out for these improvements over the coming months.
In October, we were very glad to be working with the charity EDAS (Essential Drugs and Alcohol Services). Theirs is an organisation that provides care and support for those including young people, carers, criminal justice clients, through-care and aftercare clients, clients with medication issues, pre treatment and assessment for people aged 10 – 85 plus.
Autumn continued to keep us all extremely busy. A record number of customers went live in November keeping Beatrice and Hunter on their toes in getting all six off to a flying start. We started working with our developers, Neontribe, to ‘internationalise’ the code for the apps as we have received so many enquiries from non English speaking countries about using Mind Of My Own. We gained a new member of our team: Ian joined the business development team to help manage all the enquiries. In an epic week in November we were successfully re-inspected for our ISO 27001 accreditation and a few days later received the CYP Now 2017 award for improving services to children in care. This meant party time for team Mind Of My Own and we were joined by some of our great customers there too!
As the snow arrived at the Welsh office we were beavering away to make arrangements to take Mind Of My Own to Australia, starting in Queensland and New South Wales early in the new year with a full schedule of meetings. Team Mind Of My Own is growing once again as we welcome Amanda, our first international account manager, joining us in early January.
Meanwhile we are working hard to make sure we are ready to launch Mind Of My Own for schools in January. This new service has been developed in response to the high levels of service requests from teachers wanting to use Mind Of My Own apps to help them better understand the lives and views of their pupils. Watch this space for further news on how Mind Of My Own for schools will work.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for your support in 2017 and we very much look forward to to seeing you all in the year ahead. Happy New Year!
