Hey everyone, glad to be here at CSV Conf again. So I want to talk today about how during the first year of the pandemic we implemented a way for people to use their variables to detect potentially if they have an infection and more importantly how we build something together to make this happen. I am the Director of Research for the Open Humans Foundation which helps people using and gathering their own data to learn from it and also a research fellow at the Center of Research and Digital Diplinarity here in Paris and let's start by the things that wearables can do. So there's a lot of them and they have increasingly been more clever in what they can actually track. Of course they can track your resting heart rate. Many of them now do your body temperature as well, your respiratory rate, your sleep duration and quality and interestingly coming out during the last year particularly a lot of them measure your oxygen saturation as well. And that's already a lot of physiological data that you can collect about yourselves. So even before the pandemic hit last year there was interest in using this for actually monitoring infections and here's a paper that was presented at the conference I think in 2019 that used wearables on a population level to surveil the influenza outbreaks and it was based on data from 2017-2018 flu seasons using I think around 3,000 participants and the metrics tracked through wearables were things like the sleep amount of step state and sleep quality. And for some of those variables as like shown here for the total number of steps walked people already behaved or started to behave differently one to two days before symptoms had any onset noticeably by the individuals. But the limitation of course here is that all of this is done on a population-wide surveillance level not for the individual use. So on average actually it turns out that you might see a difference before so you can see when the numbers rise up but it's not for making individual predictions. But of course population-wide monitoring is pretty cool and interesting. And then of course last year hit and particularly in March 2020 where all of a sudden everyone wanted to do similar things but for COVID. So at the UCSF and UCSD they collaborated with the people who make the URA ring wearable device there and also at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego they started their own wearable data collection and also the healthcare innovation lab at Stanford did the same and last but not least even the German equivalent to the CDC started its own COVID data donation app to address the same same thing. So all of these came out and they all had pretty much the same approach as the earlier influencer approach I showed you it was about getting population level data to have like a population-wide monitoring thing. And there are some other issues as well because if you have academic research combined with wearables then you can easily end up having like some science by press release and here's just some small quote from one publication or not even publication the press release that came out saying that oh we can actually have a 90% accuracy in anticipating symptoms up to three days in advance. But they never actually published it and by now even the press release has disappeared from the university's website so oops maybe not really. But besides this there's other issues so there's no feedback for the participants there's no data sharing so no one can actually reuse it and there's definitely no idea of supporting individuals in learning and making sense of their own data which is what we are particularly interested in. So how can we use wearables for personal science to do this together? But first what's personal science? Personal science describes people using empirical methods to answer personal questions and here are some examples like if I'm a diabetic is this fiber really indigestible or will it raise my blood sugar? What is triggering my arrhythmia or does my transitional hormone therapy influence my mood? So all of these are questions people ask and actually last year just before the pandemic really started getting going with open humans and the quantified itself we started a project called the Keating Memorial to support people doing personal science collectively together and this was as the name implies in honor of Stephen Keating. Stephen who was a board member of the Open Humans Foundation passed away a year earlier because of a brain tumor in 2019 and since he was first diagnosed with it he became a very keen personal scientist and also data donation advocate. He collected a ton of data about himself, his own genome, his cancer genome and over 10 hour recording of his awake brain surgery which he shared and he believed that data could be useful and should be shared if possible and he reminded us that collecting this data doesn't need to be selfish but that it can be used for a greater good if we share data with others and use it collectively. So we just started doing this memorial which included doing weekly calls where people try to answer their own personal questions and the three examples I gave on the last slide actually were projects people worked on. But then of course the pandemic hit and people lost all time and motivation to work on these topics and instead had actually one larger global question which is we all have these wearables and can we use them to see when we are having an infection and to make sense of the data and maybe even use this data if we figured out how our personal body responds to having an infection on a physiological level to use it going forward. So collectively we started brainstorming during the calls and continued and select conversations to see how we could do this and as the first prototype we made for quantified flu we made one for doing retrospective investigations of physiological signals. So thanks to the infrastructure we already had in place with open humans we already had support for two wearables for this Fitbits and also the Aurora rings. So we could very easily make a retrospective analysis that people could make themselves so people would just punch in when they remembered when they fell sick for the last time and they would get such a nice graph is on the right side where you can just see in this case how the heart rate evolves over time around the the line of where you actually noticed falling sick and this is an example of my own data because I remembered falling sick of all times on New Year's Eve 2018 and yeah you can indeed see my heart rate already starts going up just a few days before I actually came down with something. So we made a couple of those and actually started doing like a very small scale data analysis on the end of six where we collectively wanted to see if we can also see the same signal overall and it turns out for the temperature and also the heart rate that there seems to be at least some kind of signal which is really nice but of course that's not super ideal because first of all you need to remember when you fell sick in the past if you want to make sense of this and that's really hard you can go back maybe to your calendar or to your chat messages and try to find out when you told someone you were falling sick but it's not really easy to do and of course you might want to track more specific symptoms instead of just knowing did I fall sick on a given date here so no and also continuous monitoring in general would be just much more useful so collectively our community decided to learn from the best and steal so we went to the academic efforts that were launched at the same time and we're like so what kind of symptoms are these studies actually trying to track and we started just remixing their symptom reports to unify them into one that seemed most useful to our participants so which symptoms and on which scale should they be tracked instead of just having binary symptom reports we settled for all of these symptoms on a five scale reporting and people would get daily email check-ins to say hey are you feeling sick today yes or no and if no you're basically done you just click a link that says i'm feeling okay and if you are sick you are getting taken to this form where you can just move the sliders around and you collect this data which is nice it's easy to collect but then how do you make sense of the data or how do you use it so again collectively some brainstorming of how could this data be visualized and we came up with this graph which converts the data that you provide both in terms of symptom tracking and your physiological data into one graph and the heat map on the top you see when you had symptoms and how severe they were over time in the middle in green you have like this commenting section because people can even write comments and below you can see your heart rate body temperature respiratory rate whichever thinks your variable tracks that you can actually use for this so that's really nice and like you can see it easily and can see when you are having like an elevated heart rate because the different gray backgrounds show the first and second standard deviation of the normal medium value of your heart rate so you can see if you have an elevated heart rate right now compared to what's normal for you personally instead of having to rely on some population approach and i think what's most interesting for this particular view actually is that there's a lot of value and you collecting data about yourself which academic studies would never actually collect and the comment here is that the person reports that oh my cuff actually it's not related i report having cuffs symptoms but it's not related to having an infection because well i've been smoking more since i'm now out of work and like a couple of comments earlier the person says that they were just they just lost their job because of the pandemic so okay there is now a pandemic related cuff but actually it's just from smoking at home because they're going to work any longer so this data gets collected by people they can use it for make sense out of it by themselves and also people can share the data so people can opt in and say i want to make this data available for all the other members of the community and basically everyone so if you want you can go to quantified flu.org and get all the data both in jason and of course as we are csv conf you can also download csvs of all the data which are the physiological signals and symptoms people report so that's the technical implementation on like the very rough level but i think what's really important to us is that this was not done by me or any of the other individuals who might somehow do this professionally but really by the community for the community all of this development was done by the community members of open humans and the quantified self and even just random people who ran into our slack and said i want to help so this included the initial ideation and the protocol design iterating the protocol over time implementing of the tool and different things like new wearable support and also testing the implementation of course and as we can see what we did is we just coded every single slack message into different categories whether it's about prototyping coming up with general ideas or even like the implementation of the prototypes and we can see that there's a very nice iterative development going on so after an initial release very early on there's a lot of renewed interest in discussing the protocol and prototyping more which leads to a new version of the prototype and so on and that's really nice because it's like many of the things i showed you were not completely just done by any individual person but collectively so the symptom tracking or which symptoms to track i said was done collectively the visualization was brainstormed collectively and then one one master student actually implemented it and we even had to completely random mobile developer who made an ios app to get hardware data out of apple watches because we had no mobile developer actually in the community so someone found us and was like oh yeah i'm willing to donate a bit of time to actually help you do it so besides this all being really cool what's the benefit of doing co-creation and what we see is that co-creation really improves the user fit if you think about how mobile health applications typically work and how much they are being used one can see in the academic literature that there is a really limited sustained use and the most extreme case is less than two percent of users ever return after using your app once and never provide data or get any use out of it and in contrast what we see looking at our usage numbers is that we have over 50 percent of our users have collected data for more than three months and actually to this day data is still being collected by our community and people are contributing so there's a big big benefit in doing it like this of course if you are an academic this iterative design is really problematic from an ethical oversight point of view because typically if you want to get institutional review board approval for your study then you need to completely tell them what the protocol is so there's no way of iterating rapidly and doing things differently and I think there's like a very interesting case to be made why actually this is a big issue if you would have done it in a way of getting IRB approval for every single point along the way we still wouldn't even have the first prototype most likely instead we had five maybe six different prototypes which evolved over time in a span of maybe three months which is fine if you are doing it outside academia if you are into academic publishing that's unfortunately a really big limitation and I think we need to find new ways for actually doing things together so to sum up what we learned to give a bit of time back is that first of all quantified flu it's not epidemiology but it's about generating personal insights and personal learning and making sense of your own data and if you want to try it you can go to quantified flu.org right now connect your wearable device start recording your data and in a few days you can see how your heart rate and so on evolve over time and see if there's any correlation and I think importantly we see that this co-creation approach and this community involvement leads to a really high fit to the user needs which leads in turn to a great continued user engagement and of course the data you can opt into making it publicly available and there's I think 50-60 data sets publicly available which you can play around with if you want and as I speak so much of the community we had a lot of people involved so besides me, Matt, Gary, Kate and many others were involved in the initial brainstorming and thinking about the project and helped us a lot in getting all the slack messages coded to actually understand how we co-created. Basil was instrumental in making the heatmap. Lukasz from Poland was our iOS developer. Carolina made the Garmin variables and Google Fit integrations. Konstantin helped getting the Fitbit support up and running for intraday data and Ilona and Melvin supported us in making all the visualizations for the collective data and of course there's over 200 users now who actually tried it out and please give it a try and before I wrap it up I just want to take 30 seconds to pitch some similar idea where we could need your support where we are currently crowdfunding. Clara, a student in our lab, is launching a really cool transgender health related project called the Transbiome which is about the idea that of course the cis woman's vaginal flora is quite well understood. There's a ton of studies on this. We know a lot about how it's involved in infections and the risk for cancer and all of this but in comparison I think there is less than a handful of studies for the microbial flora of the neovagina of trans women which is highly problematic because it means they cannot get gynecological care. So what Clara has designed is a community driven study which actually was designed by her as a trans woman with support of the trans community here in France in particular to collect data on the microbial diversity and to understand even what's the baseline picture because even that's unknown right now. And if you can help us out with just a few dollars to push us over the goal that would be much appreciated. So thanks so much and happy to take any questions. Thank you so much for the presentation. I think we have a few moments for a question or two if there's any in the chat and if there's not I would invite people. Oh looks like we have a question. So can we differentiate between co-creating and the pandemic pandemic conditions the participation rate sorry. Right yeah so with regard to the participation rates it's hard to say right now but we do know that there are all the academic studies which are going on right now which don't have the benefit of being co-created because they were done completely in an academic framework and the academic researchers set up the design and ran it. So once their data is out or at least the papers are out we can see how much participants they enrolled initially and for how many they got enough data in comparison and it's both pandemic related so we can hopefully make a comparison of that in the future. And I think that unfortunately that's all the time we have for questions but I invite everyone to continue the conversation in the Slack channel CSV6 Q&A. Thank you. Thanks.


So for now, if you guys want to meet yourselves and then you can just post in the chat if there's anything that you want to ask or if you want to introduce your businesses, obviously we'll provide a section at the end for you to ask questions as well. So you've got myself today, Rachel and also Oli as well. Hi, everyone. He's gonna be doing a section of the presentation and this one is all for the aimed at the businesses basically that are visitor economy. So the tourism base, the events, the attractions, all of those kinds of businesses, but I've no doubt that there'll be things that will be beneficial. If that's not your core type of business as well, things that you can learn. So that's totally fine for you to stay and enjoy it as well.  So then we'll be handing over for series three to back to freedom works for that. So we've got today's session and then we've got one next Tuesday, which is a panel event and lots of opportunity for you to ask questions and to network as well. Digital champions. So we've got a few with us today. This is a brilliant offering where you can actually get eight hours of free support following your attendance at these webinars. So if there's something that you think that you would like help with to adapt to technology, it might be training a team up, it might be learning how to use a CRM or help with e-commerce, whatever it is, then please do get in touch with Coastal Capital. You can go onto their website or drop them an email to that email address there, which is growth.hub at coast2capital.org.uk and you don't have to choose who you want to work with in advance. They will help assign the right person to you. So if it is marketing stuff, if I'd like you to get me, but there are other people as well on the team and they've all got different skill sets. So yeah, make sure that you don't miss that opportunity. So to begin with, I'm just going to run QuickPoll to find out, oh, hang on, my poll isn't working. Oli, can you run the poll? Yeah, it will give me a good one. What's your word? Visitor economy. Let's relaunch the poll. Right, it should be there now. Can everyone see that? Should be able to double click on the answer that suits you best, but it's how confident are you in marketing your visitor economy business? Or if it's not visitor economy, just your business in general. Let's see. Yeah, I can't see the poll. Can everyone else? That's interesting. Let's try this one's more. Are you getting answers, Oli? Because I can't actually see it. I'm not getting any answers, actually. No, I can't see the poll. Technical difficulties. Right, let's try once more. No poll. Okay, not going to be able to do that one. Okay, would you be able to, in that case, just to drop us a note in the chat and let us know how confident you are feeling about marketing your visitor economy business. The first option we normally put is not at all confident. The second is somewhat confident, and then the third is confident. If you could just do that for us so that we can judge how much we've helped you at the end, then that would be awesome. Thank you. Good work, Rachel. And the next thing that I would love you to put in the chat is, can you tell us what kind of business you are, so where you sit, within that kind of economy, that sector, and why you're here today, what can we help you with today? And that would be really good to know, thank you. Perfect. A few confidence, a few not at all, a few somewhats. So there's a nice mix in here. Yeah, sure. Thanks, so yeah, just drop those notes in to say what you do, why you're here today. Okay, so yeah, that's fine, Samantha. Yeah, there's loads of stuff that will still be valuable to you, Samantha, for sure, definitely. Water sports and ecology experiences, that sounds interesting. Yeah. Interpretation, brilliant. Great, thank you very much. Cool, so we will get started, I think. And if anyone else is here, we'll just let them in. So the first thing that I'm gonna say is if you haven't met me before, I am Rachel from Shake It Up Creative. I run a marketing design company in Worthing, and I've worked with various tourism and hospitality clients over the years, including restaurants, hotels, attractions, and sports events. So hopefully today, both only and myself can share some insight into digital best practice for these kinds of businesses, but also give you some ideas for action to improve your sales as well. And we're going to start that journey with talking about planning. Now, for a tourism or visitor economy business, it's absolutely vital that you are running your own super advanced schedule. Now, why is this? Because you need to catch the early bird, so you need to catch those people that are planning ahead, those ones that are bargain hunters and looking to book a discounted prices, all of those that just simply don't want to miss out. And for visitor economy businesses in particular, marketing is often not about selling the tangible, it's about telling a story and selling an experience that taps into an emotion and also connects with your audience. National print media, their Christmas deadlines are really early and they usually fall in August, believe it or not. So all those companies are looking to get a product in those features that are talking about, the must have Christmas gifts for the year, the must attend events for the year, those are normally pitched in to the media companies around summertime. You really have to be super ready for that. 47% of consumers actually start thinking about buying Christmas gifts for their friends and family before November. So again, we can't be reliant on when the shops start putting out everything, when the Christmas music comes on, you need to get really organized for that. Now, in a Facebook ad survey, this actually showed that the largest sales come in October time and ads are costing a whole load more at the end of November where the highest ad spend was occurring at that time. But you might also want to take advantage of some super sales events that we now have. Over here in the UK, we've kind of adopted the Black Friday and the Cyber Monday from the States. That happens at the end of November and it gives you a good reason or another excuse to put a sale on or to actually have an offer and sell the services or the event tickets or whatever it is that you're promoting as a tourism business. Tourism and events marketing is more customer centric really than any other type of industry marketing. People will spend thousands of pounds to travel and to have a good time.  So answering questions in your event marketing can actually convert insecure users into booked customers. You're aiming for a conversion and you want to be preempting concerns and detailed questions so that you can help speed up the booking decision for these people. Now these things can all be done through things like social media posts, articles, video, PR and all the usual types of marketing activities. But overall, the highly effective marketing plans for tourism related businesses will show a clear understanding of the characteristics and the motivations and the behaviors and the experience of each and every customer. The marketing needs to show people how they can temporarily escape their normal, their hectic lives and actually change venue and go for some entertainment and show them that they will make memories by coming to your business. Now as we've seen and we'll hear more on later, the tourism industry is more vulnerable than any other industry.  Now event-wide data has proven that a third of event capacity actually sells in the early bird period for events that they list. So that proves that early is key. Now the ultimate goal of an organization in the tourism industry is to exceed the expectations of the tourist. But everything you do, you want to be building brand awareness the whole year round and you need to be planning, executing your marketing tactics, tracking what works, measuring it and then repeating it perhaps with some adjustments if necessary. Now customers have varying wants and requirements of course, but all of them need the basics which are convenience, excellent service, value and quality. Because visitor businesses are largely based on experience, the target market audiences utilize their sight, their sound, their touch and their taste to judge the event or adventure. And what I'm saying here is that delighting potential customers to injecting some fun and creating inviting marketing really sets the right tone and will establish expectations. You've probably all seen QR codes or used one or one time or another. Their popularity was wavering but because of their no touch feature they've made a bit of a comeback. It obviously limits contact between people. So QR codes have been favored recently and used much, much more by businesses lately. They work really well and not just to move people from offline to online situations like scanning a code at a historical site for example, to get more information but also once a customer is inside your destination. So an example of that might be a villa company that has been placing one inside each of their villa rentals that can be scanned and then that allows the customer to actually see similar villas in other destinations. So what they're doing is they're already thinking about getting bookings from that customer for a different holiday the following year or in years to come of course. In ads where you've got limited space you can use a QR code to bring people to a landing page for more information or maybe to enter an online competition but it's really important to note though that if you use a free QR generator which is totally fine and is low to online ensure that it has got tracking capability some of them don't and you want to create an account to be able to use it. Otherwise you're just going to never know how many people have actually scanned the code and come to your site and taking the action that you wanted. Now some codes can look really cool. An example here where it allows color and imagery customization. So you can create your QR codes in brand colors like this one or even some of them have like shape in the middle of it. I've seen some with like a little dinosaur and things like that to make them really much more interesting. So customized QR codes they are totally possible. You also want to ensure that your destination page is mobile optimized. Now it sounds like it's something that's a bit obvious but you'd be surprised how many businesses set up a QR code and then perhaps they're falling behind in the way that their mobile page is being presented and it really affects the user experience. So please ensure that if you're going to use these the destination that you're taking people to is fully mobile optimized and there's a good website experience for your customer. Now there's just a bit of graph here to show you where QR codes are basically scanned the most. This was dated to be developed by Mobile Line and it found the eateries so places like restaurants, bars and cafes but also retail shops or locations and on consumer packaging as well. They were the most frequently scanned types of locations for QR codes last year. So I'd imagine that we've all seen them now in restaurants post COVID sometimes that is for menu access at the very least. Sometimes it's for ordering too for the whole experience. Obviously you need to place your code in scannable locations so we're not talking about dark subways or high up unable to reach billboards here. You need to also make it clear what people are scanning for. What are they going to get when they scan your QR code? Moving on to talk about user experience which I just touched on. I wanted to show you an example from Tully so they're up in Tully. They have some very well-known now seasonal events. Christmas is one of those at the moment they're doing their pumpkin picking event and they also have a massive Halloween event as well in October. They've adopted digital over the years and have done that very well but this is just an example of the landing page really. So I just want to point out a few things. So the call to action on this page is highlighted. If you're looking at that menu at the top they've got the different sections, most of them are in whites but you've got that one in gold there which is the one that ideally they want people to take. They want people to click and actually buy and book their tickets right now. But that menu is also has become more of an essentials menu. So they're not including everything under the sun and they're not talking about other events that they run but they're actually promoting the essential information that people need in categories in that menu. They've made the video optional. So people are landing on that page and getting blasted with it with an also running video there. If people want to watch the video and get a sample for the experience they're going to have then they've got the option to do that. They also have a countdown and that really just accentuates the urgency. You know, how many seats is it for Christmas? Do we need to get these kinds of things booked for the kids trying to encourage people to take that action there and then when they're on the site. They've got some additional relevant information down the bottom but again, it's very focused just on this event. And then once you get past this, I did check it out. You can, they've got a very simple checkout. So they're not asking for information that they don't need. It's quick and easy to complete. It shows you all of the available slots and dates that you can book for. And people can be processed pretty quickly and end up with their tickets in an easy way. So why are landing pages really important? Well, a landing page is just a webpage but it serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website. It can also be a standalone page which is deliberately created to help convert visitors. So examples might be a competition landing page, maybe service pages, or a page for visitors from a specific place. So an example of that is from my side, I've got a Twitter landing page. Notice from our analytics that we were getting a lot of people clicking through from Twitter. So we decided to, I guess, personalize that a little bit and give them a page which says, you know, thanks for finding us on Twitter and coming to visit us here and it directs them to different sections of the site. So you can do so many things to that. It doesn't have to be something that you're booking or making a purchase on. And when a landing page needs to make an action happen, so a sign up or a purchase, for example, it's really important that you don't distract the visitor. So you've got to reduce or eliminate menus and links to other pages and you need to reinforce the action down the page because you want the visitor to take action as they progress. So you'll see on this example here from Universal that, you know, they've got the buy now and they've got the buy tickets as well down the bottom. So as people get down the page, there's another opportunity to take that action that they want them to do. Now, obviously the user journey, if you've got people as far as getting to your checkout, brilliant, you don't want to lose them then. You can actually boost your checkout completion rate by five or even 10%. You will make a significant difference to your return on investment. So extra costs like high shipping fees was actually the number one reason that online shopping carts get abandoned and that was found during some research just this year. And the sudden stock depletion is a massive frustration. So you want to ensure that it's clear on your product pages at an earlier stage if you've got a very limited number of tickets or products available so that you're avoiding that disappointment. If people know that there's only one of something left, by the time they get to their checkout, if they're taking a while to complete it and that's gone, they don't feel so much blame for you. You know, they were aware that there was only one left, they'd want to be quick to nab it and perhaps it just wasn't working for them on that occasion and they'll be better luck next time. But clarity and ease is what you want. So even removing the footer and additional navigation can help reduce the distractions at the checkout stage as well. And if you're providing auto complete facilities for addresses, that really helps but only if it's a good one. Some of them are a bit frustrating. I've noticed several times when I've been buying on different sites that I've had auto complete available to me and it's said, yep, it's got your card details and then despite the fingerprint approval, the card details haven't quite stayed complete and yet still have to be entered manually. And that's really annoying for a customer. So make sure that you're implementing something that's reliable, it works well, but also get people to test it out. Don't forget to keep the back button. It sounds a bit strange, but when people make mistakes and they want to go and correct their details or they want to make additions, you know, perhaps they even want to increase the number of tickets that they're buying, for example. You've got to make that easy for people.  You can also reinforce trust at the checkout. So things like including the padlock symbol, reviews and customer testimonials, the credit card symbols and also high product rating scores will build the trust to the customer and encourage them to take that step and hit buy. Make sure that you always send order confirmation emails and include the contact details for any issues as well. It's very frustrating for a customer when they can't get a hold of somebody or they don't know how to actually reach the customer service team. So now Ollie's going to talk to you about data capture. So I'm just going to let him take over the screen share and I'll be back after that. Thanks very much Rachel. Right, can I see my screen okay? Yeah, brilliant. Okay, data. So I'm Ollie from Creative Bloom. So you may have seen me run the search marketing course a few weeks ago, but at Creative Bloom, we are all about data. Stu and I like to say that data doesn't lie. So obviously if you can make a lot of your marketing decisions or decisions in general backed and influenced by data, you're essentially going to be not just trusting your gut like this dinosaur over here, you're actually going to be going with, looking at what your customers are doing on your website, in your stores and at all different points along the user journey and kind of taking that data and using it to kind of become more efficient, et cetera. So we're looking at facts and statistics that collected together for reference or analysis. And it's going to essentially give us a much more targeted approach, right? If we use data. So especially when you're, if you're starting your business from scratch, from brand new, you don't have much data to go on and you are going by your best understanding from research, what you know about your business, but over time it's really important as soon as we start getting people through our website, as soon as we start getting people to our stores, what types of data can we collect to either qualify what we already know or make some changes that will increase sales, increase our customers satisfaction, et cetera. And we always say that the earlier you can start collecting it, the better, okay? So you could have, you know, an email list with 10,000 emails in it. But if you haven't done any work to really look at the data about your customers, which emails they're opening, which they're not, which products they're interested in buying, then you're likely probably just sending some generic emails out to that whole email list. It's much better in the long run to really try and refine your list down, start to segment your customers already into groups so that when you're eventually marketing to them, you're sending them relevant products and information that you know they're interested in from the data that you've discovered. So it's all about kind of nurturing your customers, nurturing your email list, nurturing the data that you've already got. And by looking at the data, we can actually answer a lot of questions that creatively we get asked all the time. So why did people leave the basket? Why didn't people check out? How did this customer find us? Now you can use something like Google Analytics. Why did the customer book with us loads last year but they haven't booked at all this year? So comparing yourself to your competitors and looking at how the data's changed there. How are refer friend schemes working for you and et cetera, et cetera. So there's loads of questions that we can essentially ask. And in effect, once we start kind of taking some actions, we're gonna improve all sorts of different areas of the site and of the customer's experience. So regarding customer journeys, efficiency, even if you're paying for tools at the beginning that cost a little bit more in the long run, you're probably gonna be reducing your costs because you're gonna be spending less time, just aimlessly throwing out a big net and trying to catch just any fish that you can catch in it rather than actually be really targeted with a fishing pole and selecting exactly the customer you're trying to target. And as I said, the whole lane, once we've learned from this data is to send targeted, personalized and relevant information and products to our customers or to attract them into the store, obviously, if it's a physical location that we're talking about. So let's use an example of the visitor economy that has loads of data points. So loads of opportunities where we can collate a lot of data. So a hotel, for example, Boutique Hotel in Brighton, let's imagine, from the top, so from the top up here where it says search keywords to the bottom, that is the, so the top is where the user found us. So the customer typed something into Google, potentially, or maybe they typed it into a directory, third-party platform, that kind of thing. But as they go through this stage through our website, from when they're looking for a website, from when they're on our site, looking through it, typing in the search bar to the pages they're visiting, maybe they're putting a few different hotel rooms in their car and debating which ones are gonna make the most sense. They might fill out a contact form. And even after that process, once they're at location, you know, even when they're calling down to the hotel lobby and asking for room service requests, that's all data that we can actually capture.  If you could start using this to better, you know, improve your marketing and that kind of thing. So that later on, you know, after you've looked at, you know, which room did they book? How much do they pay for it? Do they have any special requests? And that kind of thing, you can then offer them an email or send them a targeted email that, for example, might offer them a room upgrade because we've looked at that user's journey and what they actually did was they put the sea room in their checkout but they ended up booking a cheaper room. And so what we could do is we could think, okay, well, we could possibly offer them this upgrade at a quieter period when we know we don't get as many bookings. But, you know, we can show them a picture of the room that they didn't book. But it's all these things that kind of remind the user of maybe what they wanted. We're very aware of it. We could offer a complimentary bottle of whatever they are, whatever they had before and they had to pay for. So, but we're actually using the data that we've looked at to, you know, when we're trying to send out some emails to our email lists for the people who visited our hotel before, we're actually sending them much more personalized things that they're likely going to be much more likely to respond well to, you know, and then once they've received those emails, we're gonna check the click-through rates, open rates and all that kind of thing. So we're never stopping. We're constantly reviewing the data and seeing what's going on. And the key steps for successful data capture are gonna be first deciding what data you should be capturing, right? Because there is so many different things that we could be looking at. And let's be honest, it's not all gonna be relevant for everyone. It's always gonna be different. And also, you know, if there's just one of you in the business, which isn't uncommon, you know, it's about your time as well, how much time do you have to look into this?  So deciding what data you should be capturing, creating a data capture process. And essentially all we're saying there is just working out at which points we're going to be collecting that data and then, you know, how we're gonna be storing that data and then using it in future. A huge, really important rule is simplicity, keeping things simple, which is a lot of reasons why people go to move into things like what we're gonna talk about in a second, which is like a CRM system, essentially just a dashboard where we can see this really easily and really straightforward. And we can search for, you know, customer groups and we can really easily segment our customers using this. And so keep it really simple. So we're not kind of scratching our heads too much and getting lost in the sea that can sometimes be a big spreadsheet or that kind of thing. And of course, security. So we had a GDPR workshop the other day that was really fantastic, but security making sure you keep people's data safe is gonna be really important as well. So firstly, what we talk about or how I'm deciding to organize it is we're gonna call it primary data, which is the data such as things like GDPR personal data when someone's filling out a form and the stuff that people aren't likely to change. So it's like the device that they're using to browse the website and what network they're on, their screen size, that kind of thing, you know, what mobile they're using. But those kind of things, you know, GDPR is obviously, GDPR personal data is stuff around their name, maybe the clothing size they're regularly buying, those kind of things we're probably likely to keep in this box. And that's where we need to make sure we're super secure on it and adhering to all the rules regarding that. But then we have the secondary data and this is the stuff that we're likely, you know, when we start our business, we don't have this information yet. We don't know how people are browsing the website. And this is where over time, when we're looking at each stage, you know, so here we've got, you know, different stages of the user journey from awareness to purchase to if someone's returning products to loyalty and advocacy and that kind of thing. Again, at each individual stage along here, we can be collecting information on how the user is browsing the website, the products they're interested in. And we can start kind of using systems, which we'll talk about in a second, to start to get some stats around how our, you know, our stores are performing, how happy our customers are and what we can do to kind of improve these things. And just in a similar, a slightly more easy to read, we've got areas that we can collect data at website analytics. So that's something like Google Analytics, which Stu ran a course on the other day. Social media, of course, there's loads of things around engagement. How many people who are viewing us on social media are actually coming in store? You've got tracking pixels, which I think Rachel's gonna talk about in a little bit. Contact information, feedback and surveys, customer service, software and obviously the transactions that people are making. So once you've selected, once you know the kind of data you wanna capture and you can be a little bit more aware of kind of, okay, we wanna track our customers. We need that GDPR data to identify one customer from another. We're then gonna look to ideally capture it in what's called a CRM. So it's customer relationship management tool. And the real reason that we do this is like we said before, to easily at a glance be able to see what's going on with our customer grouping. So how happy are our customers? How many products did they buy? Which of our customers in this CRM system would we say are most engaged, which aren't very engaged? And can we work out why? But they should be easy to analyze. The information should be really easy to access. And in a few slides, we'll really be talking about how important this segmentation is and these CRM systems. There's just a few examples here, Monday CRM HubSpot. We do use HubSpot, but it's much bigger tool. But there's a lot of options out there. So here's one that focuses much more on data analysis and purely just does that, but you can see all the different types of data sources that we're pulling in here. So Funnel is pulling in everything from Google Analytics. It's pulling in your AdWords data. It's pulling in social media. It's pulling in Stripe. So if you've got payment gateways on the website, and what it's gonna do is it's gonna link all those data sources, and then it's gonna provide you with some information and in an easy to read way that you can start making some better decisions on. So Funnels one, and then you've got something like PO360, for example, which is almost like a do it all tool. So this is the CRM system, so where all the data is being stored, but as well as that, they'll offer marketing and they'll offer automation. When we talk about automation, this is about taking the manual effort out of it and trying to use a little bit more of AI learning, so artificial intelligence to actually send people the right emails. If someone hasn't opened this, it's gonna automatically send them this a few days later, or it's gonna only show them images of particular products that are related to the ones that we know they're interested in. So these can get really quite in depth and really help your processes in the long run. And obviously the more and more data you have, the more and more customers you have, as soon as you have something like automation and you have a computer helping you make sense of what's going on, it's really going to make you able to keep on top of this, keep on top of your data. It's all right when you've got maybe 100, 500 people in there, but once you start kind of building your businesses out, you're gonna really want to be able to make the most of these tools so that you can, while you build your business, keep improving your marketing, keep improving your customer relationships, that kind of thing. And my tip for you, if you don't, is getting one out there is offering free trials. And even if you're completely brand new to this, you could very easily learn a lot through taking advantage of all these free type trials. You can essentially get a little bit of free consultancy, consulting from these businesses. You can ask them to have a look at your website and what they suggest, what tabs they to you. They think you should capture so I would definitely recommend that. And there's a little link down here. You're gonna get the slides. As usual, they will be posted online, but there's a link down here of a really good website that kind of shows you a broad range of lots of different tools and software all with reviews and that kind of thing. So let's have a look. However, of course, it's irrelevant to say that we don't all have necessarily the budgets to be paying for these expensive tools. If they are expensive and not, I know there are some questions about the cost of these tools.  I'm not aware of the cost of them off the top of my head. However, what's really important is, this is something that you can build towards and it's about knowing, being aware of what the possibilities are. And at the moment, there are three data collection tools that we can use at the moment, which do exist. And although, of course, they're not gonna be as interlinked as everything else that we're talking about, but what we need to be realistic and use what we have to hand at the moment. So Google Analytics, we obviously know. I think in Stu's session the other day, almost everyone had Google Analytics, but almost no one used it, which is very common. Yeah, we don't have time to kind of jump in there and dig around, but that is showing some really, really beneficial information about our website and the user journey and how people are experiencing it. So really valuable tool. Of course, the famous Excel that many of us stay away from, Stu loves it, but it's a spreadsheet software. It's kind of the bane of my life, Stu's colorful, crazy spreadsheets, but that's the joy of data, there he is. And then you look at other things, you might already have MailChimp and you might be sending out emails, but again, it's quite common for us not to be checking open rates. We're not necessarily checking who's opening, who's not managing those lists, seeing, sending out different emails to different people to see how they're responding differently. This is all data we have available to us at the moment, and it might already be free to you. So like I said, Google Analytics, you've got something like a landing page, just grabbing one simple report as an example. This is the landing page report, it just means the page that someone first lands on when they visit your website. And you might find that the actual, the amount of conversions or sales that you're getting from one landing page over another could be vastly different. And it's important to take a look at this data and kind of check if you're doing the right thing, if you need to tweak it, if you need to review which page you're sending people to. And even if we look at something like a spreadsheet, you can do stuff to make it much easier to read. So we're not using these complex, but very handy, paid for tools. We're gonna export something into a spreadsheet, but then we're gonna use something like conditional formatting to just better view the data. So that at a glance anyone can quickly filter from which keywords are brought us the highest clicks, which keywords are most expensive if we wanted to run paid advertising and we can filter them. So there are ways that we can learn how to better view our data and still be able to make informed decisions using these fruit-free tools, essentially. And like I said, once you've started to look at the data, you ideally want to start segmenting your customers. So you wanna segment them into groups. And the reason is, is cause, of course, if you have a hundred people in your email database, they're not all necessarily gonna be, if you're a restaurant buying the same meal. So you might have some vegans in there, but you might serve burgers. Why would you wanna send an email of a nice juicy beef burger to a vegan if we really know that they don't eat them? So it's about looking at the data and trying to decide how can we segment these people and let's send them some emails and see how the engagement differs if we try to be a bit more targeted, a bit more personalized, than just doing a one catch-all approach with one big email to all these people. I know there's lots of questions going on, but so I will come to them hopefully at the end, just say, no, I know that Rachael and Stuart are jumping in there, but... Because after we segment our customers, the truth is, is that the majority of us would actually much rather have personalized, targeted emails showing us, I say emails, obviously. It could be anything. It could be paid advertising as well. But we'd much rather be seeing things that we're interested in than that we wouldn't. So I, you know, Blue Men Wild, for example, there's an online flower company where we can deliver flowers to people through the letterbox. I typically buy certain colors of flowers from there. If they were to send me lots of emails with a color that I wasn't really interested in, so bright red is typically a color I don't like buying, I find it a little bit garish. So if they were to send me an email saying, here's a discount, here's a promotion off these flowers, it's just not any flowers I ever buy, whereas obviously if they sent me a promotion with photos of things I do buy, it's gonna make me much more likely to engage or at least check it out. So it's gonna build trust, it's gonna keep it in my mind, it's gonna increase advocacy. So telling people about it, refer our friend schemes are gonna improve. So just by learning from the data, you're being more personalized, more targeted over time. I wanted to give you a tool, a little extra tip on a tool, hot jar, feel free to write if you've heard of hot jar or not, but it's a user behavior visualization tool for a website. And it is free, it has a free option. I think it limits you to a certain number of, what they call recordings a month for heat maps, but essentially what it does, it tells you and shows you in visual form where people are clicking on your website, where their mouse, like where the mouse is moving, on mobile it shows where people are scrolling to, and then it also records whole sessions for you. So people who are browsing on mobile and desktop from the point that they arrive to the point they leave, you can see where they're clicking on your website and the type of experience that they're having. And that massively will influence user experience and your understanding of how a customer browse is your website, so there's a little example there. You can just see, this is a screen recording of someone scrolling down a page. Obviously it's just a brief example, but you can imagine that if you can see where people are clicking, where they're spending their time and attention, it's gonna make a big difference. You're actually using this data, this visual behavioral data to influence how you form your pages. So really in the end, it's just all about trying not to be a business that just chucks out a huge net to all the people you've spent so long and so much work on crafting a really engaged customer base. It's about not chucking a net and just sending them the same stuff. It's about trying to send out individual lines, have your customer groups, design a lure that's specific for that fish. So Stu likes water-based analogies, so that's the new reason this is in here. But yeah, obviously you have a lure that attracts a specific fish and it's in the same way you have an email that's gonna attract a specific customer. So learn from the data, use it as best you can and don't give yourself a hard time, just do something that at the moment makes sense to you and that is plausible. There are three ways to do it at the moment. So if that's where you're at, then jump in and just have a look around and that's what you're doing, you can't do anything wrong. Okay, I'm gonna hand back to Rachel. I was gonna talk about remarketing. I'll just stop sharing. Great, thank you. And Oli, I love that you buy for how it's regular. It's true, it's true. That's very smart. I just realized that I probably said it and then Stu's look thinking they're scratching his head wondering why he hasn't received any, but... Yeah, so we're gonna jump into a bit of a remarketing explanation. People that have become really distracted often move on to the next thing when you're on your website. Sometimes they can completely forget what they were doing and what website they were on.  Many potential customers also lost forever when they decide to take more time to reconsider a purchase. So perhaps they've got some questions or they need to check with a friend about something or they might even just wait or look for a better deal. But the question is, how do you prevent this from happening? How do you turn a higher number of visits into a purchase? The marketing technique that can help you out here is called retargeting or remarketing. Now, they are slightly different remarketing, retargeting but the terms are also used very interchangeably. So we're just gonna call it remarketing for today. But retargeting is reaching those that have already been on your website or a competitor's site and remarketing is reaching people via social media, email campaigns or either the phone. It's something that sounds quite difficult but it isn't too hard to set up and it will become invaluable. Research has shown that a huge 98% of web visitors go away without leaving an email address, without contacting you, without following you on social media or buying anything from you. So retargeting Pixel places a cookie inside the visitors browser so their information is saved in your account. So it might be on Google Analytics, Facebook or Twitter, for example. You then serve ads to those that have been on your website before which is what makes retargeting so successful because they've already demonstrated their interest and they've started to engage with you. Those might be banner ads on other website pages, for example. But on average retargeting ads will show a 10 times increase in click-through rates as people can already relate to your ad because you're not a stranger anymore. So it's a really good thing to get in place alongside your other ad campaigns. Now it's not gonna be suitable for everyone to go through how to set up remarketing either within Google Ads or the Facebook Ads Manager. So this is just a quick summary so that you can understand it a little bit more. When you go into Google Ads and you set up a Google Ads tag, you then customize it for which data you want collected depending on your business. If you have a web developer in-house, you can either email them the tag for them to add to your website or ask them to use Google Tag Manager. It might be already tracking other campaigns already using Google Analytics. Or of course, you can do it yourself if you know how. You then need to copy and paste the Google Ads retargeting script onto every page of your website and it goes in a particular position. It goes between the head tags. Once that tag is set up and you also once it's been tested on top of the basic website retargeting. So just showing your ad to everybody who visited your website. You can also just take it up a notch as well and you can target by specific date ranges or list sizes, specific URL visits and much, much more than that. You can also create a campaign which excludes people that have visited a certain page if you want to. So that just gives you a bit of a summary on how it works and the people that you're trying to essentially bring back to complete the purchase. Now, to help me dedicate time to the marketing activity, the work, including remarketing, you obviously need tracking. So building something called UTM codes is something that tracks campaign success and that's a great approach. Now UTM, it stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Those codes are snippets of text that are added to the end of the URL to help you track where website traffic comes from if users click a link and then visit that URL. The text can be customized to match the webpage of the URL and it's linked in order to attribute the success of that campaign to specific pieces of content. So it doesn't affect anything on the page by adding that being a piece of code. It just lets your analytics program know that someone arrived through a certain source inside an overall marketing channel as part of a very specific campaign. So here's an example that I borrowed from a company called RWL Design. And we can see that it's tracking visitors that visited a blog post about UTM codes via a post on Facebook that was boosted as a paid campaign. You can see that broken down in that example that just popped up. So instead of all social media traffic being bundled into one source, it enables you to specifically track one thing. You can build them in Google Analytics with Google's campaign URL builder or in some CRM systems like HubSpot for example. And in your analytics, you'll be able to visit the campaign section and see that dedicated tracking data in there. So now we're going to move on to some real local examples of digital adoption and digital successes. And the first one that I'm going to talk about is an organization called Leave No Trace.  With many visitors arriving into Brighton by train, the Brighton Community Group saw an opportunity to raise awareness as soon as tourists and residents stepped foot on the station floor. The team were keen to come up with an action plan that was environmentally friendly and would not create additional waste. So they turned to technology and they got some pro bono help from a company in Brighton called Digital Detox. Now the idea was very simple. Create a pledge that visitors could read and sign as soon as they arrived in Brighton. Provide facts and encourage visitors to take responsibility for their own actions whilst they were there. And it was all in the name of Coastal Environment Protection. So the pledge is accessible on smartphones via QR code which is available at Brighton train station. At the station, there are also three Android tablets. I don't know if they're still there but they were during the height of the campaign. They were on loan from a place for tech take back and it meant that the Brighton pledge was made accessible for everyone. They've also made circular and provisable reusable cups available for sale alongside a small donation to the Leave No Trace Brighton campaign fund. And those cups can be purchased from Brighton station train station and the Leave No Trace online not for pocket shop.  And you can see the pledge on the screen there and the three sections that go with it. They're also encouraged to share photos of themselves doing this on social media with a tag. So the tag Leave No Trace Brighton and that's created a fantastic community of environmentally conscious people who are proud to be doing their bit to protect the beautiful Brighton seaside. So in eight months, the social tagging actually proved that nearly 9,000 so it was 8,903 pieces of beach rubbish on Brighton that had been cleared due to the campaign. There might even been more where pledges perhaps didn't tag Leave No Trace or just did it anyway. But it's an excellent example of where digital technology has contributed to environmental fit. Now, the second example, I'm very, very lucky today to have Louise join us from the Artisan Bakehouse in Stenning. They are an award-winning location and she's going to talk to you about what happened with her business during COVID, how they turned that around and all the trials and tribulations along the way. So please welcome Louise. Hello everyone. Hi, thanks Rachel and thanks for inviting me to have a little chat with you. So just a bit of background about us, if you haven't heard of us, we're the Artisan Bakehouse and as Rachel said, we're based in Ashhurst just outside Stenning just on the edge of the South Down. We've been here just over nine and going into our 10th year of trading now. We are an Artisan Breadmaking School primarily specializing in traditional Artisan Breadmaking and we have a range of classes that we offer. We also have accommodation on site. We're a venue hire business. We do events, weddings and we also historically did do pre-COVID. We used to do puff up cafe openings as well but our core business has really always been our tourism holiday accommodation business and our breadmaking school and we get lots of people historically worldwide who used to come and stay and learn to make bread with us. So pre-COVID, life was pretty good for us. We won Sussex Best Eating Experience in 2018 and that gave our business a real launch pad to take it further and be more well known. We have one of our tutors is the guy called Emmanuel Hajindreou who's one of the top international bakers in the world. So he became part of our team about five years ago and that really gave us a very strong following and he's been a really good ambassador for us as well. So we felt I think pre-COVID that we were quite robust really as a business. We're a small business, we're rural and I think the biggest challenge to us as a business was the fact that because we're rural we have really, really poor connectivity. Our broadband speed, we've made a few adjustments which I can sort of explain, but our broadband speed was about one megabyte download and less than that for upload, which when we did hit COVID we realized just what a challenge that was. But before COVID, I think we felt we had a strong business, we had a lot of forward and repeat bookings, we had a very diverse business because we have our accommodation, our baking school, our events side of our business and the ability to sort of do pop-up events and turn the tap on. We had lots of different income streams. So if one area was a bit quieter we could sort of tweak the model a bit and we could adjust and we felt as a business we were quite lean and quite just able really to adapt to anything. So life was pretty good. And then like a lot of us COVID came along and absolutely decimated us as a business like anybody that's here on the call in hospitality it's just been absolutely devastating. And I think we've been self-employed for over 20 years and it was just devastating financially and emotionally to feel just totally powerless to manage your business. And we just felt totally vulnerable because there literally was nothing we could do when we were told to lock down. We had hundreds of people on classes that obviously we had to refund and postpone and then all our holiday side of the business people weren't able to come and stay. And I think that was probably the hardest hit because we never thought as a business that people couldn't come and stay in the accommodation. And that always was a core income stream for us to really sort of keep the business afloat. So yeah, like lots of people it was a really devastating time. And I think very quickly we realized we had to have some sort of online presence.  We weren't even able to sort of post updates. And obviously because everybody was locked down at home everybody was ringing us wanting help with how to suddenly the whole nation developed an interest in baking and breadmaking which has been great. But we felt we couldn't even respond to our customers. And I remember we did try to do when people were struggling to get yeast we tried to do just like a little Facebook call to sort of do a video to teach people how to do a sourdough starter and how to do that. And it took us like three days to try and upload it. So again, we were just so frustrated because we felt even powerless to pivot and get online. So amongst other things we decided we, you know we was no good just crying into our bread dough. So we thought we need to take some actions. So we were really fortunate that we applied to the South Downs National Park small grant scheme. And we were given 2000 pound which was a really fantastic boost. And it gave us the impetus to really look at how we could get online. We realized we couldn't do anything live because of our poor connectivity here. And we just looked at really our business and how we could get it online. Obviously we looked at like maybe a food offering we looked at maybe launching some sort of like baking equipment business. And obviously we looked at all the margins and everything involved in that. But we really came back to I guess what our core business is and we thought, well, what are we good at? And that's teaching people to make bread. So we thought, well, let's get back to really what we do and try and just get that online. So we started off creating and we got the help of a really fantastic production company a guy who's like ex-BBC. And we worked with him for a couple of months to basically film. We started off with four and we did four 45, 40-minute master classes. So we looked at like our most popular breads which was baguettes and a basic loaf of cinnamon buns because we were coming up to Christmas. So we thought people would like that. And focaccia, which is one of our favorites. I hope everyone's not too hungry because it's kind of lunchtime. So sorry. So yeah, so we launched those. We're not technical people at all. We're a rural hands-on business which promote people to people and like artisan products which is all about handmade for us. So for us to try and get online was really, really challenging. So if anybody's listening, thinking all this is all really difficult, like we were probably the worst equipped people to get online really. But we took various advice that was available. Obviously we were just totally out of cash. We had like no cash flow at all. So even to just get that small grant to help us was brilliant. So we worked for a couple of months to get that. We did all the production work and then we spent a lot of time researching the various platforms and how to actually stream the courses and how to really just make sure that the content was safe, that they couldn't be copied. That was like the biggest challenge. So we launched for just before Christmas so that we could sort of promote it to like the Christmas market. I think that was about November time. We got that up and running and it was a fantastic success. Within weeks we covered like the grant investment that we've been given. And people were buying gift vouchers for people and obviously just buying the classes direct for themselves. Because obviously it was a great time as well because people were locked down. So they were able to do that at home. And we really did that primarily just through our database, just through like social media. And yeah, it went quite well. And we also set up a Facebook, a private exclusive Facebook baking club where we said if you've been on our course before one of our face-to-face workshops or if you did an online class you could join the exclusive club which meant that we could give people feedback and it's just been fantastic because people have like posted what they were making and then we could help them and give them other tips and so that went well. So I think after that, like we had four and then people even started saying to us, oh, what else can you do? What else can I learn? So we then spotted that there was another grant available through the SME restart and recovery to kickstart tourism. So we applied to them and we got 5,000 pound, which was fantastic. And that enabled us to go on and now we've produced another seven classes. So now we've got a really strong portfolio of 11 classes. So to make you feel more hungry, we've got like piters and croissants and hot cross buns, brioche pizzas, sourdough. So we've got a really comprehensive range now which has been fantastic. And then we launched those in time for Easter with the hot cross bun one last April. And yeah, we've had sort of ups and downs and if I'm really honest, we have kind of put it down a little bit, but the great thing only because we've just been so since April when we were able to open up again, we've just had a backlog of about 700 people. So we've been working really hard to get that back on track.  So we've had to sort of, you know, keep all our resources on looking after face-to-face customers. But I think for us, the most fantastic thing really, I guess, with going online and seeing the benefits of digital is that we never would have done this and it's been the big positive for us coming out of COVID because what it has done, it's given another strong income stream to our business and it's a passive income because now we've actually put this into place. You know, some days we get up in the morning and we've made half a dozen sales and we don't actually do anything because it's all digital now. So somebody buys it, buys the product and they can then watch that class over and over again whenever they want to. So that's been, you know, it's fantastic. And I think even, you know, with, you know, the current news about possibly restrictions again, that we're not feeling quite so uneasy because we think, well, okay, at least we have got another product and another revenue stream to our business now. And we can just, we know that it needs a lot more work in times of getting people to know that these products exist. We have, and we know we really need, you know, we need the help of some of the suggestions we've made today to sort of really get it out there and have a really robust marketing plan for it. But already we've seen some great successes because we've sold products to people now in America and Mexico and we've got a lady in Japan that's bought quite a few classes. And if I'm totally honest, it's an area we've got to work on because we don't know how we found these people but they found us.  Which was always, you know, the dream really if we could create this and it could have a wider appeal and bring people to the South Downs and bring people to us in person as well. So it's just been fantastic. We've just also, which has been really exciting, we've partnered up with Lakeland and we actually got our production guy to take one of our 45 minute classes and reduce it to a five minute class and Lakeland have put it onto their YouTube channel. And already I think I looked yesterday and within like a couple of weeks we've got about 450 hits from that and I've been trying to track what sales we're getting from that. So that's been great too because they've got obviously, I think about over 30,000 followers on their YouTube. So yeah, so that's been good. They've asked us if we'll do another three but we're just a little bit cautious at the moment because we don't want to dilute our products so that people end up just watching Lakeland's YouTube for a five minute one and not actually buying our full class but that just needs a bit more work really. So yeah, and we're still desperately hoping to get through the Gigabyte scheme, get us onto Superfast Broadband but we're still being told that's another 18 months away. So at the moment we've got a little upgrade with 4G. Luckily we were able to get 4G. So now I think on a good day we get about 12 download and eight upload but it's enough, we can operate and we can get by. So yeah, so really now our next steps is to just learn from like Rachel and people like you that know how to get this message out there but we know that we've got a great product and we've had fantastic feedback from it which has been really good. So we think we've got a good portfolio now to be able to sort of take that forward and just give us, you know, a little bit more security really for our business. So yeah, I think that's probably us. I don't know if you've got any questions or... That was brilliant, thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your story and obviously it's amazing that you've come through all of those things that were thrown at you through no choice of your own and a really, really coming out the other side is brilliant to hear. Does anyone got any questions that they would like to ask? I have a question. I'd love to hear just how you're... Obviously like you said, there's still kind of things that you're learning but how has your marketing changed from, let's say before you went digital, how are you kind of outreaching to people and has that kind of... How has that transformed now? How is that, what's the comparison before and after in terms of how you're marketing or is it similar or is it... Yeah, I think if we're honest, which is always a bit dangerous for a business, we've always been very much a people-to-people business and very much our business has just traded on referrals. We've done minimal advertising historically and we've always just been busy enough and we get a lot of repeat customers and we get a lot of people refer and recommend us to their friends and we've got a good name locally and a good following which has been... We've been obviously state in 10 years to build but it's been strong. But I think now we... I think we've got about 6,000 followers on Facebook and about over 3,000 on Instagram and we do do a lot more on social media than we ever did. We do use Mailchimp more. I think what we're trying to do now as well is we're kind of complementing the two. We're almost seeing our online business as a separate business but it does complement what we do. So for example, when... All this summer we've been doing face-to-face classes but we're saying to people, oh, and by the way, we also have got an online portfolio so if you can't come back and do another full class and to be fair, people pay £150 to come for the day. That's quite a big investment. So some people think, oh, I would quite like to make croissants but I don't want to put the whole day and do a whole day of class or I don't want to come for two days over the weekend and do sourdough a weekend but oh my goodness, for £25, you can teach me how to make sourdough pizza or you can teach me how to make a brioche or a croissant. So they're actually... We're kind of marrying the two together really. So I think that's how it's changed that we're now seeing that we're doing follow-ups to people and because we... I suppose the biggest change which we probably would never have got round to doing is this exclusive bread-making club that we've set up so that... And we've been quite tight on that. We're getting lots of requests for people wanting to join it but we're saying you can only join it if you've been on an online class or you've been here face-to-face and so people are really starting to get like a little bit of a community and they're all praising each other and then they're kind of...  They're doing the job for us because they're saying, oh, have you tried this class and have you done this one and this one's a good one. I said they're all talking to each other, probably aren't they? And you can just sit back and watch it happen, right? That's really exciting but also like just really rewarding because the biggest thing for us we're not people to sit at a computer. We're not digital people but we're just about real people. Face-to-face and we're about hands-on showing people how to enjoy and enjoy rural living and stepping back and a bit more soulful really that's what our business is. But what's really rewarding is seeing that people get so much joy out of thinking, oh my goodness what I thought would take me forever to make decent bread I can build it into my life now and it's so easy and you've taught me how. So that's the most rewarding thing really. But we know we've got to use digital to help us do that. Well, you've made a start, it's all good. Andrew, what would you like to ask? Well, it's really interesting actually. So you mentioned some of the specific things that you kind of evolved with and did like the videos and the bread-making club but I think we've seen across Costa Capital that there's been an attitude change as well. So we've seen the businesses that have been successful have done this thing called pivoting but it's as much about a positive attitude and a way of looking at the business as anything else. But so have you got any messages for other businesses as to how your change of outlook has made a difference to the way you've been successful? Oh, I don't know, that's the tough one. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I think we're by nature and I think anybody here that's self-employed I think entrepreneurs generally are resilient and positive people, you know because there's no one to cover your back. You know, I worked in corporate life for over 20 years and without sounding arrogant this has been the hardest challenge in like in a 40 year career I've had, you know because you just realized if you were gonna go under if it wasn't for you and I don't mind admitting we had some really tough times where we were even my husband just sort of crying thinking this we've lost the whole lot we've got to sell up, you know something you'd work for for like 20 odd years and you just see it just absolutely collapsing and what was really hard was, you know people ringing up saying, getting really shirty with you saying, you know, I need my money back and you can totally understand that but when you're thinking, you know we thought we had a good cash flow and a good resilience but when suddenly you haven't our priority was to pay our staff and be as honorable as we could but yeah, it was difficult but I suppose, I don't know how to say you just have to think, well, okay you got two choices, you gotta dig in your boots and make it happen really and I think what did keep us going which probably, I don't know might sound a bit soft but was our customers genuinely we had so many lovely customers ring us and say, you know, oh my goodness you can't go under, we'll crowd fund for you we'll do anything to it and we had customers saying to us like, we'll come and do your garden because we had to obviously bin off the gardeners and cut back any cost we could to just keep afloat really and obviously, you know the government came good in the end but the first three months when you still had, you know tens of thousands of pounds worth of refunds going out and, you know, still having to pay staff and furlough them and the furlough money didn't come through for a long time so, you know, that was a really tough time and just even, wow anybody that's on the call who had to deal with it just trying to absorb all the lead all the change in information it was just so much information hitting you so it was just really tough really but I guess, I guess like anyone who self-employed you either just throw the towel in or you have to think, come on there's a way out of this and we just thought, yeah we've got to, you know, we're not going to give up we just thought our customers like what we do and they like coming here and we've always felt really grateful and honoured to just be the guardians of, you know the bakehouse and we don't want to let it go because if you cut us in half it would say the bakehouse so we just thought, no we can't we can't let it go under really and I think, I suppose anybody who's built a business from nothing which we had, you know to like let 10 years just fall away we're just, we weren't going to give it up really, I suppose So persevering, can't you? Yeah And keeping that passion alive as well Yeah, and I think as well not being, I suppose one tip would be don't be afraid to ask for help because it's not, we've never in all the years we've traded applied for any grants or anything and we're looking back we probably could have because we're a rural business but we've always thought I was an ex-bank manager and so I had to background in like finance and it's never been something that we felt we'd go begging for money but when time for the chips are down you're just like we've got to get all the help we can get really so and also just the expertise you know, the council were very good in like keeping us updated on what help was available and yeah, I listened in to different you know, forums on just keeping your morale up really and I remember there was a guy who runs a water sport business and I think a walking business on the South Downs and he was on a call one day and I remember I just came off the call and cried but I thought, oh my goodness like you feel just like we do so we're not alone everyone was having a tough time like he was, I think he'd been some sort of army rescue guy in the SAS or something and he was, you know, he was a tough guy and he was saying this has been my hardest challenge to see him all my business collapse and so he suddenly thought, oh, we're not alone really. There was a lot of help and as I said, we are, you know, well now we won't call ourselves experts even though we've got this online we're just sort of dabbling with it really but it's kind of worked what we've done so far but, you know, we know we need to take advice of other digital experts to help us or take it forward. Yeah, I suppose don't be afraid to ask for help really because you're never too old to learn and you don't have a choice when you know that. Actually, everyone around you is taking advantage of the support financial or otherwise on offer.  It's there for everyone. So thank you so much. That's right. You know, we're all really feeling for you now we're glad that you survived this terrible time. I will just go through the last few slides and then if we've still got a couple of minutes and you want to have a chat further with Louise then obviously you can totally fine. So I just want to make you aware of experience with Sussex. They couldn't make it on the call today but they are the county's destination management organization. They have got lots of free resources they also do webinars and workshops that you can go and attend if you are a visitor economy business. So do have a look at their website and sign up to their newsletters as well to get those updates on what is available to you as a business in that sector. They're really, really lovely people and I'm sure they'll be able to help if you've got anything that you need. And I think the funding on offer is there's a few things. So we've got the business hot house which is partially partially, I should say, matched funding, low case, which is all to do with being more low carbon and also rise as well, which is about innovation and providing funding around that. Just to recap on the digital champion support, you're eligible to get eight hours of support. A few of us are here today, but do get in contact with Postapapital if you would like to take advantage of that and they will assign you someone to work with you for those eight hours or whatever your priorities might be around digital adoption. That's the end of our session today, officially. And I just want to say that the next series, Systems and Productivity by FreedomWorks, they're all online and available to book your space now. Again, they're still free. They're probably on, not on Zoom. I think they might be held on the other platform, which, namely, escapes me temporarily, but they're on account systems and HR and stock inventory and things like that. So do have a look at the list and just look on to any that you would like. But that's it from us today. I just want if you can take a second to pretend the poll is there and put in the chat whether we have raised your confidence today in marketing within the sector. That would be amazing. So that would be not to talk confident, somewhat confident or confident. Thank you very much. And if you want to get the actual poll up, I think the poll is right there. I think I managed it. Oh, it's working. Yeah, I think so. I see it on my screen. So I can't. If does it? Is it there? OK, brilliant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, so it's being selected today. Cool. That's good. Thank you. And yeah, if you want to hang around for a minute, you're welcome. If not, I would just say, thank you again, Louise. Thank you to Ole field section as well. And thank you all for coming. Thank you, everyone. And don't forget, there is one more. The final session of ours is next Tuesday. It's a Q&A session. It's a big session where you can ask questions on this whole series. So if you have some real still have some questions that are desperate for answers on or maybe you've been waiting specifically, that would be a great session where there will be a whole panel of us from there. It's going to be a marketing blankety blank style panel. Yeah, that's going to work. Yeah, but you've said this as a pumpkin. This is my plan. Well, be careful, panellists. All right, so that was a that was a brilliant case study. I love that. That was that was, you know, inspiring, really, of the power of digital and, you know, how you how you just kind of rolled your sleeves up and right, we're going to get on and do this. And it's, you know, it's transformed your business. So, you know, thank you, thank you for attending the session. Cool. Yeah, I want to say as well that that was a fantastic case that and I've even I was thinking, you know, the next thing for you is rolling it out colleges. That'll be your next big thing.  So anyway, sorry, I'll shut up now.  I wasn't after a discount code, I was just saying. Can you send us some of those pizza things once a week? So you were if you'd like to do that, send me the code after and I'll put it in the follow up email. To be honest, as soon as Rachel told it showed me that that you were coming on to talk about it, I one of the websites I was like, I'm obviously going to be booking this for a weekend away. Can I have those things in our morning sprints on the gate? OK, sure. I'll do one for the well, the cottages or the shepherd's heart or if you bless me and I'll be amazing. No worries. Well, yeah, because everyone needs a bit of a help just now as well, don't they? All right. Thank you. All right, thank you. Oh, thank you, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Thank you for seeing you on the next one. Bye, bye, bye, bye. Oh, I've just realised so. Good work. That was great, guys. Well done. Clap, clap. OK, so.


Welcome back you're so watching the breakfast and plus TV Africa before we look at the other issue earlier advertised let's look at the very important subject matter of COVID-19 of course the global community has been doing everything they can to protect their citizens especially with the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus so the mandatory face coverings in public places and other COVID rules have now been dropped by the United Kingdom starting from today Prime Minister Boris Johnson had announced that when he appeared before the parliament last week a Prime Minister also said the government would immediately drop its advice for people to work from home and that's a a major one it's advice for people to work from home the Prime Minister said England was reverting to plan A due to boosters and how people had followed plan B measures he also told MPs scientists believed that the Omicron wave had peaked nationally and we're now being joined live from London by resident of Thames Mead London Mr. in Sikagabasequere it was uh Mr. Amos good morning to you thanks for joining us on the breakfast and plus TV Africa morning thank you for having me this is a major announcement by the Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson is this coming from a place of facts do you think and the real situation on the ground or is he trying to buy some public public support based on his travels of course the inquiry into his conduct and the conduct of his office during the lockdown absolutely I think the whole rhetoric of the whole thing is basically trying to buy him some public support by removing the masks and if you asked me and lately these are showed in the last time that the compliance levels for wearing masks in public places and coming out areas have dropped by every major peak for that what that means is the level of compliance has dropped so for me how would this make any sort of difference I think it's just a gimmick of his to try and buy some sort of public support but I think it's a little bit too early because if you look at the rates of infection particularly in London where it leads it is actually plateaued it's not really it has not actually dipped it's just sort of a little bit of a dip a little bit but it's not something that you could trigger an action shot as removing the mask so for me I think a little bit too early okay so so what are your thoughts on this liberty it feels like it's a liberty to not respecting this protocol do you think it's okay with the fact that this is you know a serious global concern yeah there's so many facts to be number one the wearing of the masks many organizations have come out right after Boris Johnson announced to say that well the guidance from wearing masks has been removed but we strongly advise the use of masks in coming out areas we've got so many transport companies you've got so many retailers coming out to tell you that they have not completely accepted the embrace the ideal removal of masks entirely so that tells you that people are taking them the PM's word with a little pinch of salt because there is no basis there are no scientific basis for him completely teaching the mask as it were. Mr Quarell what exactly is the difference between the plan A and plan B measures you know of course we're hearing that he Boris Johnson is saying the public had successfully followed plan B measures we've entered the plan A what's the difference for those of you who are there yeah for us it's it's it's very massive but it's not really clear but it's massive for instance we are legally required to work from home during the plan B that is no longer requirement so that is a big big difference this hospitality industry will actually be jumping up and down right now by that announcement because that means that they can go about their businesses without any sort of restrictions in place or access complete access to all sort of clubs, nightclubs, pubs and all that so the basically you can you can tell you can understand the basis for this decision it's purely business and not really scientific if you ask me it's purely driven by business so he's been short from beginning that he's listened to the business side of things a little bit more than the yeah the siege as it were so yes I completely agree with that fact so on second abasic do you see people complying would you be wearing the nose max what do you really think are people already you know taking that to consideration not working from home among orders for instance I work from one and but when I have to go to the hybrid week I currently do sort of what's it called hybrid so you work a few days in the office and a few days at home the guidance for wearing masks in your has not changed the guidance for wearing masks in the bus stays public transport the trade the rails has not changed people still wear masks so exactly how does this impact the life and culture of people it has little or no impact and compliance levels have naturally dropped because people have seems to be compliant with wearing marks generally so that will not suddenly change but I don't think that it will have any sort of massive difference because to be honest are you still wearing masks people if you notice the compliance levels has to do a lot with the age brackets as well but all that you are the more likely you have to comply with wearing marks the younger you are for instance you're talking about the guys in the millenials for instance they don't give a client who's about wearing masks generally so but do you think do you also think that this might you know go well with some of the what you want to call it the conspiracy theories around especially in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole as regards the entire because a lot of people still think that you know the COVID-19 and Omicron is just a hoax and so with this decision and with the policy coming from the United Kingdom the system might just really go to justify that COVID doesn't really exist it's just some political power play here well the conspiracy theorist sadly it's disappointing because for me I've had close friends I've had colleagues in Nigeria I've had a close friend from Nigeria die of COVID case all because we don't believe that COVID is real this is what most stations should make people understand and the fact that we don't have you know sophisticated healthcare says to be able to track monitor these things does not rule out the fact that COVID does not it is real people have had it people have been hospitalized for it people have died for it so died with it and so we need to we need to distance people from thinking that COVID is some sort of conspiracy to to I don't know what I don't know what to call it it's the same drive that prevents people from taking vaccinations as well because they don't believe that it's real so they don't believe that the vaccination is meant for it is alive it is alive COVID is real and this message needs to be passed across to African countries and nations a large okay thank you very much it's quite interesting in one sentence what's the reaction of the public basically to this move in one sentence please any different okay all right all right thank you very much used one word I appreciate that in Sikah Kaba Sekwere is joining us live from things made in London United Kingdom giving us analysis of the latest move by the United Kingdom government to relax on the restrictions please in the public as part of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in that part of the world thank you very much for your time merci we have to move on on the breakfast this morning yes hopefully all right we do appreciate your time and hopefully when we return we head straight to the third conversation where we look at the issue of the cost of fail subsidy for 2022