In the third week of January, we came together for our first Blogathon of this year. This is our second year of running Blogathons and so we are delighted to be continuing to build on the groundwork already set by the previous sessions. We are also incredibly pleased to welcome Jill Russo, our content designer and have her join us on this special team day.

The idea of our Blogathons is to give ourselves:

Time to think
Space to write
Power to share

With this in mind, we started the day with a round of coffees and hot chocolates from the wonderful National Archives Maid of Honour cafe, enjoyed a quick welcome presentation and then set off to find some quiet spaces to get creative.

To make the day extra special we had planned a team lunch at Grill off the Green, a restaurant tucked away near Kew Green.

What were we hoping to get from this Blogathon?

Our team Blogathons give us a way to:

Create - meaningful content together
Connect - with each other and readers more
Contribute - to the company’s story and impact
Celebrate - our team and what we can do together

We’ve found that they bring us closer as a team and also strengthen our creative voice. We want to be able share our experiences and learnings with our clients, community and partners. We also want to continue to build consistency in our publishing.

We spent time thinking about why we blog

Before we started writing we asked everyone to think about who their blog post was for, what they were trying to say, and whether it would be genuinely helpful to someone reading it.

We also encouraged the team to think about the problems our clients and potential clients are facing right now, and whether their post could offer any insight, advice or reassurance based on their own experience.

The questions were designed to encourage everyone to write with focus and intention - hopefully enabling each of us to create something that is truly useful, thoughtful and grounded in real work.

What topics did we agree to write about?

Everyone came to the day prepared with ideas for what to write about. The topics we agreed on were:

The Tyranny of Use Cases
Digital Sovereignty
Vibe coding in DnD note-taker
Transforming the public sector with smart data and user-centred design
UKGovCamp reflections
People hate spreadsheets or do they? (Our spreadsheet survey results)
Blogathon learnings

Writing with trust and building connections

Another key component to our Blogathon this time was thinking about trust and building stronger connections with our clients, partners and readers.

By sharing how we think, what we’ve learnt, our approach to our work and ethos in an open and honest way, we want clients to feel closer to us. We hope to draw from our real experiences, our client work, the patterns we see across different projects and the sectors we work in, and to explore these learnings together.

We hope that they resonate with our readers and help to build confidence in our work and team. Our aim is to write in a way that reflects who we are as a team: thoughtful, curious and practical and for our blogs to be something people can trust, come back to, and find value in over time.

Looking ahead

By the end of the day, we had a collection of blog posts to review and that we’re proud of. They represent a range of topics, perspectives and experiences are all rooted in the same intention: to share what we know in a way that’s honest, useful and practical.

Our Blogathons continue to be an important part of how we make space to think, write and share. We hope these posts give you a sense of what we are like as a team - what we’ve been working on, how we are growing and what we’re learning, and how we approach the work that we do.

We hope you enjoy reading the articles that came out of this Blogathon and find something useful along the way. If you’d like to talk more about any of the topics, or explore how they relate to your own work, we’d be happy to chat.

Also explore what we did in our previous Blogathons:

Author

Featured

Nisa Chitakasem

Nisa is the Chief Marketing Officer at Register Dynamics. Having studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, she has a strong background in technology and a great appreciation for what technology can do.