On the 1st May 2026, we held our 5th Blogathon. As a team we have come to look forward to these gatherings. They give us a chance to come together and share our thinking across different areas of our work.

Why we make time to write

We started our Blogathons in early 2025 as a way to make time and space for writing. It is something that we all value as a team, but that can easily get lost amongst our delivery and client work.

Blogathons give us a chance to take a moment to step back, reflect on what we are learning and seeing across projects and to turn that into something that we can share with others. They’ve also become a really valuable way for us to come together as a team and be present together.

Evolving our approach

This time, we wanted to be more deliberate about what we were creating. We wanted to focus on real client challenges and explore the kinds of situations that we have been seeing across government and in the private sector. We also wanted to share some of the different ways we have approached these challenges.

The topics we came up with include:

how to shape strong ideas into better user outcomes
why best practice doesn’t always lead to success
why digital service procurements go wrong (and how to fix it)
the hidden work behind great digital products
how data shapes better digital solutions
and why complex work doesn’t need complex language

They’re challenges we’ve come across in different ways across our projects, and ones we’re still learning from. Through these blogs, we’re hoping to share some of that experience in a way that’s useful to others facing similar situations.

Working in pairs

We have also decided to take a new approach to our writing. For this Blogathon we worked in pairs to shape each article. The aim was to encourage more collaboration, bringing together different experiences and perspectives from across the team and making the most of that shared thinking.

Before we met, we also spent some time preparing — gathering our thoughts, experiences and insights, and contributing to each other’s blog themes.

How the day went

We started our day on Friday morning in Kew with a welcome presentation followed by discussions in pairs talking through our ideas in detail. The aim was to get from initial idea to full draft article by midday.

Lunch was at the Coach and Horses, Kew - a beautiful Georgian coaching inn right opposite Kew Gardens. There we enjoyed a hearty lunch and reflected on how the day went.

The general consensus was that the day and new approach had been really positive. It enabled us to come more prepared to the session, to share and build on ideas more effectively and to enjoy our time together as a team also.

After our lunch we had time to continue editing our articles or relax with a game of Star Wars Scrabble for those who had finished already!

What was different this time

This Blogathon felt slightly different in how we worked. The combination of focusing each article on a real client challenge, working in pairs, and spending time preparing beforehand meant we could build and shape more in-depth articles more effectively.

There was more time for discussion and sharing experiences as we went, and the work felt more collaborative throughout. We kept coming back to real examples from our projects, which helped keep the writing focused and practical. We also kept asking ourselves, 'would a client recognise this problem?’, and ‘would they find this article useful?’ as we reviewed the articles, to make sure we were staying close to real situations we’ve seen and being as helpful as possible.

We’re still learning as we go, but we hope this reflects a bit of an evolution in how we approach these sessions since we started.

Our aim is still the same — to create something useful for clients and others facing similar challenges, and to share thinking that is grounded in real experience.

We’ll be publishing the articles over the coming weeks. If anything we’ve written resonates — or if you’re working through similar challenges — we’d be really happy to talk.

Read about our previous Blogathons:

Author

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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.