Clients & Projects

Save the Children

This is without question our biggest current project. We were brought in by STC UK in the Spring of this year to do some initial strategy facilitation with the web team, but our work quickly expanded from there.

Our main contribution has been the development of a detailed strategy for the online component of EVERY ONE, the organisation’s 5-year programme to reduce child and infant mortality. Through extensive internal consultation, we developed and scoped out the everyone.org website, were jointly responsible for appointing the agency to build the site, and have been the liaison point throughout the build phase. Additionally, we have scoped out a mobile SMS pilot scheme for STC in Nigeria and are currently planning Phase 2 of the EVERY ONE digital campaign.

The City of London

COL is our longest-standing client. We were engaged by them in the Summer of 2008 to provide an honest appraisal of their current web site and to make some attendant recommendations. Our work has grown from there. We’ve refined the initial paper to create an evaluation of resources necessary to recreate the website in an entirely different form, have facilitated thinking around the ‘COL’s current offline and online brand offering, and have provided strategic thinking about website/intranet synergies and divergences.

At the time of writing we are creating the brief for the design of the new website.

Royal Opera House, London

We’ve had four discreet work streams with the House. We delivered a workshop in the Summer of 08 looking at the role of digital technology in arts education – and music education specifically.

We produced the interactive programme notes for the online video of Don Giovanni, creating the notes themselves and working with the platform provider to ensure a smooth user experience.

We also facilitated a strategic brainstorm to help design a new creativity competition, which has just launched, called fanfare.

Finally, we developed a Moodle-based eLearning programme for the Royal Ballet School.

Client list in brief

The City of London
Developed strategy for new website and managing the build process now

Save the Children
Scoped out a website at the heart of a 5-year campaign

BBC Training and Development
Ran a series of social media seminars in London & Glasgow

Glyndebourne
Created a digital media strategy

The Royal Opera House
Seminars on tech and education, small scale bespoke buildand helped create fanfare

Creativity Culture and Education
Conceived a cultural activity tracker for young people

BBC Audio and Music Interactive
Wrote a music learning portal feasibility report

City Fringe Partnership
Scoped out a website for London Jewellery Week

Barbican
Ran a digital media workshop for senior management

Barchester Care Homes
Delivered social media workshops

London Sinfonietta‏
Created strategy for website redesign

Outline Productions
Created a digital media strategy

Instrata‏
User experience work for smart phone OS

Tech PEI‏
Introductions to UK games developers

Institute of Digital I‏nnovation
Wrote a report on UK digital industries

IT4Arts
Hour-long multimedia presentation on IP, art and tech

BBC Training and Development

We began working on the BBC T&D department’s Future Now project in Winter 08/09, delivering a series of seminars and workshops on the theme of social media – and particularly what social media means, practically, for broadcasters.

The events ranged from small hands-on training sessions through to large, formal presentations, featuring a wide range of guests from inside the BBC and out. The series initially ran in London at various BBC locations until Spring 2009; we’ve recently re-built the sessions and run them for BBC Scotland in Glasgow.

Our role in the sessions took in all aspects of the production: session design, guest liaison, overall event production, hosting, brainstorm facilitation and in many cases, presentation.

Glyndebourne

This was one of our collaborations with arts consultant John Kieffer (see below). We worked with the Glyndebourne Opera Company in Spring 09, having been asked to make recommendations about possible directions for their website.

We took what for us is the closest thing we have to a template for such work – albeit a highly adapted one. Initially we ran in tandem a piece of desk research and a series of internal stakeholder meetings at Glyndebourne. We followed with three three-hour workshops looking at various potential development strands for Glyndebourne online. We finally delivered an extensive paper capturing these sessions and presenting a series of recommendations about not only the Glyndebourne website, but about how best to resource this ambition, its technology platform and a number of business development opportunities in the realm of social media.

Creativity Culture and Education

Another collaboration with John Kieffer, our work with Creative Partnership’s CCE (Creativity, Culture, Education) Find Your Talent programme was essentially a think piece which involved the headline scoping of an online and mobile application to help children and young people track their cultural activity across time, and compare that activity with that of friends, classmates, and aggregated groups such as school, age group and location.

BBC Audio & Music Interactive

The BBC’s A&Mi department commissioned us in the Spring of 09 to write a report looking at the feasibility of the organisation creating and maintaining a very interesting new digital learning project. We performed an wide-ranging series of interviews with key individuals across the BBC and followed this up with an extensive piece of desk-based research, studying and auditing the online music education area in general, the BBC’s current and potential role in it, and issues of market impact.

City Fringe Partnership, London

We worked with CFP and the Communications Group to shape up the web offering for year two of the Coutts London Jewellery Week. Working with representatives of Coutts, the media agency and CFP itself, we delivered a scope for the new website, jointly appointed the project manager to run the build and helped to shortlist and appoint the design agency responsible for the brief.

London Sinfonietta

We worked very closely with the LS team to create a fresh strategy for all of their digital undertakings, the first of which was to build a new website. We supported the tendering process and then became the liaison point between AVCO, the agency appointed, and the organisation. We continued to develop the strategy with the two teams and took the project to the launch of a very successful new website.

Barchester Care Homes

Barchester are the UK’s fourth largest supplier of care homes for the elderly. They asked us to consider how social media might play a role in their communications strategy and in the care of their residents. This was a new subject area for us and, as ever, we immersed ourselves in the sector, looking at the role of digital media in the health sector generally and care sector specifically. We then led a team from Barchester through workshops looking at the phenomenon of social media at its widest, gradually homing in on its use in care and health provision, before brainstorming Barchester-specific social media concepts.

Institute of Digital Innovation, University of Teesside

IDI is a department of the University of Middlesbrough, in the North East of England. Sited in its own cutting edge facility, it strives to bring together local tech businesses and academia, acting at once as a research centre, a technology incubator and home to post-graduate education. In the winter of 07/08 IDI asked us to prepare a report on the state of the digital industries in Britain, helping them to identify areas to target in their research, teaching and investment. Following a series of detailed briefings from the report’s commissioner, we wrote a lengthy and detailed survey of the UK digital media arena, and made some typically forthright observations and recommendations.

"Double Shot understood our requirements and delivered beyond our expectations: their lucid and insightful analysis of the latest trends in technology and media, along with a thorough understanding of the implications of these trends for academia and business alike, both identified high growth opportunities and pulled no punches pulled when it came to over-invested areas."
Dr Jim TerKeurst, Director: Institute of Digital Innovation

Barbican Centre, London

In the Spring of 2008 we ran a half-day workshop for 40 or so of the most senior staff at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, leading them through some key concepts on digital and communications technology: social media, ubiquity of connectivity, cloud tech and web tools, user-generated content, P2P, streaming vs downloaded content… We then looked specifically at how this was all affecting the arts & entertainment sector, asking who was doing good work,, who was a missing the mark, and what was missing, that is, what opportunities were out there for the Barbican?

"Justin and Simon delivered an excellent workshop with good feedback from all who attended; they went on to provide an excellent paper which is going to be incredibly useful as the 'baseline bible' of understanding and something - along with its links and references - which I know colleagues will find really useful."
Chris Denton, Head of Marketing, Barbican Centre

IT4Arts

We were asked by IT4Arts - the arts wing of the IT Livery Company - to take part in a conference about the impact of digital technology on intellectual property in the arts field. The result was "The Trouble with Poetry", an hour long multimedia presentation taking a wide-ranging and typically idiosyncratic look at the whole area, from the sharing of poetry on the web to the problems with the BBC's seven-day on demand window, from Wendy Cope to Negativland. The talk can be read in full here and formed the basis of an essay we wrote for the After the Crunch book.

Manchester Music Service

Back in the Autumn of 08 we went up to Manchester to help out at a a day organised by Manchester Music Service and hosted by the University of Salford. Over the course of the day we delivered three 90 minute sessions to over a hundred music education practitioners in total, looking at the impact of digital technology and communications technology on the music education sector. We discussed online tools, file-sharing, the rise and rise of social media, wikipedia-style knowledge sharing, mobile apps, music-based video games... the gamut, basically. As ever, we avoided a slide presentation, instead using live, online demonstration and encouraging the sessions to be as interactive as possible.

Classroom of the Future, Gateshead

Invited by Marc Jaffrey of pioneering reputation management consultancy Think Again, Simon travelled to the wonderful Sage in Gateshead in January 2008 to present a duo of presentations at the Music Learning Live! conference. As part of the Classroom of the Future project, Simon gave two presentations; The Kids Are Alright looked at just what teenagers get up to with technology while Let's Put the Future Behind Us discussed some of the new technologies just around the corner, suggesting that the really important ones ar e those with us right now. As ever, Simon eschewed the use of slide-based presentation and instead gave live, online demonstrations - always nerve-racking but always fun too!

Prince Edward Island, Canada

Prince Edward Island is the most easterly of the Canadian provinces and a Anglophone; Tech PEI seeks to launch initiatives encouraging technologists to move to the province and, following the success of other Canadian provinces in the video games sector, asked us to set up meetings between them and leading UK games developers during the games conference season in the late Summer of 2007. Drawing on our extensive contacts in the games sector, we were able to affect a series of fruitful meetings for the organisation.

Outline Productions, London

North London-based Outline are an award-winning production outfit specializing in mainstream, accessible but ultimately serious, issues-based TV. Their work includes House of Tiny Tearaways, Dumped and The Big Experiment, and has been commissioned widely across the UK sector, from, among others, BBC2 and BBC3, Channel 4, Five, Discovery and Sky. We worked with them through the Spring and Summer of 2008, running workshops with production staff, creating a digital media strategy for the company (including a template on how to respond to a 360 commission) and helping with introductions to key Interactive content commissioners.

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