Kickoff: 2012
Client: Comic Relief
Status: live
The story
The Explora-lab-ora-torium
We built a lean, and hilarious, hack lab for Comic Relief to help them launch six new products in just six weeks.
Week 0 - Setup
Comic Relief asked us a simple question - can we help them make more money, out of funny, at more times throughout the year using digital. Of course we said yes, and we put forward the Exploralaboratorium as our solution - a six week hack lab to make at least six products. The lab would focus on moving ideas into prototypes, quickly. We moved into Comic Relief's offices, and within the first day we'd built our website, started meeting people and found our first really exciting idea - Dares!
Week 1 - Dare Roulette
Week one we built Dare Roulette - an app that encourages you to do stupid things for money! The prototype was designed to enable Sarah, the product manager, to do a simple test to see which mechanism is most effective in raising money - donations or payments. She's now sending it out to 5000 people.
Week 2 - Topic Telly
In week two we built Topic Telly, a video platform for schools. The idea is to reduce churn amongst the schools that do Red Nose Day and sport relief and thus increase donations. We do this by only letting these schools use the product, and by capturing more teachers email addresses. The schools an youth team plan to offer it to 50% of their base to test if it works.
We also wrote a long blog post reflecting on what we've learnt so far.
Week 3 - Mega Miles
In week three we built the mega miles challenge - an app that aggregates run data from map my run and allows you to set sponsorship goals for long term challenges.
Week 4 - Have the last laugh
In week four we decided to reinvent legacy giving and built Have the Last Laugh - an app that helps you make a legal will, in 5 minutes, and leave a gift to Comic Relief. This is now being taken forward as a commercial product.
Week 5 - The napp challenge
During week five we iterated on Dare Roulette, and shipped a native mobile app in under 36 hours! Its called the Napp Challenge, and its a challenge for people who are addicted to their smartphones. The napp is scheduled to be released for Red Nose Day 2013.
Week 6 - Fundeer
In week six we built our most ambitious hack - Fundeer.org. Fundeer brings together fundraising and volunteering to get people to get sponsored to do worthwhile stuff for Comic Relief supported causes. We loved this idea as it bought together so many different parts of the business, and we built some clever Linkedin integration to make it so user can sign in with one click and get relevant challenges based on their skills. However, it is a complex and big project so is currently not scheduled to go any further. Shame.
Week 7 - Strategy
After all the hacking and making and demoing and pitching and arguing and meeting and talking and debating we took the time to think about what this means for Comic Relief going forward. Obviously, most people would call this back to front, doing strategy inspired by execution, but for us it made complete sense - successful digital products are a combination of the right timing, with the best execution. Ideas are pretty low down the list of importance. So for us, we wanted to get going, fast, and get good by doing. Delivery, not deliverables.
However, we did relent and write a nice thick strategy type powerpoint to leave behind making recommendations for how Comic Relief can build out its product management and development skills in order to make money year round, and the executive is now reviewing how to implement these recommendations going forward.
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