Digital Transformation Award Winners
The Digital Transformation award recognises companies at the cutting edge of digital design and technologies who are boosting Staffordshire’s growing reputation as a digital hub. The Staffordshire Chambers Business Awards judges were keen to hear compelling examples of how digital technology has been used to transform business processes, customer experience or to create exciting, effective campaigns.
Before 2021, Healthwatch Stoke-on-Trent relied heavily upon face-to-face engagement and had a narrow digital presence with a limited digital audience. As a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic limitations, we adapted our business model from traditional methods, such as face-to-face engagement, to evolve and thrive in a digital age to provide the public with reliable, accurate, and up-to-date information in the face of the growing presence of fake news.
To accomplish our new business model objectives our social media and our mainstream website were pivotal in achieving digital growth and efficient online engagement. Not only did we strive to share local information and interactive content on Facebook and Twitter, but we continued to champion local people by listening to and acting on their concerns around health and social care services through social media messages, phone calls, and emails in direct response to trends and emerging themes in peoples concern regarding their overall wellbeing.
We changed the whole way we worked during the pandemic to embrace digital working to both reach out to people in Stoke-on-Trent as well as communicate and work as a team together albeit remotely to strive to reach people and collect their voices. We brought in weekly e-bulletins where we would provide people with local news, including sharing of any vaccination pop-ups, we posted a series of mini call-outs with prompts to encourage people to share their stories on the related topic, and set up a number of drop-in sessions on Zoom to offer an alternative to faceless phone calls.
