Projects
ERA Personalisation
The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) has been busy enhancing the user experience for the teachers and students who access their educational broadcast resources. Users can now bookmark clips and programmes, allowing them to quickly find their favourites from among the thousands of available resources. Teachers can also add their own notes to each resource – a useful feature when planning lessons. In addition, users can now maintain and update their profile data, enabling ERA to keep up to date with the changing demographics of their user base.
Projects Abroad HubSpot integration
As part of our ongoing digital transformation work with Projects Abroad, we’ve started integrating their systems with the HubSpot CRM platform, marking an exciting milestone in their journey. By leveraging the CRM’s features, we’re helping Projects Abroad streamline customer relationship management, making it easier to engage with users at various stages of their journey. This integration sets up tracking for customers and their application process, utilising HubSpot’s powerful pipeline features. It also lays the groundwork for backend teams to make the most of CRM capabilities and opens the door for future improvements. We’re excited to support Projects Abroad in this next step toward modernising their digital tools, and we’re eager to continue enhancing their systems to drive future growth.
Redevelopment of IPU’s Database
Over the past two years, we have worked side by side with the Inter-Parliamentary Union to redevelop their Parline database. We reviewed and redesigned their underlying data model, provided a fully featured RESTful API, and made significant improvements to the efficiency of their database and administration functionality. Additionally, we enhanced the website with more feature-rich data visualisation abilities, and created a new modern technical architecture to facilitate the enhancements to search tools, data access, and visualisations.
Leicestershire Personal Assistant Noticeboard
A Personal Assistant (PA) is someone who supports disabled or older people to live their lives more fully and independently. The PA Noticeboard we built for Possability People helps to match PAs looking for work with potential employers looking for support. In partnership with Possability People we continue to roll out the PA Noticeboard to new local authorities, and in August we launched the latest site for Leicestershire County Council.
BAAT Member Events Calendar
The British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT) runs a wide variety of events for their members, and for non-members who are interested in joining the profession. They also have active forums where their members share information of interest to others, and until now the forums have been where members would advertise their own events. We have now added a calendar of events into the memberzone, with the ability for members to add their own events. These events are moderated by the BAAT team, and are then visible to other members, alongside the events run by BAAT.
Social events
Spontaneous team lunches
We are very lucky to have a team that we love and, whenever we can, we like to spend time together. Throughout the years, making plans has become harder as people have been spreading their wings and moving to different places around the world. This is why we take any opportunity we have to go for a quick lunch out and sometimes even play a game of pool!
Summer Day Out
Every year, when the sun is shinning, we take the team out for a day to spend together as a big family!
To start this year’s summer bash we went to a go karting venue and raced against each other to reach for the podium. We completed two races, and the winners were Karl Maw and David Hide.
To regain our energy we went to The Perch, a fun restaurant in Lancing that has a lovely sea view. We enjoyed a delicious meal of our choice, then spent some time eating our desserts and having a laugh whilst sunbathing!
To finish off the day, we headed back to Brighton and enjoyed some drinks and Jenga games in one of Brighton’s lovely local pubs.
Let’s see what our next team outing will look like!
Employee spotlight
We want to take this moment to celebrate Bradley Taylor for his hard work and commitment to BrightMinded during these 10 years of service by sharing his story in software development.
Since his teenage years, Bradley already knew he wanted to become a software engineer. When the concept of coding was introduced to him, he was instantly attracted to its logical nature. After exploring many areas of IT in college, Bradley settled for web development.
Some of the things Bradley loves about being a software developer is being able to work with talented front and back-end developers, liaise with clients across different industries, and our trusted partners.
Throughout his 10 years at BrightMinded, Bradley has been able to go from a junior front-end developer to being the head of development, taking part in a variety of projects with confidence and exposure knowing that at BrightMinded we have the skills to develop any project that comes our way.
For those out there who want to pursue a career in software development, don’t be afraid thinking you are not good enough, everyone starts somewhere! At BrightMinded, when we hire inexperienced developers, it’s important for us to see evidence of their potential. For those with a university degree, that might be the form of a university project. However, for those who are self-taught, we recommend building up your own portfolio of work. That could be websites for family or friends, a personal blog, etc. The important thing is to have something that shows a level of proactiveness.
Team expansion
In June, we welcomed Rachel Green into our eight week digital marketing summer internship program with the University of Sussex. During her time here, she wrote incredibly insightful articles, expanded her knowledge on software and marketing B2B, and took part in organising events. After her internship she joined the BrightMinded team and became a content creator to continue developing educational pieces.
Later on, in September, we welcomed a new Solutions Manager. Dubravka Zaric joined the BrightMinded family with a decade of expertise in the technology sector, dedicated to delivering great solutions.
Recent blogs
We have posted several interesting articles since our last company update.
An educational blog about how to contribute in making the world a better place by optimising your website sustainability.
Following this, we posted two articles one about the best onboarding membership site practices, and another one about artificial intelligence for membership sites.
Our latest blog is a very interesting piece about Fermi problems, aiming to calculate the number of pizzas eaten by the BrightMinded team.