My first week at dxw
Without wanting to sound like I’m attending an AA meeting – Hi I’m Jane and this is my first week at dxw as Marketing and Communities Manager 🙂
The last time I was working within the public sector sphere was way back in 1999 for The Home Office’s Communication Directorate, and it’s safe to say things have changed somewhat since those days when it comes to how businesses market themselves online – way before the days of social media and even before most businesses had their own website!
Since then I’ve mostly been working as a marketer in the tech world – for many years at Origins.net, the first pay-per-view website who were groundbreaking in providing public access to birth, marriage, census, death (and other weird and wonderful datasets) records from the General Register Office for Scotland and the Society of Genealogists to those wanting to research their family history.
My last tech role was just down the road on Old Street for a fintech company, Ormsby Street heading up their marketing department. As one of the original team, it was a fantastic opportunity to work alongside a hugely talented team of innovators and creative minds and help bring to life a product called CreditHQ – an online platform to help small businesses assess the credit-worthiness of businesses they’re trading with by giving them actionable insights and tips on how to improve their business cash-flow.
During my two and a bit year stint there, we created some unique ways to engage with our customers – such as the ‘Tinder for Business’ landing pages https://www.credithq.co.uk/businessmatch and I was lucky enough to organise (and get to go to) some fantastic tech events around the world from Web Summit, The Next Web to being picked as one of the UKTI’s ‘tech ambassadors’ to go the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin (which was as brilliant as you’d imagine!).
One of the challenges and key lessons I’ve learnt in the last few years at a tech company was how to work in a fast-paced agile environment and the importance of not only creating marketing campaigns and events that work well and gain engagement and traction; but how to pivot and react when things beyond your control may happen! (such as being asked to do a last-minute talk at a major industry event or provide copy for a newspaper at the eleventh hour).
I’m hugely excited about joining dxw and making my (hopefully very positive!) mark and shouting about the great work we do here for public sector teams – from NHS England’s website to providing hosting services for DEFRA, Thames Valley Housing and many more. We’ve got a lot of exciting developments up our sleeves in the upcoming months, so keep your eyes peeled for new events we’ll be putting on in the future!