Can’t believe we are already halfway through the course! Key updates and learnings from the past week below:
Persuasive design: Companies and corporations use persuasive design ALL THE TIME to boost their sales and hoodwink us into making purchases that we perhaps didn't even need in the first place. We learned all about these tiny tricks and tried to identify them in our daily lives. And as suspected, they truly are everywhere (at the mall, embedded within different brochures and pamphlets, when we make online purchases etc.). Surely enough, persuasive design is not just an art, but also a science. We learned all the important strategies and tricks to design compelling material which would garner the attention of our potential clients. We worked long and hard on this; received feedback from our fellows and made ample edits and modifications all leading to a finished product which we could use in our practice
Basics of graphic design: We may have the best content in the world but if we use black and white paper of poor quality and shabby font to get the message across to our clients, would it be effective? If anything, it would be such a waste of good content only because we weren't smart enough to understand the basics of how to package our content. To fix this issue, we spent an entire class learning about the basics of good design. We delved into text sizes, fonts, colours, images, layout and much more and learned which would be appropriate based on our target audience. We studied different examples of good versus bad design so that even if we have to outsource these tasks in the future, we are able to give sound instructions and not come across as design illiterates!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Managing and maintaining relationships with clients is a crucial part of any business! Imagine making 10 phone calls to your prospective clients; 3 are out of town, 4 didn't respond, 1 asked to call back in 10 minutes and the final two you had a wonderful conversation with and they are interested in your services. How do you store all this data? Do you make note of when to call the prospective clients who didn’t respond? Did you make a note of when the first 3 prospects you spoke to are back in town? If you didn’t, how would you know when to call them again? All these processes don’t have to be random because there are easy tools available which help you to streamline all these processes! This ensures you aren’t losing business and revenue only because you couldn’t remember to capture the small details. We learned about two such tools and how to use them for our business-the humble Google excel sheet and Asana; a project management tool.
Website designing and development: No, we didn't have to switch professions from health counsellors to part-time coders for this task! In fact, it was a lot easier than we originally anticipated. We learned about what makes a good website, how to keep clutter minimal to none, studied some good and bad websites and invested ourselves into creating and designing a website which makes the experience for our clients not only user-friendly, but also warm and welcoming. It’s still work in progress but we are definitely getting there!
IMPACT challenge-Week 3 (From Inspiration to Transformation): At IMPACT this week, we had a grand moment of relief and an extremely fun surprise but hey, that's all we can share here because what if you're a future participant?! We are strong proponents of no spoilers ;)
That’s it for Week 3. So many new learnings, so much execution, so many revisions and things really seem to be coming together for our fellows now. We look forward to next week and everything that it will bring forth for our hard-working NEP fellows!