SME Member of the Week: Hello Lamp Post

Hello Lamp Post is a two-way communication platform that can reach any member of your community, using their mobile phone.

How did your company start?

Wind back a few years to 2013 and the wheels of Hello Lamp Post were in motion - but not the Hello Lamp Post you might know today. Our business actually evolved from a one off digital art installation in Bristol in the summer of 2013, after Hello Lamp Post won the award for Watershed’s Playable City. The initiative looked to utilise the city’s pre-existing infrastructure and repurpose it to enable playful digital interactions with the community - an idea born out of our observations and frustrations. After Hello Lamp Post received an overwhelming response from the public, we knew we had to do more - we could really make a difference by giving power back to the people. I guess you could say this was our ‘lightbulb’ moment - we saw an opportunity to scale our businesses and potentially have a positive impact on society. 

From this point onwards, Hello Lamp Post has been on a mission to “make places better for people”. After investigating some challenges facing the public sector, we found current tools for public communication were out-dated and analogue, leading to slow, expensive and often non-compliant public engagement. The common denominator with these existing community engagement platforms was that they focus on aggregating feedback from other sources, instead of generating valuable data - where public sector organisations rely on the customer to commission expensive town hall meetings, research projects, marketing campaigns and awareness events. 

Since incorporating in 2018, Hello Lamp Post is the only business that has built a communication platform for any public space. But there’s more to our edge than that. Hello Lamp Post’s technology is:

• Proprietary, AI-driven and location relevant, using NLP analytics and reporting
• Flexible, allowing us to serve multiple sectors, use cases, audiences and locations at once
• Unique - we have a very strong brand position that has put us ahead of the curve
• Valuable, this is proven by our strong early traction
• Based around our underlying mission - to enable more community-led decision making and place shaping

… and we’re proud to say that we’ve launched in 60+ locations around the world, supporting a variety of sectors, organisations and communities. Benefits we can bring to any organisation includes:

• Increase inclusivity with diverse, widespread and underrepresented audiences
• Monitor real-time citizen perceptions and gather insights around key topics
• Benchmark and measure changing community behaviours over time
• Increase accessibility with low barrier to entry
• Improve internal efficiencies, by directing resource where it’s most needed
• Make decision processes more efficient, using evidence based data
• Automate query answering to increase staff resource and time
• Improve transparency and communication between decision makers and citizens
• Easily adaptable, customisable, always on engagement solution
• Flexibility to scale over time, according to engagement priorities

How does your company contribute to this month's theme?

A smarter approach to patient engagement.

Hello Lamp Post is working with NHS Royal United Hospital Bath, providing a digital automation tool that saves staff time and empowers patients to share their thoughts on their care experience. Through our platform, patients are giving real-time feedback about the service they receive. Ranging from their overall experience to the welcome they received from staff. Hello Lamp Post is making it simpler for patients to give feedback and automating the process of data collection and reporting for hospital staff.

While healthcare providers face increasing pressures on service delivery, Hello Lamp Post is providing a solution that helps reduce the strain of administrative tasks on care staff, while improving cost efficiency.

What’s the impact so far?

• Collecting feedback via the Friends & Family Test is a valuable but time-consuming process for NHS staff.  
• By automating parts of data collection that require staff input, Hello Lamp Post is saving hospital staff 300 hours of time, per department, per annum. 
• Patients now have an accessible feedback tool. Rather than completing a lengthy paper form after treatment, patients can use Hello Lamp Post by scanning QR codes located around the hospital with their phones. 
• Since launching, we’ve increased RUH Bath’s feedback rate from 2% to 70%. The feedback received is clearer and more actionable. For example,  58% of orthopaedic patients recorded their experience as ‘Good’ and 5% reported ‘areas for improvement’.

Jo Miller, Chief Nursing Information Officer says “Our patients are at the heart of everything we do. We’re keen to encourage feedback and take action when improvements are needed. With Hello Lamp Post, the possibilities are endless!” 

Who's behind your company?

The UK is known for attracting the best talent and we’ve definitely benefited from this when you look at our team! With an extensive range of knowledge from a variety of fields, our team consists of passionate pioneers who all have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Our skill sets range from: Project Management, Business Strategy, Customer Success, Marketing and Brand, Software Engineering, Design, Sales and more, across the UK and US.

Tiernan Mines - CEO & Co Founder - “The one thing that does stand out to me most is our team! Not only have we scaled from four to 17 in the space of a year, but we’ve built such a brilliant culture that makes me excited to go into work everyday. I’m so proud to be part of a team that is both driven by our people and towards our collective opportunity and societal impact.”

Natasha Willis - Community Engagement Representative - “Hello Lamp Post is such an exciting company to work for with a genuinely amazing team and refreshing company culture”.

Rahul Bhogasara - Implementation Manager - “Hello Lamp Post looks to answer the hard questions - because they are the ones that are worth answering. Places around us have so much more to give than what you might initially think. Whether you’re in the comforts of your hometown or you’ve stumbled upon a new place - there’s always something new to share, answers to be found and stories to be told. Hello Lamp Post helps uncover these places and bring them to life and I’m proud to say every deployment we’ve worked on embodies our core values - to be curious, caring and playful”.

What’s your perspective on the present and the future of this month's theme?

Hospitals and other healthcare organisations will find many benefits associated with becoming ‘smarter’:

• Advancements in NLP and machine learning models have made it possible for organisations to engage with their community in an easy, quick and cost-efficient way - RUH has paved the way in achieving this and enhancing their community engagement strategies.
• Engagement and consultation is becoming increasingly mandated globally when it comes to public spaces. We expect to see public sector organisations like hospitals engaging with their patients and visitors more regularly to meet these new demands. The future of any kind of decision making is community involvement.

Recent Success

After the success of our deployments in the South West of England with the Environment Agency, we’re proud to say that we have a National Contract with the organisation and have some exciting plans to scale our work across the UK. Helping communities to better understand their flood risk and see how they can reduce the impact of climate change on their local area, whilst supporting the organisation with improving service delivery, extending their community reach and reducing engagement costs. 

What does the future look like for your company?

We have plans to scale our business and make every corner of the world interactive. Subsequently, we want to improve the democracy of our societies, so that we can make a real difference to those who use our local areas and rely on our public services the most.     

Asks for other members

• What trends do your members expect to see in the public sector over the coming years?
• What could we do better when it comes to keeping people informed in our local plans and ideas?
• What are other members doing to enhance their community engagement?

More information

LindedIn - Hello Lamp Post 
Twitter - @HelloLampPost_  
Facebook - Hello Lamp Post  
Instagram - hellolamppost_ 
YouTube - @hellolamppost8104 

SME Member of the Week: May - Local Public Services Innovation

For May's SME Member of the Week, we’ll be focusing on local public services innovation. Local public services are faced with a range of challenges and digital presents the opportunity to do things differently and smarter. We want to showcase SME members who have worked with local authorities to find solutions that improve outcomes for citizens and help create thriving, productive and safer places for all.