Do your health events reach the right audience? Do the conversations in the room include all of the important voices? Are you confident that you are using social media and new technology to its full potential?

Today we are launching #BeyondTheRoom; a digital conference service that will:

1. Create a buzz before, during and after your event
2. Extend your reach and amplify the conversation
3. Facilitate a democratic conversation that involves all of the right people
4. Create a legacy (a permanent record of your event)
5. Evaluate the social activity and report on impact

Our team of expert health professionals, service users, digital innovators and researchers will bring the perfect combination of people, knowledge, experience, evidence and technology to your event. We will work flexibly with you from the event planning stages right through to after the participants have all headed home. Don’t leave it to serendipity! Ask our dedicated team to do it for you.

Live coverage of your health event

We offer a flexible range of services to suit your requirements. We prefer to start working with you a few weeks before the event, so we can hit the ground running on the day.

Our services include:

1. Live tweeting: opening up the event discussion to as wide and varied an audience as possible; including tweet chats, hashtag registration and analytics.
2. Live blogging: evidence-based summaries of research being presented at your event, disseminated via our major international blogging platform – the National Elf Service.
3. Live podcasting: recording short audio interviews with people at the event and sharing them online. These are hosted on our Soundcloud page and added to our podcast feed. The aim here is to give a flavour of the less formal/conversational parts of the event; something people obviously miss if they don’t attend in person.
4. Live video streaming: videoing talks, debates and other conference sessions and live streaming them on YouTube so people can watch and join the discussion via Twitter.
5. Live graphic reporting: graphic illustration, cartoons and sketches to capture your event and support the feedback of talks and group work.

Mental Health: working in partnership

Our Beyond the Room service will initially focus on mental health, social care, learning disabilities and dentistry events. We have established elves in these subject areas and extensive networks of experts who we can draw upon as needed.

Our mental health team

Here’s an overview of our Mental Health team to give you a flavour of the people, experience and audience that we bring:

Mark Brown @markoneinfour

Mark is development director of Social Spider CIC, ex-editor of One in Four magazine, one of Nursing Times/Health Service Journal Social Media Pioneers 2014, mental health writer, doer. One of the people behind the regular We Mental Health Nurses chats on Twitter. His current digital projects include: the Leeds Mental Health and Wellbeing Innovation Lab, COOP CAMHS platform, A Day in the Life, a development of A Day in the Life focused upon adult learners with mental health difficulties, and an app to support advice seekers. Mark regularly writes and speaks on mental health and technology.

Vanessa Garrity @vanessalgarrity

Vanessa is a registered mental health nurse by background and has current professional registration to practice. Her initial background was within the NHS, where she spent many years as a Clinical Nurse, Manager and Professional Lead for Nursing. Vanessa spent her earlier career working within acute mental health and continues to be passionate about improving safety and quality  of care in inpatient settings. Her leadership work was predominantly within specialist mental health services, which is where she became increasingly curious about the potential for digital technology in clinical practice and for professional development. Vanessa is part of the team behind @WeMHNurses which is an online community for mental health nurses and those interested in mental health. The community runs regular online twitter chats as well as being often utilised as part of various national consultations for a number of professional bodies and organisations, such as NHS improvement, Care Quality Commission, Department of Health and most recently the Foundation of Nursing Studies (FONS)

André Tomlin @Mental_Elf

André is an Information Scientist who has worked in mental health since 1996, originally for the NHS, then for the University of Oxford and since 2002 as MD of an evidence-based healthcare consultancy called Minervation. He has coproduced over 20 mental health websites and apps for charities, the public sector and companies in the last decade, so has extensive hands-on experience of working with service users and professionals to build accessible, usable and reliable products. Since 2011 he has led the development of the National Elf Service, which helps keep people up to date with the latest evidence-based health and social care research.

Tom Bailey @TomBaileyLeeds

Tom is very very good at drawing cartoons.

Our mental health audience

Over the last 20 years we have built a large following of people who are interested in what we have to say about mental health and related issues. Our combined social following is well in excess of 60,000 people and the group is made up of a diverse mix of patients, professionals and other citizens.

By employing us to cover your conference with our #BeyondTheRoom service, you will be opening the door to your event to this huge and diverse audience.

Evidence of impact

We track our activity and report on the impact that our service has on your event.

#NPNR2016, Nottingham, 15-16 Sep 2016

For example, we recently covered the #NPNR2016 conference in Nottingham and the Symplur Twitter analytics show that from the 12.5 million impressions we had during the week of the event, over 8 million came directly from #BeyondTheRoom social media activity of our Twitter accounts (Mental_Elf, VanessaLGarrity, WeMHNurses, MarkOneInFour). This clearly demonstrates that our involvement in the conference brought a 3-fold increase in the overall Twitter reach.

#PDDigital16, Leeds, 28-29 Nov 2016

We saw even greater reach at the #PDDigital16 festival in Leeds where we had >16 million impressions in less than 24 hours and facilitated discussion between over 400 people at the event, even though there were only about 100 in the room. The conference reach continued to grow in the days after the event, with over 700 people participating by the end of the week. Again, our combined team input was significant, with over half of the Twitter activity from Mark, Vanessa and André, as well as popular features including live streaming of the festival debate, filming of the talks for later use, and live podcasting of informal conversations with participants to capture ideas as they arose.

#MindTech2016, London, 8 Dec 2016

The fourth annual NIHR MindTech conference brought together researchers, clinicians, patients, developers and policy makers with an interest in mental health and digital technologies. We amplified the conversation massively with 80% of the overall 16 million Twitter impressions coming from our team. The live podcasting worked particularly well at this event, as we were able to ask the conference speakers questions raised on social media, and quickly share their responses for people to listen to. Really effective #BeyondTheRoom communication and a great way to democratise the discussion.

#MQScienceMeeting, London, 2-3 Feb 2017

The annual Mental Health Science Meeting is an international gathering of researchers who are dedicated to exploring cutting-edge new ways to understand, treat and prevent mental illness. We worked closely with the MQ team to live blog, live tweet, live stream and live podcast this jam-packed event. Once again, our involvement amplified the social conversation massively; in this case by more than 400%!

Of course it’s about more than numbers; it’s also about engaging with the right people and this is where our service can really bring value. Our following is multidisciplinary and extremely diverse, so if you are looking to widen the audience of your event to specific hard to reach groups, we can work with you to achieve this.

Testimonials

Our #BeyondTheRoom service has already generated a huge amount of positive feedback from conference organisers, speakers, participants in the room and those who have joined online. Here’s a flavour of the comments so far:

Wow! Employing #BeyondTheRoom for our #NPNR2016 event brought a 3-fold increase in our Twitter reach.

Massive thanks to the #BeyondTheRoom team for taking #PDDigital16 into a new dimension!

André, Vanessa and Mark understood what we needed and made a huge difference to developing our reach and impact. Our pre-conference keynote speaker discussion was live streamed on YouTube, and this and its associated @WeMHNurses #WeMHNs tweet chat drew in people from the UK and beyond. We had live tweeting from every speaker session, and videoed every plenary speaker for future use. All this represented a considerable, and helpful step up for us and we look forward to working together again in 2017.

Huge impact from #BeyondTheRoom social reporting at #pddigital16. A big asset to any event wanting to extend reach and collaborate.

Great work #BeyondTheRoom today at #pddigital16 – steadfastly determined to amplify conversations outside online – great idea for events!

I was very impressed by the Mental Elf’s beyond the room service that you used by the way – I thought that added a whole different dimension to the event.

For all those hosting events in the health and care space wanting to connect #BeyondTheRoom, I can recommend this fab team!

Tell us how we can help you

Please contact us if you’d like to find out how #BeyondTheRoom can improve the reach and impact of your event:

Email

• [email protected]

Twitter

• André Tomlin @Mental_Elf
• Mark Brown @markoneinfour
• Vanessa Garrity @vanessalgarrity

We look forward to hearing from you!

This blog was last updated on Friday 2nd Dec 2016.