John Harper, Founder & CEO, writes:
The challenge we’re coming across again and again is the disconnect between the person within the organisation interested in integrating the service and the decision maker who will pay for the service. The person who is making the decision, often wants to see a business case for why they should invest in their peoples’ well-being. I have found that offering effective and trusted well-being services to our teams and communities can change the way we work, study and live – with an implicit and measurable, positive return on investment.
As Rize continues to grow the amount of interest we’re getting is expanding at a rate we’re struggling to keep up with.
Since our major launch of the Rize app onto iPhone, iPad, Android and Tablet we’ve been rushed off our feet. We’ve been featured by the Huffington Post, Cambridge University, and we were honoured by an invitation to pitch Rize infront of the Duke of York last week at an event called ‘Pitch@palace‘ – See our one minute pitch on the day here.
When I set out to create Rize my focus was on the individual – working out how I can engage and help the most amount of people to understand and improve their mental well-being with an fun and interactive app, whilst keeping it safe, relevant and effective.
As word spread, I started to hear more and more interest from not just individuals but larger bodies – employers, Universities, counselling services, HR services, even sports teams! They all saw the opportunity to provide Rize as an accessible tool to help their people to improve their mental well-being.
Those organisations who have showed early interest in Rize instinctively knew what improved mental well-being can do for a team or workforce, but many of them don’t have enough of the solid facts yet to make the case – the business case of why improved support for mental well-being will have a positive impact for the whole organisation. The people who ‘get it’ – the HR Directors, the counsellors, the team leaders aren’t necessarily always the decision makers who either say “Yes, we want Rize” or “Really?..”.
So I began interviewing employees, employers, students, counsellors and mental health institutions – I realised each of them all have their own measure of success, their own metrics for their return on investment (ROI)…whether they are investing their time, hope, or money.
- I found that employees/students/patients (we’ll call ‘individuals’) wanted anonymity and some kind of assurance that they won’t be wasting their time using Rize – they wanted to know exactly how Rize can help them, where the evidence is, and how much time it would take out of their day.
- The person interested in subscribing Rize for the organisation (we’ll call ‘administrator’) wanted to at least know that the service was being used regularly, by a lot of people and not just being picked up once by a few, then replaced by flappy birds the next day. They also wanted to know how this is going to provide an indirect cash-value return in some form.
- The decision makers who would be paying for the subscription wanted to know two things – how does this help my ‘individual”s to flourish and feel grateful to their organisation, and most importantly – what is the ROI.
I was very fortunate to have interviewed all of these people (thanks to advice from my excellent mentors at Accelerate Cambridge) before we had finished creating Rize. I was able to not only tailor the value proposition and promotional material for each of the people concerned, but I was able to add important functionality to Rize that would allow them to see their own ROI.
Click here to read the rest of this blog post
____________________________________________