The art of conversation

Hoop’d is our platform for delivering digital transformation in local area engagement, communication and service provision.

During the pandemic it became increasingly clear that alternative methods of communicating and sharing information were desperately needed. Despite the myriad of different ways in which we can all communicate with one another we are becoming increasingly divided, increasingly difficult to identify appropriately, and harder to engage positively.

The environment needed to convey and receive meaningful messages, opportunities or updates, has become incredibly crowded. Powerful algorithms, digital products and unsustainably subsidised private services find new ways of delivering content that is increasingly personalised, aesthetically pleasing, accessible, and convenient.

This means many traditional methods of civic, community and local area communication are quickly becoming outdated. Any peice of irrelevant or innappropriate information is becoming a potentially permanent barrier to successful engagement.

Which means with so much noise, misinformation the barriers to engagement are increasing every day.

“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”

The workload for anyone managing and growing a community is therefore becoming increasingly complicated.

• Firstly it is difficult to create and design personalised touchpoints and tailored correspondence for every community member.

• Secondly it is difficult to promote or signpost different types of offers, opportunities and messages to each community member.

Both are solved by effective digitalisation, to create better quality and more accessible local area data. But there are also many issues concerning user consent and data compliance that makes it tremendously difficult for stakeholders invested in the health and wellbeing of large groups to design appropriate solutions.

This interests us at Mortar enormously, because it leads to identifying a huge range of different social, organisational and operational problems in the design of structures and systems of information. Problems that require solutions that range tremendously in size and scale, and that often require niche innovative new hyperlocal approaches to improving and enhancing digital inclusion.

Hoop’d is a platform we have designed that uses Mortars framework to aggregate and disseminate local area information and engagement opportunities.

This allows us to build exciting real-time, dynamic, geo-spatial solutions that can be tailored and personalised; helping communities to deliver information to their users more effectively. At the moment we’re developing our use-cases with local authorities, housing providers and master developers, using data and technology to deliver information more equitably and utilising data to build more effective and efficient forms of service provision.

Helping find new ways in which to deliver the right information, to the right people at the right time.