Your expertise

Over the years NAM has been fortunate enough to be supported by experts in different fields and specialisms. Donating their time, expertise and resources has meant NAM has been able to do things that would not have been possible without this help.

The NAM team has a huge range of skills and specialisms that we draw on every day to deliver our work.  We are the first to admit that we don’t have experts in ‘everything’ at NAM so it is important to us to be able to ask for help when we need it and draw on external expertise when we know we have gaps in our own experience or knowledge.   

 Here are some examples of how we have been helped with a big thank you from the NAM team.

John is an independent market research consultant. He has supported NAM for over 10 years, donating his time and expertise for free to help NAM really put you, the user, at the centre of our thinking. He has run focus groups and interviews, produced questionnaires and discussion guides and presented countless pieces of audience research, which have shaped the way NAM thinks and develops resources. These are just a few of the resources that John has helped us improve and evolve over the years:

HIV & Stigma: NAM's patient information booklet explores the issues of stigma, discrimination and how individuals can manage and cope with it.

HIV Treatment Update: NAM's free monthly newsletter keeps readers up to date with key research and development in the field of HIV.

HIV Treatments Directory: A dip-in guide to the medical aspects of HIV with A-Z listings of drugs and info on starting and changing treatment, side effects, and symptoms.

With his skill and sensitivity we have been able to talk and listen to people and hear their views about what's good and bad about the things we do.

As well as doing a huge amount of this work himself, he has generously passed on his knowledge and experience to other members of the NAM team. Through training and skills building in market research techniques and approaches, he has helped make sure this area of work is sustainable and embedded into our organisational approach. And you can’t really put a price on that!

Crayon is a digital media agency. Usually working with big brands with big money, they kindly donated their time, resources and contacts to us for free. We benefited from a whole raft of expertise. 

Chris, the graphic designer, redesigned the HIV & Stigma booklet. He made it look friendlier, easier to read, less 'stigmatising' and more pick-up-able, all comments and ideas generated from focus groups.

Mark, Sarah, Lindsay, Chris and Paul helped us launch our website for positive people: namlife.org. This involved a huge array of tasks from project planning, audience involvement, design of posters, advertising, media and radio promotion, and an on-the-street launch with an artist from Paintshop Studio on World Aids Day 2008.

They have also left us with a lasting legacy – in house learning and skills building. So next time we do something similar we will have this experience to draw on.

Discovery is a Research Consultancy. Andrew, Jess and Matt kindly made NAM their Charity project for the year and donated their time, expertise and resources for free to help NAM develop a brand-new information resource. 

We thought we had identified a need for a basic HIV information resource. We needed some help to test this hypothesis, and make the idea a reality. Discovery ran face-to-face and telephone interviews and focus groups with HIV professionals and people living with HIV. They analysed the findings and presented us with a piece of research that really helped NAM understand what this resource needed to look like and who it should be for. Our patient information editor and our graphic designer could then develop the resource very much based on people’s ideas and suggestions. 

We have requests for this resource series from all over the world. We have distributed over 110,000 copies of the basics across the UK. They are available to download for free from aidsmap.com and are now translated into over 10 different languages.

Mike is Global Head of Healthcare at Cohn & Wolfe. He helped NAM in the early stages of developing a better Communications Plan.

NAM’s resources are written and produced for people all over the world. With such a diverse audience, it is important that we have a clear communications plan. In practice this means making sure we let people working and living with HIV know we exist, and point them in the direction of resources and information that are going to be useful. It helps us look at where our audiences are and what they are doing and this in turn means that we use our resources in the most effective way to get the message to the right people. 

Mike’s help has been invaluable in shaping our thinking around this plan. He has asked some difficult questions to really make sure we understand what we are doing and offered guidance on the kind of things we should and shouldn’t have in a communications strategy. His input has meant we can maximise our resources and make sure we are working in a focused, targeted way so our audiences get the most out of us.

Cogapp build ‘websites, interactive installations and next-generation mobile applications’. They help their clients do digital media and user experience projects.

Cathy and Pete knew that NAM didn’t have any cash to spare, but gave up their time to come to an aidsmap.com web development team meeting and share their expert thinking. They helped our team understand efficient user experience techniques and practices better and gave us some helpful ideas about how to learn more about how people were using the website. 

The great thing about their suggestions was that we could actually put into practice their suggestions on a shoe string/no budget. We were able to run a quick survey on aidsmap with thousands of responses, run simple user testing exercises and then build the findings into the development of the website. 

We think this website is vastly improved from the previous one and it is now easier to find the things you are looking for, easier to scan with shorter click through rates. It is still very much a work in progress so have a look around and if you have any suggestions please do get in touch.