At On the Mend, we are honest about our successes and our failures. We know that we can never fix every single problem with a single interaction. Below are some of our key reflections, and things we would change if we could repeat this work:
A smaller team
This was the first project we ever worked on together and at the time On The Mend consisted of a much larger team than now. Although this was a really interesting way to work and taught us a lot, it had its limitations because everyone had very different ideas on how they wanted the project to develop. After having run the event we quickly realised how valuable it would be to have a smaller core of people with whom we could exchange ideas with but knew we could depend on when running events.
Contact charities and community organisations
Because we were very short on time, we didn’t spend time contacting charities or community organizations when planning the event that we could have told about the project and agreed on sending postcards too. Since we didn’t do this, we spent lots of time after having done the event trying to find people who wanted to receive these postcards, which was much harder than we expected. Contacting them prior, would have improved the project immensely as they could have given us feedback when we were still developing the event and find ways to tailor it to the needs of their patients more.
Impact measuring
After sending out the postcards to different organisations, we didn’t ask for any feedback on how they were received and what patients thought of them, which made it difficult for us to measure the impact of the project. It would have definitely been needed to gather feedback from organizations and patients who received postcards.
