Local Authorities - Maybe* Anything Is Possible

Foreign. Welcome to this afternoon's session. Historically has been on behalf of the High Streets Task Force, now delivered by MAYBE directly. And we're going to be talking through some of the things that are coming next post the five years that we've been working so closely with the High Street Taskforce and all the data that we've collated and all the learnings that we've found from that journey, from that working relationship, I'm going to be sharing some really interesting insights with you. Just press the right button. There you go. That'll be the right button. My name is Sarah Bassett. I'm Head of Growth at maybe, and I'm joined by the lovely Hannah. She heads up our customer support team and she's going to be manning Q and A together and also keeping me on track as we rattle through all of the fantastic information slides that we've got for you this afternoon. Say hi, Hannah. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Yeah, I'll be behind the Q and A, so any questions, please answer away. Excellent. So the agenda today, we're going to really be taking a little review of all of the activities that we've undertaken through our five years with the High Street Task Force and working with local authorities. And we've actually got 25,000 users, the Mabie platform. So I'm going to be talking to you about some of the learnings we've had from that and what the opportunities are that exist for you as local authorities and for local businesses. By leveraging AI and attempting to bridge the digital divide, which is still really rather frighteningly wide, the physical and digital worlds are blending more and more. So every day, in fact, my phone has just pinged me. My husband had just left the house to go and pick up my daughter from a friend, and I have my live360 saying, Jason's just left home. That's how the physical and the digital are blending. It's blending in a business sense. You know, we're using our mobiles, we're carrying them around everywhere. But, you know, we've got digital devices, we've got watches, we've got everything. How many steps are we doing? We're measuring so many different things digitally without even realizing it half of the time. And how do we do that in a work sense or as in a managing a place or a local authority sense, have all these data around footfall? A lot of that is collected through connecting to mobile data. We know how people are moving around as small businesses. We're wanting to look at shipping data. Where are our customers coming from and how can I go and find audiences that look like them? So we've got all these data sets and we're touch pointing as humans in so many different ways. And it's really starting especially now. We've got so much more AI technology and it's frightening to some, but the opportunity is enormous. Our lives are going to become ever more blended as the digital and physical world evolves. And this is, you know, this is something that were very aware of AI right at the beginning of our contract with the High Street Task Force, because that's what they wanted us to do. They wanted to help us to help them understand the sentiment data around 3,600 high streets and town centres across the UK. And that involved AI technology. AI is becoming much more accessible to each and every one of us now. And as businesses and as local authorities, there are security concerns in many of the products. But I'm going to show you just how far AI has come for maybe as we go through this call. So we collected the data and the insights from 3.9 million businesses across 3,600 UK high streets over the last five years. That's a lot of insight. We understand what people are talking about, we understand how many businesses are or are not using social media. We can see what's working for people, what's not. We see how much engagement people get, different types of engagement, what generates good conversation because it's, what's a decent email, what's a great blog, what's a great website, how. What are the digital marketing things that we do as an organization, as a local authority or as a business? What am I doing and how does it work and how's it all connecting together? So we've been able to learn an awful lot from this journey and I can tell you now that the pace of change outstrips the majority of organizations ability to keep up. I think we're all probably aware of that, but it, it is, the pace is getting faster and faster and faster. We've got supersonic wheels on the bus right now. There's no more pulling a cart. People and organized organizations of every shape and size from, from, you know, government all the way down to your solo entrepreneur need to be able to embrace digital and make the most of the AI learning that they have at their fingertips to keep up with the consumer. Because the consumer, I can tell you, are massively influenced by digital marketing. 82% of consumers say social media influences their lifestyle and purchasing decisions. In fact, that 82% are spending over seven hours a week on social media. And I would think that that's likely an awful lot more than that. Seven hours, certainly I spend more than that. My children definitely do, my teenagers and my 26 year old. But only 19% of UK and US businesses, same in states, have an active social media presence. So there's a big gap that needs filling, big cap. But what an opportunity for those businesses that aren't yet engaging in digital marketing or digital activity because the consumers are there ready and waiting for them. And that's what we really have spent the last five years doing, understanding what the consumer is looking for, helping businesses to engage with them. And that's really what the crux of maybe is all about. But in doing that, we've also taken those learnings, you know, the big knowledge gaps, how do we fill them? There is a hunger definitely to learn more and to collaborate and people want easy access to relevant information. We definitely learned that putting people in a classroom and delivering them training doesn't really work or it doesn't work for everybody, that's for sure. So giving people a whole kind of multifaceted way of being able to learn and giving them the tools, such as the AI that I'm going to show you shortly, gives them to take, to be able to take those learnings and apply them in the shortest amount of time possible, needing the least amount of heavy lifting you could possibly imagine. The appetite for that is definitely there because we're short of time and everybody needs time to value, to be fast. And that's what AI helps us to do. You know, we, we've historically talked about footfall. It's always, you know, pre Covid it was a really big conversation and I think we're using other things to measure the, the vitality of our high streets now. But it, it is still really important and it's not any footfall, but it's dwell time too. I think that's really important because we're now starting to really see that, that move back towards people instead of that shopping with intent that we've had over the last three or four years. I'm going to a place to buy a thing and I'm coming back. That's what's the safest thing to do. We're starting to see people engage more in events in their town centers and going to have their hair done and then going for lunch and then perhaps going to see an art exhibition at the village hall, all of that kind of thing. But they don't know what's happening in their towns or their high Streets, unless people are telling them. And where are they going to look for this inspiration on their phones? Might be on social media, it might be looking on Google Maps, seeing what's local to them or what's available in that area, what type of businesses there are. It might be that they've shopped in one place before and they're part of an email flow that, you know, there could be tourism sites, there could be all sorts of different things that I want to go and find my perfect customer, journey my day out. And this is what we worked on, one of the pilot projects for Herefordshire. Would improving digital performance increase footfall and absolutely, yes it did, without a shadow of a doubt. We had. 62% of those that participated in improving their digital footprint. Everything from, you know, websites to. They didn't do all of it, everybody did something. You know, they might have improved their website or they might have got involved in social media or they might have been involved in an email marketing campaign or something to, you know, anything digital. We found that 62% had street level visit count higher than non participating businesses. In fact it was a 15% increase in physical engagement compared with town trends across the county and 7.4% up on their non participating counterparts. I mean that's, that's huge. That's really huge. And this is, this is what we do, you know, on a day to day basis. We've got, just finished a fantastic project in Hammersmith and Fulham where we've delivered tools and training over a six month period. We're in Buckinghamshire at the moment, about to launch in Birmingham. We've got lots and lots of different places that we're delivering business support in. But you know what, there's a much bigger problem. We've got ChatGPT and this is what we're talking about, the AI. So we've done the digital marketing, how to do social media, but how do you compete with tools like this? I mean it really is transforming our worlds at such a pace and I mean, I don't know, I just find it extraordinary when I look at this. So time to take one, time taken to reach 1 million users, threads an hour. Amazing, but not surprising given that they own Instagram and basically all the Instagram users signed up. ChatGPT was five days, a million users, when you think Instagram was two and a half months, Spotify five months, Facebook 10 months, five days. And that's how much it's, it's changing our world. And so the gap between, between what consumers are going to be able, are achieving and or be able to do and businesses, it is going to get wider, much quicker. And so leveraging AI being part of that journey is something we really have to think about because only 6% of European SMEs actually use AI technologies at all, compared to 28% of large enterprises. We're all walking around with one of these on our phones, on our phones, in our hands. Apologies, can't get my words out today. And you know, we're constantly being informed, we're constantly being fed data and information and more and more of it is going to be powered by AI. So how do we embrace it? We're going to be talking about that in a moment. But you know, our experience of AI, our personal experience as maybe as a business, we would never in a million years been able to deliver that help and support 25,000 businesses if it hadn't been for AI. Not that we've given them AI to use, but we've integrated AI into our organization. Hannah heads up customer service. She used to have a team, a large team. They all now have AI. Our business gets bigger. They don't need to, we don't need any more members of staff in that department because actually our team can all do their best work faster. We can invest in other areas of our business as we grow, rather than needing more customer service, because AI will do it for us. We can invest in those things that we can't use AI to help us with. There's just so much that it's done for us and it's really streamlined our processes, really helped us understand our customers, helps us understand much more about how we can help people. And we've built an amazing AI powered tool that is now integrated in our platform that helps businesses to take that heavy, lifting off the creativity that's needed to deliver great content that's going to be compelling to their customers. So what's coming next? We've done the High Street Task Force, we've got all this learning. We all know that AI is everywhere. What's the next, what's the next part of the story? Well, we have a new, we have a new strap line. Maybe anything is possible. We are building very exciting new technology which I'm going to have a play with in a minute, that literally will allow you to use AI to do customer service, that allows you to create amazing reports. You might have, for example, you might have 10 UK SPF projects and they've all got different reports and actually you just want to pull all 10 projects into a summary. You can do that with Maybe I'm going to show you how you can deliver. You could perhaps upload, you know, are you, are you struggling to keep ahead or keep on top of all of the different business support activity that's going on in your local authority area? Wouldn't a knowledge base of everything that's available be wonderful? Maybe we can do that because AI makes it possible. You can upload as much documentation as you want, an entire knowledge base. We have solicitors, for example, that are using our platform because they have all their legal documentation in there around money laundering and what else, you know, criminal activity, what, you know, all those, those legally things. I'm not being very articulate about it, but I'm sure you understand what I'm saying. And they, they're using on opposite sides. So for internal purposes, all their solicitors, their juniors, the partners, everybody has access to the latest information on every single legal act there is at their fingertips because they can just upload anything that their entire knowledge base into maybe. And with the, the use or integration of ChatGPT4, it means that that data is constantly updating. The beauty of what I'm about to show you and the real magic piece about what I'm going to show you is that it's absolutely secure. So a lot of organizations are very, very nervous about using AI. ChatGPT is OpenAI so Gemini. So many of these are the products and so actually creating anything around sensitive information is something that, you know, people just aren't doing for security reasons. You have a brick walled garden around our product. What you put in stays in there. What it creates also stays in there. It is your data doesn't go back to retrain any other models. It's all safe and secure. So this is, you know, we've been so busy over the last five years and don't ask me what this graph actually says or does, but I can assure you that our team have spent a long time working out how to build a safe and secure portal that can be used white labeled, but can be used in pretty much any application to deliver content, to deliver things that you, you know, the reporting, access the knowledge. You know, how do I do a thing, where do I go to find support, where do I find this grant or that grant or the other grant? And it's all automated, it's all there without having to have, you know, 10 different knowledge bases. A lot of the support that we deliver there be three or four other companies, stakeholders that are delivering other forms of support. Actually, how can we pull all that together to give the businesses or residents or, you know, whichever department we're supporting access to all of the information they need in one place. So I'm going to be showing you a little bit around that. And then, in fact, I'm going to do that first. I'm going to do that first. As she clicked this into, she put a link in. Oh, you are an absolute treasure. You think I'd have built this deck myself, wouldn't you? So I'm going to take you to what we call your AI. And we're in, we're in the maybe platform and we call it your AI because no matter who you are, what size of business you are, what you do, you can connect any information to bits that. This lovely little tool here that allows you just to upload all of your data. Can't put spreadsheet data in at the moment, but any PDFs, any Word docs, anything like that, you can upload into the knowledge base. It can connect to your social media, it can read your website, you can point it at any URL you want to. Everything just uploads here and you can upload tens of thousands of files if you want to. But in this particular account, it knows about us, it knows about maybe and in general use when we're, excuse me, supporting local businesses. We have trained it to be a marketing guru and we've written prompts into it to help those businesses really understand how, how AI can really help them. And it's, it's really engaging, it's friendly. I can come in here and ask it to define my brand voice because actually I know what we are. We're a digital marketing platform. What does, you know, what does AI, our AI, now we've trained it, think about our brand voice. I just want to go there. There we go. So it's going to go away and come up with some suggestions, some ideas. I can look at my brand storytelling, I can ask it to write bios, I can come into the context section, say, what shall I post on Facebook today? I need to write a blog, but I don't really know what to write it on. I want to write an email campaign. I want to write LinkedIn content. I want to. I don't know, I want to. You could even make up your own prompts and ask it to write you a business plan or a plan on, perhaps if you're using it as a local authority crisis planning or perhaps putting a campaign together to cover something like some new building works or a change in the traffic system or a change in the day for the waste disposal or some new policy around childcare, adoption, social services, anything. You can create all your own prompts. Some of those you can keep to yourself. You could define them as being departmental. You could share them with your with your other members of your team. It's just the world is your oyster with this. The more information you feed it, the more it learns about you. So I so it says to create a brand voice that resonates strongly with your target audience, it's crucial to focus on several key characteristics. These include so there's lots of this here but I'm going to ask it to make it relevant to me. Make it relevant to me. Make. So it's going to come back and rewrite it and make suggestions around what we could do to enhance our brand voice. We can help with strategy. Marketing strategy for example. That could be for a tourism destination management company. Doesn't really doesn't matter what organization you are. Could be a marketing strategy around, I don't know, uk take your kids to work week or mental health awareness week or perhaps you're holding events around Diwali, for example. Anything. It'll write it for you. So it's come back in. Okay. Authenticity and reliability. Here we go. Leverage the real customer testimonials, showcase successful use cases and the tangible benefits Mabie Solutions has provided helpfulness and supportive tone. Position maybe as a dependable partner eager to add value offer practical tips, insightful advice and solutions providing social media content ideas around key events, engagement focused, informative yet concise and so on. Let's have a think about let's go to writing some content. Let's go to see whether I can get a blog. I mean strategy aren't I write great content. Blog writing blog topic inspiration. I've just kept rattling, haven't I? For a whole half an hour has have we got any questions in Q and A, Hannah? No, not yet. Oh crikey. Far too informative. Come on. More than welcome to ask questions. I hope I'm being coherent. I'm just being rather enthusiastic about all the different possibilities there are and the journey that we're going to be taking you on moving forward because we're not going to be stopping doing these webinars because we're no longer delivering them on the behalf of the High Street Task force. We're going to deliver them on your behalf and we're going to be asking you actually to contribute the way you can by telling us what problems. That's one of the reasons why I'm throwing all these Ideas at you, what problems can maybe help you solve? Could be internal communications, could be external communication, it could be pulling different topics together. Or is it more about reporting? Or is it more about brand consistency? Is it, what is it? What is the pain that you would love AI to take away to help you be able to do your best work faster? Because certainly local authorities, we're not going to have loads of money thrown at us in any anytime soon. So we want to be able to leverage every single thing we do to get the maximum benefit from it, the maximum impact. That's harder and harder and harder. How can we help you with AI? That's what we'd really like to know. And each month from here on in, for the next three or four months, we're going to be showcasing how AI can do the thing that you're asking us to ask it to do. So use the Q and A. But you will be getting an email later when we share the recording where you can email me and, and tell me your suggestions. We'll go back to that in a moment. So I wanted blog topic inspiration. Okay, I think I've just pressed that button twice. But never mind, we can wait for it. It's not a problem. Blogs are so vital, you know, they drive so much traffic and a lot of the small businesses that we work with just, you know, have got nice little websites, haven't really got their heads around writing blogs and this has just made it so much easier for them. So enhancing your online reputation, strategies for small businesses. Okay, top five social media tools for improve customer engagement. Celebrating National Mustard Day Fun flaps and marketing ideas. Well, there you go. Maximizing brand awareness through user generated content. Spice up your order content. Okay, so I'm going to say write me a 500 word blog on 7. The benefits of Facebook Messenger CRM integration. There you go. One of the amazing things I can do now, I can ask IT to write me a social media campaign to go with it. There you go. The benefits of Facebook messenger in CRM integration. All done for me. Amazing, isn't it? Just going to have one more little go in here before, before we go back to the deck and there's lots of different chats now. I want to write a new. Oh, here you go, a new chat. Oh, this is exciting. Right? You see this little paperclip here? This is where you can upload all the files that you want something to do with. So you can have 10 files in there all around SPF reporting, for example. And you just say, right, please use this information to Generate me a summarized report of SPS activity to date and what we're going to be doing moving forward. Whatever you like, this little beast here. But I'm just going to say, how can AI be used. By local government? Let's see what the AI comes up with. Probably taking the ideas away, but I'm sure you have securely. Don't know. I've been a bit risque asking that question. Maybe, I don't know, I don't know what it's going to say. Huh. Okay. Central focus on pre3 primary areas. Data privacy. Okay. Yes. In, I don't know, let's say the. Social care activity. Just making this up as I go along. That's a bit risque, isn't it? But that's what we do when we go off piste. There you go. Interesting. Local governments have adequate measures in place to use AI securely. They can leverage AI to significantly enhance social care activities. So predictive analysis. Analyze historical data to predict individual needs. Identify at risk populations. Okay. Automated administrative tasks, appointment scheduling, data entry, case management. Reduce the workload of those that of social workers, allowing more time to focus on direct care activities. Look, you've got all of these different ideas. So what we're going to challenge you with is what is your impossible? And how do you think AI could be used at local authority level as well as in supporting local businesses? Because that's just the small element that we've used of it. But there's just unlimited, unlimited scope with what we've built and we'd like to know how you would apply it. I'm going to go back to the deck. Oh yes, my lovely, my lovely graph. Oh, Shopify Open AI. Crikey. So many different things. So Shay or impossible. And let's explore how AI can help you solve problems. Your data will be safe and private and we're asking you to challenge us because we're really, really interested to see which projects will work well and we want to be challenged in some. So share your bottlenecks and let us know. And let us share how secure personalized AI can help you and your local businesses. How it can you and your, you know, your local departments, your internal departments, the growth hub. I don't know, just challenge yourself to think about what problem could we solve. You can summarise huge amounts of written data. Writing documents based on a wide range of data. So when you're writing documents, when you're writing those ghastly, which I've responded to far too many of and everybody seems to like to write them the same tender requirements in a different way. Every local authority, different questions. Let's challenge. I call it Challenge Basset, because actually what we deliver to all local authorities, pretty much the same thing. But it's just when you write your tenders, yeah, it all comes through. I find AI very useful in unpicking what it is you're actually wanting me to say. But, you know, you can use it to write documents. So, you know, based on economic development plans and strategies, national strategies and, I don't know, all sorts of different things. Responding to inquiries. Sure. It's really quite amusing, our trust pilot. I don't know whether it links through on here. If you go to our trust pilot, you'll find that there are loads and loads and loads of testimonials on there. People say, oh, Hannah's been so helpful. Oh, and Danny's been so helpful. Well, what they don't realize is that actually 90% of our customer inquiries are responded to by our AI. And these people have absolutely no idea and they find the service just brilliant. We've even now got our AI responding to comments and mentions appropriately on Facebook and Instagram, just does it automatically. It's fantastic. You just have to train it to do so. And it's really simple because we're using AI. How about responding to inbound inquiries into your department? If you could answer most 90% of those questions that are so regularly. What about repetitive tasks? If you could get AI to do the things you find yourself doing over and over and over and over and over again. And training. Brilliant at training. That's what our AI does for our local businesses that we support. We use a lot of AI in our training and anything else you can think of. So once a month we will share what's being achieved with AI, and we are taking great big leaps and strides. So please do stay with us along the journey. Invite anybody else in your in your local authority area or your business, depending on where you've come from today, please spread the word and ask them to come along. We really want to be challenged. Please challenge us because between each webinar we will go away and build, solve the problem that you're going to challenge us with. We hope we will. You know, the impact of AI powered, powered business support programs, you know, is brilliant, but you can apply it to everything, any program you like. So what's your impossible? Is what I'm concluding with today. Either pop it in the chat, I think Hannah's had to dash off elsewhere, or email me. I'm sarahabytech.com. i'd be really, really interested to know. Feel free to be as challenging as possible and next time we will be featuring one of the suggestions or one the the ideas that have come forward from one of you, hopefully. So I'll see you next month, same time, same place. It's the first Wednesday of every month at 3 o' clock and let's see where the journey takes us. But I hope I haven't challenged you too much, but yes, what's your impossible? Is the theme that we're going to be looking at over the next couple of months. We'd really, really like your participation. So thank you very much for having me. I'm sorry, it's just been me and haven't really broken it up with. With anybody else today. Polly is sends her apologies. She normally sits alongside me on these calls and that adds a little bit of more thought and interest. But she's busy at a conference which I'm sure she's having a wild time at. Anyway, thank you very much for having me. Don't forget to share your impossible and we'll send you recording round. And please do share how we can. Yeah, how we can solve your impossible. I'll say it again last time feels quite snazzy. Maybe anything's possible. There you go. Let's go. Do you like it? It's very creative, isn't it? So, yes, I'm Sarah at mabetech. Com. Really looking forward to hearing from you and thank you again. See you next.