Red Badger meets Queensmead School for BIMA Digital Day

Over one hundred agencies and 100 schools from around the UK took park in BIMA Digital Day, a special day that helps to educate students giving them an insight into the tech world to impart their knowledge. A few Badgers attended Queensmead School in South Ruislip to participate on 17 November.

What is Digital Day? Digital Day was created in 2012 as a pragmatic response to the digital talent shortage by coordinating BIMA members to help raise awareness of digital careers amongst young people.

How does BIMA benefit students around the UK?

Digital Day links industry professionals like Red Badger with schools and colleges like Queensmead School across the UK to raise awareness of the fantastic opportunities for young people in digital which started because of a digital talent shortage. BIMA Digital Day provides students with a broad knowledge of the tech industry and some practical challenges which could be beneficial to some students futures, as some may choose this as their career path because they enjoyed the challenge they got involved with, and found the presentation from the agency really interesting and exciting. BIMA Digital day is a proven success story now in its 4th year with over 5000 students having taken part.

To begin the day, Hanna Cevik, our Senior Marketing Badger took to the stage and introduced the other Badgers to the students, and explained what us Badgers do and get up to on a daily basis, who we work with, and an overview of our agency Red Badger. Hanna then went onto to explain Badger Academy where we take in university students for work experience who we call ‘badger cubs’ of which the students found amusing. After the Badgers were introduced to the students, Hanna went on to explain the role of BIMA and Digital Day and what the day aims to achieve.

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Our other badgers, Sari, Monika and Sarah were brave enough to take over and went on to explain in more detail what it is Red Badger do presenting slides to the students.

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After, there was a BIMA Digital Day live stream which had a very cool camera enabling someone with a smart phone / mac to rotate their device 360 degrees enabling the user to see all angles of where the live stream was taking place. The students found this cutting edge technology fun, so did we. 

After the slides the Badgers gave a brief overview of their career path, all interesting and exciting but eventually landed them in Red Badger to our delight. 

Below are our digitally savvy sponsors who set the briefs for this year’s 3 challenges as well as be providing money-can’t-buy prizes for the winners.

Challenge 1: Standard Life - Britons are currently the worst in Europe at setting money aside as savings, meaning we have little to fall back on or to finance our dreams. This situation is even truer when it comes to young people. A recent survey assessed only a third of younger adults (aged 21-24) as financially literate. Standard Life have tasked Digital Day students to think of a fun, easy and most importantly digital way to help younger adults to save money.

Challenge 2: Vodafone - Vodafone have given students the challenge of creating a new and exciting feature for the ‘My Vodafone’ app. Participating students will need to go beyond the current ‘My Vodafone’ app features and think about what their phone can do and what it knows about them, and how they can use these features to create something that will drive downloads of the ‘My Vodafone’ app and engage users.

Challenge 3: Sony Music - Sony Music have challenged Digital Day teams to plan a digital marketing campaign to help their favourite Sony artist with a new album release. Students need to think about emerging channels they can utilise, how to create a buzz before the release date, engage fans on the day and how to drive downloads and purchases after the release.

After the 3 different challenges were explained by the Badger team the students decided amongst their group members which challenge they wished to do. In total, there were 5 teams, of which 2 did the Vodafone challenge, another 2 did the Sony Music album release challenge, and 1 other did the Standard Life savings challenge.

While the groups were discussing ideas amongst themselves for their chosen challenge, the badgers walked around talking to the students about their ideas and gave them some useful tips and advice without giving them a whole new idea. 

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In the afternoon, the students were bringing their ideas to life, designing their apps and putting their idea onto paper, all very exciting. We then had a dragons den type event where the groups had to present their ideas to the other groups. Only 1 idea from each challenge could be submitted so a vote was taken to select the best ideas. We then asked the groups if they were interested in getting into the tech industry, and the majority said yes :-) so we must have done a good job.

The day ended on a fantastic note and the badgers had great fun, Hanna in particular, and all definitely deserved a pat on the back with some well deserved wine.

We’d like all the students that took part in the event for being brilliantly behaved and thanks to Mr. Green for just being a great host.

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Here’s a short video of the great day we had at Queensmead School :-)

BIMA Digital Day from Amy Crimmens on Vimeo.

Click here to watch Rory’s Talk in 360 degrees (Live stream on BIMA Digital Day)