Staff Spotlight: Emma Barrett

We chat to Emma Barrett, Head of Digital Engagement at FSRH, about her love of all things digital, muddy dogs, and website development.

My name is Emma Barrett and my job title is Head of Digital Engagement at FSRH. I sit within the Membership team at FSRH but work across all staff at FSRH to develop areas such as website content, creation of video content, management of channels such as Youtube, Vimeo and our FSRH Training Hub. I work closely with Maureen Bell-Smith, our Data Manager and we spend a lot of time finding ways to personalise membership experiences on the website and our training hub.

Around the world

My background is in education and teaching initially. I was a teacher for over ten years, I taught in Slovakia, Poland, Singapore, Hong Kong and London. I’ve traveled a fair bit in Eastern Europe and SE Asia. I was lucky enough to visit China and lots of countries in SE Asia including Sarawak, Borneo where I spent time visiting the rainforest and was lucky enough to see wild orangutans in the forest.

Since returning to the UK, I’ve worked in Communications, Marketing and more recently in ‘digital’ in membership associations, universities and other UK charities. I’ve developed an interest in digital transformation and the wider cultural changes that can take place when organisations adopt new ways of working with technology. I achieved a Distinction for my MA in Charity Management in 2018 and my research project focused on change management as part of a digital transformation project in the charity sector.

Outside of work...

In my free time, I’m a trustee at Edinburgh Dogs and Cats Home, I also volunteer sometimes for various animal charities and this summer I helped out at Battersea’s Muddy Dog Challenge which was great fun. I love animals and feel really passionately about animal welfare issues. I have a cat called Jinx and I’m godmother to Murphy, a lovely German Shepherd owned by some good friends of mine.

 

We spoke to Emma about what it is like to work at FSRH, read on for a day-in-the-life as Head of Digital Engagement...

What excites you most about working for FSRH?

My job at FSRH is very varied and I enjoy that very much. I am also very fortunate to be able to work across all staff in the organisation so I get to ‘see’ a lot of what happens across all the various areas of work from education to external affairs and to more operational aspects of keeping a charity going.

Do you have any exciting projects you are working on?

I’m enjoying developing our new FSRH Training Hub and then translating this new knowledge into working on improving the learning experience of our members and candidates.

Give us a day in the life of your role:

My days are really varied but a fair sample of activities might look something like this:

First thing, I check my emails and messages to see if anything urgent has come in that needs to be fixed. We work across four agencies at FSRH: one for the database, one for the website, one for the training hub and one for the single sign on functionality. At any given time, I might have around 5 individual items on the go so I have to be really organised about staying on top of any fixes or tests.

I usually have several meetings with my colleagues, ranging from training staff on specific skills on our software and platforms, to discussing content improvement needed across our website, database or our Training Hub. I can also have meetings with Directors or the CEO at FSRH to discuss more strategic matters such as our digital transformation plans or developments that I’m working on across all our platforms and the wider implications of these on operational matters across the staff team.

I might also spend some time updating various google data studio dashboards or analytics to help offer feedback to teams on what is/isn’t working in terms of content across these platforms according to how our users are viewing things on screen or according to how much engagement these pages/items are getting.

I spend time creating our public facing and internal videos and then embed them, share them or upload them to Vimeo/Youtube/website/training hub for our users. This year to date at FSRH we have created more than 70 videos.

No two days at FSRH are alike but most of my days involve talking to people which I really like. I feel lucky to work with a great team of really committed staff.

And finally...you’re stranded on a desert island - what are the three objects you’ll take?

My paddle board, my cat and my kindle loaded with books.