Mind operates as a mental health charity, supporting over 400,000 people across England and Wales, with a network of 110 local Minds. The charity works to help individuals so they do not have to face mental health challenges alone.

Addressing mental health is a significant challenge, yet Mind demonstrates remarkable impact. Annually, its mental health resources are accessed over 20 million times, and they've reached 1.57 million employees through its well-being programs.

Wanting to continue the mental health charity’s fantastic work campaigning for improved services, raising awareness and promoting understanding, Mind came to us with multiple goals, including:

• Supporting people who are likely to develop mental health problems

• Empowering those with mental illness to make informed choices about how they live

• Ensuring those in need get the correct support

• Enabling social participation for those experiencing mental health problems

• Removing inequality of opportunity

• Building a culture of organisational excellence 

Mind needed to begin its digital transformation journey to achieve these goals. 

The mental health charity wanted to establish a robust digital component to its service delivery and development and create a comprehensive mental health information service accessible through multiple channels, acting as a primary entry point for those seeking support. Mind also wished to enhance the involvement and engagement of both beneficiaries and the supporters of its cause while leveraging digital tools and platforms to shift how they generate their income and fundraising. Overall, Mind wanted to be 'fit for the future' with digital systems that are updated and modernised to ensure their effectiveness in the long term. 

To revolutionise its services, our two main tasks were to onboard the existing Umbraco website and continue to provide support services for Mind.

Initially, our work centred on completing the onboarding of Mind's existing Umbraco website. 

Taking the time to understand the Umbraco website application and the Azure hosting architecture was an essential first step so that we could confidently move to the next phase of the onboarding process. Completing a health check on the website and Azure hosting environments equipped us with the knowledge to support the Mind website effectively. Based on our findings, we were able to make informed suggestions on improvements for the website and hosting environments. 

As always, our experts conducted technical due diligence on the Umbraco and hosting infrastructure, including completing several remedial actions before launching the live support service. 

We also set up deployment pipelines to the Mind Azure hosting infrastructure, reviewed and made recommendations on the website analytics, and tailored a development sprint deployment test plan to Mind's Umbraco website. The final stage of the onboarding process consisted of a Jira migration for Mind's development backlog from the incumbent agency to our Jira instance.

Following the successful onboarding of Mind's website, we now continually maintain the website with our hosting and support services. 

Our critical support means that Mind can rest assured that its website will always be available to visitors with our 99.9% uptime guarantee. Any issues are taken care of rapidly as we know what an important role the Mind website plays as they strive to ensure no one faces mental health alone.

Our reactive support services leave Mind secure, knowing that any more minor issues are immediately resolved by our expert support technicians, who then deploy straight to the live website, ensuring the highest standards are kept. 

All this is made possible by our ongoing communication with the Mind team, as it gives us the power to plan and review, ensuring the Mind website is always running at its best to support people who need a helping hand.