There were a couple of things we particularly valued about working with Business Think. One was Elliot’s untiring commitment to drive down to work with us personally once a week during the height of our project. We sat around our kitchen table and hashed things out every week, which was a real gift of time. The other was his experience and knowledge of putting together learning environments, something we had never done before. Because Elliot knew what questions to ask us, he was able to design just the kind of course we wanted. The result is a growing body of happy students on our Foundation of Buddhist Thought Course. Elliot in addition clearly wanted to realise our vision for the site and learning platform. We looked at another company’s site that we loved, with a couple of elements we wanted to use ourselves. Elliot said, “You’re not going to get that.” Then, the next week he gave it to us. He had gone away and found out how to do it. That kind of commitment to our happiness, we think, really recommends him.
We would particularly recommend Business Think if you’re doing anything with education. We now have a top-class online course that is getting effusive feedback from our students. People are finding us online through searches, and they are signing up just on the basis of visiting our site. We feel it’s a great result.
Peter and Tri at Foundations of Buddhist Thought
Our work with Foundations of Buddhist Thought
I first met Tri and Peter in the Summer of 2019, after being introduced by a good friend of our business, Jon Gerrard at Saltwater Digital. They were planning on starting a business providing online training based on the Khen Rinpoche Geshe Tashi Tsering’s Foundation of Buddhist Thought book series. This course material had existed in a form on Moodle for a number of years, but Tri and Peter felt the current website did not provide the quality of learning experience they desired for their students going forward. They also needed to launch the material using their new brand, which was yet to be created.
Initial discussion focused on marketing strategy, how to reach the audience using digital channels (and engaging existing contacts), to establish what needed to be done to ensure students would find and buy the course material. Then the build of a new website began. WordPress provided an integrated online learning platform, so that the content, learning and payment would all be manageable in one place.
We met every week for two hours each time, over the three months project, as the scale and complexity meant it was important to always check we were all moving in the right direction. Tri and Peter had a very clear vision for the visual identity of their brand and website, and I was happy to work with their graphic designer to make sure they got exactly what they wanted.
This project was really enjoyable, as Tri and Peter asked that the existing material and learning process be reviewed while the website was built. I have worked at the University of Plymouth on digital learning for a number of years, so applied those same skills to recommend changes to the way the course material was delivered. The website launched successfully in January 2020. The response of the marketing communication was instant and from a personal perspective, very exciting. Tri and Peter are already running multiple intakes of students on the Foundations of Buddhist Thought courses.
I also learnt a lot on this project. After spending the equivalent of 24 hours face-to-face you get to know each other well enough to go off topic and have interesting debates about the World (and Buddhism). Tri and Peter even sent me copies of the six books written by Geshi Tashi Tsering during the project, which was very kind of them. The books are on my office shelf, alongside significantly less interesting publications about digital marketing and finance.
Thank you Tri and Peter for asking Business Think to do this project.
Elliot Forte at Business Think
