Meet our neighbours: Motivait
Meet our neighbours is a new series for Arches, where we showcase one of our neighbours based within the recently developed Helix site.
11 April 2023
Motivait, a company that provides digital engagement solutions, was established by Newcastle University alumnus Antony Jones in 2016. Motivait’s headquarters is located at The Core which is part of the Newcastle Helix development and a close neighbour to the Business School.
Antony first started his connection with Newcastle University as a Politics student back in 1976. In his first year he lived in Seaton Sluice, giving him a different introduction to student life which was reinforced by working on the Byker Wall rehousing project for the local Labour party. During his degree, he also spent a sabbatical year as Student Union President where he was involved in a variety of other community-based projects including an initiative on widening participation as an early forerunner of the University’s successful PARTNERS programme.
These early experiences sparked his interest in community engagement which has stayed with him ever since, as has his advocacy and passion for Newcastle and the Region. However, as was the case for many, Antony moved away from the North East to pursue his career in the IT industry with roles across Europe ranging from entrepreneurial start-ups to leading the largest multinationals.
He lost touch with the University but a chance meeting in 2000 with Sir Christopher Edwards, the Vice Chancellor at the time, persuaded Antony to revisit and he became an active supporter across a number of different areas such as the Students Union, the Careers Service and the Business School. He was Chair of Convocation and a member of the University Court for 10 years, and is passionate about supporting student employability, internationalisation, and widening participation. Antony was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Newcastle University in 2007.
It was his interest in engagement, motivation and behavioural science which led him to found Motivait in 2016. During a recent interview with Newcastle University Business School, Antony opened up about his connection to the Northeast region and Newcastle University, shedding light and insights into the company, significant milestones and challenges, their vision and goals for the for the years ahead. Through his reflections, Antony offered a unique perspective on Motivait's journey and the role that Newcastle played in shaping his personal and professional trajectory.
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At Motivait our focus is on designing and delivering digital engagement solutions.
When organisations are struggling with an engagement challenge, we try and provide solutions that leverage intrinsic motivation in people to get tangible results for them, hence the company's name of Motivait. Obviously, as a result of the pandemic, engagement has become an even bigger challenge for many. We are about increasing motivation and participation through innovative digital solutions that support users in five key markets:
- Customer engagement and loyalty
- Employee engagement
- Education, learning & development
- Civic & community engagement
- Alumni, supporters, members and volunteers.
The last market is a new one for us that we are particularly excited about. We see a large number of organisations and charities that want to build a different type of relationship with their alumni, and supporters by having more emotional engagement rather than a focus on traditional fundraising which is quite transactional. I have always said that fundraising is most successful when it is an outcome, not an objective. If you can develop great alumni engagement, you are much more likely to get discretionary support back from your alumni in whatever form is appropriate for them.
We typically work out of our offices in Newcastle and Madrid, but we also have people in other locations such as in Portugal and Cuba.
We operate a hybrid working model and within that try to make it pretty flexible for the individual without diluting team effectiveness or delivering high quality service for our clients.
We operate as a single functional organisation regardless of where people are working from with a lot of interaction and teamwork across locations and functions. We're just delivering a new digital hub for Newcastle Helix, and the team working on that are spread across our locations rather than just being based here.
Motivait is a relatively small team made up of diverse individuals with a shared passion to make a difference for our clients by working together to achieve remarkable results for them. Cross cultural interaction, understanding and collaboration are critical facilitators of that as well as having what I consider as just the best people!
We try to play our part in Newcastle, including hiring and supporting graduates.
We are very invested in the city, the region and the university and have been for years. I think a lot of people come to Newcastle as students and build an emotional attachment but then for different reasons find that they can't stay. I saw the employment situation here as a student and always promised myself that if there was any way to create or support jobs in the North East, I would want to be part of that. We try to play our role in the North East, obviously on a small scale, but at the same time by being quite proactive, even at the simple level of offering people a short three-month summer job to develop their experience and skills.
The School of Modern Languages were telling me this week about some of their challenges post-Brexit including securing placements in Europe. International businesses like us can help provide opportunities for students to work in Madrid as part of their degree. If they're studying Spanish and want to develop their experience at the same time, we are open to see if we can support this.
I would say that the secret to building a successful relationship with a university is all about individuals. There are some great people across Newcastle University who are really committed to giving students the best experience and opportunities possible. At Newcastle University Business School, we have worked with outstanding individuals, both on the Academic and the Professional Services side, and I would encourage other businesses to build similar links and find the approach that is right and mutually beneficial for them.
We were one of the earliest tenants on the Newcastle Helix site and have seen it grow to the amazing location it is today.
We don't worry so much about what your degree is in. It is about contribution, collaboration, commitment and change.
My A levels were in Greek, Latin and English Literature, my degree in Politics but my whole career has been in Technology. I have been fortunate enough to have had amazing experiences in different countries, from start-ups to running very large multinationals, but if I had to highlight two lessons, it would be that success is much more about execution than anything else and change is constant. That means that engaged, flexible people who are able to communicate well can be a differentiating factor and that is definitely not just about particular qualifications or even experience.
As an IT business we need and have great technology, but I believe that is because we have a diverse team of really great people. One is the outcome of the other. We try to stimulate and encourage innovation and give individuals opportunities to collaborate, let their ideas be heard and their contribution count. At the end of the day, we all inherit the results of the team, so we are all invested in it being the best possible.
We have a phrase in Motivait that may sound a bit trite but is probably true. We try and create a safe environment to fail in – whatever your age or experience. I always say it is okay to make mistakes here. I know I do, and, if we are honest, we all do, and shouldn’t be afraid to admit it. What matters is to try to not make the same mistake in the same situation twice because then we're not learning.
We can hire people less experienced than the role might suggest because we want to give people an opportunity to learn and develop. What’s more this is not just about age since we should all be developing and learning throughout our careers, and I simply do not accept that age or experience should be regarded as a limitation or determinant on contribution.
Trust is an important value for us, so we try and open the company up internally. We operate on a transparent basis including making most information available to everyone, so everybody knows where we are, how we're doing and where we are going. How we perform is going to be determined by our team and so transparency, trust and knowledge are essential ingredients. I am also pleased that we typically hover around 50% gender balance which ridiculously is still not the norm in our industry.
When we first built our technology platform, we took some important decisions that weren’t obvious but have really paid off.
You certainly cannot start a business without taking some risks and although you can mitigate some, there are others that you just have to accept may work out well or may not. The first couple of years in our corporate journey were spent investing significantly in developing our core technology platform. Our solutions use this platform, and we then adapt what the user sees to address each client’s challenge. We also took some bold decisions on technology choices back in 2016 that today have proven to be really good decisions even if they were less clear then.
Motivait’s first big customer win in 2017 was a Spanish based global fashion retailer which meant we had to adjust our original plans, capabilities and priorities to support them properly, both from a functionality level and with regard to the team in Madrid. This, together with my background, probably laid the foundations for Motivait to be international and multicultural in our outlook.
Motivait has been growing ever since and in the midst of the pandemic, we took another bold decision to relocate our UK headquarters from the South East to Newcastle. At the time, with uncertainty rife, it felt a bit of a gamble, but I couldn’t be more delighted with the result.
Today, we have over 40 million active users using our solutions across 50 countries who perform 75 million interactions in a year. In January, we did over 10 million in the month and have had peaks of over half a million in a day.
That has been a pretty big growth curve for us all and has shown we can scale. We deliver our solutions as a managed service to our clients with a service level guarantee. Rather like in football that means we are only as good as our last results, and I don’t want to tempt fate, but I think it is a credit to the team and the technology that in six years there hasn’t been 1 minute of outage time, which is sadly not normal in the technology world.
We use gamification in our engagement solutions to increase motivation and participation, so even though this was relatively unknown then, we decided to build all the game mechanics into our platform from the start. I do think that over time we will probably stop talking about gamification and user experience per se and they will just become a natural part of good design practice because good design is by definition about users.
I think Newcastle Helix is a fantastic base but with one caveat, that it could easily be seen as a collection of fancy buildings without a connection to the city.
The partnership between Newcastle City Council, the University and Legal & General to develop Newcastle Helix is a fantastic initiative. We were one of the earliest tenants on the Newcastle Helix site and have seen it grow to the amazing location it is today. However, it is true that the buildings, however impressive they may be, are only home to the people that work, learn, research and live there. If the site and the activities and knowledge generated aren’t embedded in the city and become an asset for the wider community, there is a risk that its potential impact could be limited. It may be an ambitious thought, but I hope one day people walking down from Arthur's Hill, instead of walking around Newcastle Helix, will walk through it and think of it as theirs.
We try to proactively work with the Business School across multiple areas.
We have worked on the BUS1016 project, to create a digital solution that enhances and supports teaching and skills development on this undergraduate module. We have also collaborated with the NUBS Corporate Relations team and supported the MBA with lectures and practical assignments. Our people learn and grow from these collaborations, and I hope we are able to contribute to the student experience.
Our mascot Moti is a sloth. Not an obvious company mascot given what we associate with sloths?
That is right - they don't move a lot, but then again, that is the challenge. So, if you can motivate Moti, you should be able to motivate everybody. It is obviously a bit of internal fun but if we can bring the same level of passion and dedication to our client’s engagement challenges as we have for engaging Moti, then we might be on the right track.
Whilst change and agility are constants, I do believe in strategic determination, focus and consistency.
When we started the company, we agreed on six strategic measures of progress that we would monitor. We had the pandemic in the middle which was a bit scary but taught us a lot about resilience and determination.
Like all businesses, we monitor our financial performance including revenue, profitability and cash. In the current economic environment these are going to be challenging for every organisation. But we also look at five longer term strategic indicators.
Firstly, being in multiple markets, sectors and geographies tests that what we do is relevant, can mitigate any effects of a particular market downturn and offers growth.
Our second measure is about our clients and their levels of satisfaction. We focus on this hard in terms of formal feedback, but since we operate as a managed service provider, we also measure other indicators such as renewals and increases in scope.
The third thing we measure is growth. We are a young business and growth matters to us. We look at growth with existing clients and growth by gaining new clients. Both are equally important.
From a predictability point of view, we also measure recurring revenue in terms of the revenue that clients have committed going forward which can be another sign of satisfaction.
Our last indicator is about organisational development, both as a business but also as individuals since it is important that people feel that they can develop their capabilities and experiences within Motivait.
Our goals for this year? Deliver more value for our existing clients and continue to gain new clients. Keep growing, keep delivering, keep developing, and have some fun. Let’s also see if we can keep Moti moving!