Communications Key for Development and Launch of Mobile App

By Susan OttenApp Launch Communications

When I’m not having fun supporting Minnesota professional communicators as President of IABC Minnesota, my day job (as I like to call it) is COO of VITAL WorkLife. As a national behavioral health consulting company, we’re in the business of improving the well being and health of employees and leaders in many diverse industries. With healthcare as our largest market and physicians consistently ranking high as stressed and burned out professionals, we had to find a better way to make them aware of the services their organizations were providing for them to improve their overall well being. Solution: develop and launch our own mobile app.

So, as any good communicator would do, I set out to clearly define our objectives for our first app, VITAL WorkLife Mobile. We interviewed our key clients, plus consultants, counselors and coaches who deliver our solutions, and then vetted these results with our own team of account executives, service delivery and marketing teams. The results determined some critical needs:

The next step was to roll up our sleeves to gather the content and develop the features to be deployed via the app. We have an extremely collaborative culture, so each team played a role:

Client engagement was key to every step of the process as we wanted an app our members would really use to access their benefits and to learn more about their own well being. Working on being holistically healthy is hard work, even more so for busy professionals (can I get an “Amen!”), so making it more available via iPhones and Androids was a priority in supporting our clients.

So what’s next?

A communicator’s work is never done and, as I am learning, neither is an app developer’s work. As Marketing and Client Services begins our launch campaign, Service Delivery is working on the next functional enhancements and continues to develop fresh content. I am starting on a companion app for our non-healthcare Employee Assistance Program (EAP) clients and am focusing on the analytics and reporting to track the success of our first app.

Overall, we hope to accomplish the following:

Communications played a key role in the design, development and launch of our new app. What big projects have you supported with your communications talents? I would love to hear about them.  Please email me so we can feature these successes in our IABC Minnesota blog.