NIH and PhysIQ Complete Initial Phase of COVID-19 Digital Biomarker Development

NIH and PhysIQ Complete Initial Phase of COVID-19 Digital Biomarker Development; Pen Contract for Phase II

CHICAGO, IL – The National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), exercised their option to enter Phase II of a multi-phase contract to continue physIQ’s development of an AI-based COVID-19 digital biomarker to address the rapid decompensation of high-risk COVID-19 patients. This exercise of Phase II by the NIH brings the total contract to $6.6 million.

In just 10 weeks, physIQ successfully enrolled and monitored 400 high-risk COVID-19 patients in Phase I of the DeCODe study. “The adoption of and enrollment in the platform by both patients and healthcare providers has been overwhelmingly positive. I believe this speaks to the demand for this type of program, as well as the ease of use and value to the both patient and provider,” said Karen Larimer PhD, ACNP-BC, study PI and physIQ’s Director of Clinical Development.

The DeCODe project, which is in collaboration with University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System (UI Health), aimed to develop an early warning system allowing providers to intervene when a COVID-19 patient who is clinically surveilled from home begins to worsen. Rather than relying on periodic point measurements, such as temperature and pulse oximetry that are known to be lagging or insensitive indicators of COVID-19 decompensation, continuous multi-parameter vital signs and physiological features were used to establish a targeted biomarker, or COVID-19 Decompensation Index (CDI), for worsening COVID-19.

“Using Phase I data, we developed and tested a preliminary digital biomarker using state of the art machine learning algorithms that take advantage of our extensive library of wearable biosensor analytics as inputs,” said Stephan Wegerich, physIQ’s Chief Science Officer. “Furthermore, we were able to demonstrate performance levels that far exceeded our target performance criterion.  We are looking forward to further validation in Phase II.”

Phase II begins January 2021 where 1,200 patients will be enrolled to validate the digital biomarker. During the validation phase, physIQ will continue to enroll ambulatory participants who are confirmed COVID-19 positive and evaluate the ability for the digital biomarker to predict decompensation severity remote from the hospital.

The study is designed to capture data from a large, diverse population to investigate the digital biomarker’s overall performance, as well as to identify any differences that may exist among subgroups based on age, sex/gender and racial/ethnic characteristics. Preliminary analysis has demonstrated that nearly half of the participants are Latinx and at least one third are Black. With this diverse representation of study participants, it may be possible to better understand how COVID-19 infection specifically impacts these populations.

“UI Health serves some of the most vulnerable, underserved communities in Illinois. These are the communities that COVID-19 has hit the hardest,” stated UI Health Chief Medical Officer, Terry Vanden Hoek MD. “We need to have a deep understanding of how and why COVID-19 is impacting people of color so dramatically. Then we’ll use this data to improve care everywhere.”

This biomarker will build on physIQ’s prior FDA-cleared, AI-based Multivariate Change IndexTM (MCI) that has amassed more than 2 million hours of physiologic data, supporting development of this targeted digital biomarker for COVID-19. This will enable new research and further insight into using digital health to advance the public health response.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. 75N91020C00040.

###

About physIQ

PhysIQ is the leader in digital medicine, dedicated to generating unprecedented health insight using continuous wearable biosensor data and advanced analytics.  Its enterprise-ready cloud platform continuously collects and processes data from any wearable biosensor using a deep portfolio of FDA-cleared analytics.  The company has published one of the most rigorous clinical studies to date in digital medicine and are pioneers in developing, validating, and achieving regulatory approval of Artificial Intelligence-based analytics.  With applications in both healthcare and clinical trial support, physIQ is transforming continuous physiological data into insight for health systems, payers, and pharmaceutical companies.

For more information, please visit www.physIQ.com. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Originally posted here.

“Leadership, at its core, in my view, is about being personal.” President Joe Biden

It is this very quality that President Biden possesses that gives millions of immigrants across the country hope and faith that better days might just be ahead of them. Immigration was a core topic during Biden’s election campaign, and he has indicated that he intends to make immigration one of his top priorities during his term as President. The question remains: what will that look like for the millions of immigrants who are waiting with bated breath and for the business community, who rely on immigrant workers for their high skills and specialized knowledge?

Biden has announced that he would nominate Alejandro Mayorkas for the position of Director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Mayorkas, a Cuban-born lawyer and one of the architects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program, was previously the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, during the Obama administration. He would be the first Latino and first immigrant to hold this position – something that is being hailed as a historic moment. As Biden has noted – he is looking to Mayorkas as someone who “….. will play a critical role in fixing our broken immigration system and understands that living up to our values and protecting our nation’s security aren’t mutually exclusive — and under his leadership, they’ll go hand-in-hand.”

Biden’s nominations for key Immigration Agency positions and White House Staff appear to be intentional and almost always ties into his narrative of securing America’s values as a Nation of Immigrants. This is further reflected in his pick of Tyler Moran as Special Assistant to the President for Immigration for the Domestic Policy Council and of Esther Olavarria as the Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council for Immigration. Tyler Moran previously served in the Domestic Policy Council [DPC] in the Obama-Biden White House and had worked on the DACA program while Esther Olavarria, born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States in 1962 with her family, has also worked at the Immigration Hub, the Center for American Progress and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Biden’s first 100 days:

Biden’s vision for immigration reform under his administration has been led by a desire to “safeguard our security, provide a fair and just system that helps to grow and enhance our economy, and secure our cherished values.’” As per Biden’s campaign, he has indicated that his priorities within the first 100 days of his administration would include:

• Reversal of the Public Charge regulation: This regulation requires foreign nationals to disclose their financial history, including whether they have used public benefits in the past. This new regulation allows USCIS officers to take such factors into account in a “totality of circumstances” test in determining the granting of certain immigration benefits. Biden has expressed that this policy “undermines America’s character as land of opportunity that is open and welcoming to all, not just the wealthy.”
• Protection of Dreamers: The Obama-Biden administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 to protect “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, obeyed the law once here, and stayed in school or enlisted in the military. Under the Trump administration, DACA had been terminated and there continues to be legal action in the courts against this ruling. Biden has mentioned that he intends to reinstate DACA and explore options to provide the Dreamers and their parents a roadmap to citizenship through legislative immigration reform.
• Review of Temporary Protected Status [TPS] rescissions, explore path to citizenship through legislation: Biden has indicated that he intends to order an immediate review of the Trump administration’s rescission of TPS and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) holders.
• Rescission of Executive Order 13769, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.
• Streamline naturalization process: The Biden campaign has indicated it intends to improve the current naturalization process by “addressing the application backlog by prioritizing the adjudication workstream and ensuring applications are processed quickly and rejecting the imposition of unreasonable fees.” 

Long-term employment-based priorities:

The President had maintained throughout his campaign – and in more recent times – that he envisions a modern immigration system – one that  attracts the “best and the brightest” talents to the U.S. and in turn incentivizes foreign talent to seek out employment in the U.S. President Biden has also indicated he would like to bring about changes and reverse some of the Trump administration’s executive orders to bring about an ease for employers to employ foreign talent and continue to leverage the “best and the brightest” applicants that come to the U.S. Some of the changes that the Biden administration has indicated that they will focus on are:

• High-skill nonimmigrant reforms
• Wage-based allocation process for H-1B
• Prevent “crowding out” of high-skilled workers by entry-level workers
• Support legislation to eliminate per-country Employment based Green Card quotas
• Support legislation to increase EB IV quota
• Temporary quota reductions during periods of high U.S. unemployment
• Quota exemption for recent U.S. STEM Ph.D. graduates
• Support new visa category to allow cities and countries to petition for higher levels of immigrants to increase economic growth

•  H-2B reforms and streamlining
• Strengthening employer compliance and enforcement

There are many open questions that remain; specifically, the Biden administration has not explicitly provided any indication of its plans for such immigration issues as:

• Presidential proclamations on H/L/J [non immigration visa categories] visa issuance, immigrant visa applicant health insurance, and COVID-19 travel restrictions
• H-1B cap number allocation
• H-1B eligibility criteria
• L-1 visa policy
• F-1 admission periods, practical training
• B-1 business visitor policy
• EB-5 investor visa policy

The reality is that as President Biden assumes the office of the President of the United States of America, he will be faced with several challenges – all of them competing for his attention and immediate action. It is expected that Biden’s first priority will be COVID-19 and stabilizing the economy. Amid all of this, from an immigration perspective, it is important to temper our expectations from the incoming administration as to what it will be able to achieve in its first 100 days. Since his election, Biden has urged a sense of patience while his administration begins the long process of undoing some of the current administration’s policies. He has indicated that this will take time and he would like his administration to “get it right,” instead of causing more chaos.

As Bruna Bouhid, communications director of United We Dream, the first and largest immigrant youth-led organization stated – “There’s so much energy on what we can do in a Biden-Harris administration.” This was further echoed by the American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA] President Jennifer Minear in her statements post-election – “AILA stands ready to offer solutions that will help undo the previous administration’s harmful immigration policies and to work toward a better future for all of us.”  It appears that with the incoming Biden-Harris administration, there has been a renewed vigor and faith within the immigration and business community. The expectation appears to be one of stability, predictability and accountability, together with reinstating a sense of respect for immigrants throughout the country.

Originally posted on https://www.fragomen.com/.

Amazon is always improving, but it’s no secret that the platform still lags behind other digital advertising giants when it comes to offering insights in a simple, user-friendly format.Doesn’t mean this info doesn’t exist, but it can be difficult to find and even more difficult to finesse into something worthy of presentation.

With all its day-to-day metrics such as Sales, Spend, ACoS, NTB, it’s easy to get lost and lose sight of some of the high-level metrics your boss, direct reports, or clients want. After all, how often have you come to a meeting prepared with a full table of ACoS data only to be stumped by the question, “What products are performing best in the ads?” or, “How much are we spending on this product?” 

Again, this information is available on Amazon, it just is hard to put into a simple report. Fortunately, with some time spent upfront with the steps in this guide (and the use of a few free tools), the whole process can be fairly quick.

Step 1: Pull an Advertised Product Report

You can find the report by logging into the Amazon advertising console, going to “Reports,” “Create Report,” and then clicking on “Advertised Product.” For the purposes of this article, we’ll use a Professional Seller account. 

Once you’ve selected the report, you can set the time frame as well as the Time unit (either Summary, which will aggregate the product data over your selected Report period, or Daily, which will segment the product data by day — this can be a very large report if you have a large number of SKUs and cover a long Report period).

This can be a tedious process if you’re doing it every week — especially if there are other Amazon reports you need to pull and/or you manage other accounts. Fortunately, Amazon makes it a bit easier for you by offering the option to automatically have the report delivered to your email address (it doesn’t need to be your account login; it can be emailed to anyone).

For that, simply select the “Recurring” option under “Schedule,” set your frequency and preferred delivery day, and then select an appropriate End date — this is when the report will cease to regularly pull. If you are running recurring reports, be sure to take note of your End date, because you may want to extend the recurrence period!

When configuring the report, it’s usually best to pull data at least a week (and preferably two weeks) in arrears — so if you’re pulling a report on the 25th, the latest data you’ll want to pull should be the 18th (and preferably the 11th). The reason is that revenue data for Amazon tends to have a good deal of latency — ad data such as clicks, spend, impressions and so on are fairly reliable in real time, but revenue (and in turn ACoS) are almost never real time. The nice thing is that you’re almost always in for a pleasant surprise each time you log in, with revenue increasing and ACoS decreasing, but the bad thing is if something is wrong with a campaign, it can take some time for you to notice.

Either way, always account for the lag time when pulling your reports.

We typically schedule ours to pull on a weekly basis, a week or two in arrears, and looking back over the last 30 days. That leads to pasting over a lot of data, but it’s going to be more accurate.

In terms of the report itself, whether the data is broken down by day, week, or month is entirely up to you, but if you’re following along with this guide, we recommend breaking the data down by month…

To read the full article, you can find it here.

Relativity Acquires VerQu, a Data Management Software Company

Together with VerQu, Relativity’s SaaS platform will transform how organizations handle collaboration and chat data, and connect directly to archives

CHICAGO and RARITAN, NJ – January 6, 2021 – Relativity, a global legal and compliance technology company, today announced that it has acquired VerQu, a data management software company that helps organizations migrate and capture communication data for record retention and compliance purposes. The integration of VerQu into Relativity’s SaaS products will transform how organizations handle collaboration and chat data, and massively accelerate the ability to collect, analyze, monitor and review all types of unstructured data seamlessly and securely.

“It’s imperative that the legal and compliance industries stay ahead of and evolve with the changing nature of work in organizations globally,” said Mike Gamson, CEO at Relativity. “Enterprise communications will continue to shift rapidly and scale from traditional channels like email toward chat and collaboration platforms. That’s why Relativity is committed to investing in technology that connects directly to native cloud data sources for surveillance and e-discovery workflows, evolving the data paradigm from documents to include conversations.”

Relativity will welcome VerQu’s team that includes top-level engineers and project managers who have a deep knowledge and understanding of data management and the ever-changing information technology landscape. Founded in 2013, VerQu has successfully served domestic and global organizations ranging from small and medium sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

“Since 2013, VerQu has worked to create a data management and migration service to provide a best-in-class customer experience that anticipates our clients’ future needs. Joining Relativity is a natural next step to evolve how our products ingest data and combine that with a platform that enables users to analyze and act on that data natively,” said Frank Perrone, Managing Director at VerQu. “I’m looking forward to seeing what we can all do in e-discovery and surveillance when we integrate the power of our teams and technologies.”

In 2020 alone, there were 115M daily average users worldwide using Microsoft Teams and 12M+ users on Slack – where the daily average messages per user per day increased by 20% in 2020. With the nature of work becoming more collaborative across enterprise technology platforms, this data cannot continue to be analyzed like email as teams can lose valuable context and metadata unique to those platforms.

In conjunction with the Relativity integration, VerQu will still offer its current products – Phoenix, Hydra and Hive – and customers will continue to access the products and customer service that they rely on while also having the opportunity to leverage Relativity’s resources.

Once integrated, Relativity’s SaaS platform users will have the ability to:

• Treat collaboration data like conversations: By leveraging Relativity Short Message Format for more sources rather than treating the data like an email, users will be able to review, monitor, analyze and produce data types in its native format. Users will no longer lose the richness of communication and collaboration data, enabling better use of artificial intelligence to get results more quickly and reduce false positives.
• Integrate with cloud data sources directly: Cloud-to-cloud integration enables a more secure, efficient and less costly collection process. More than 30 cloud data sources for RelativityOne Collect and Relativity Trace will be available for seamless ingestion into the platform, with accelerated innovation times for emerging data sources.
• Directly access archives: Direct access to archives like Proofpoint, enables Relativity to easily pull content from a regulated organization’s system of record proactively or reactively. Instead of a multi-step process that requires search, export, migrate, process and upload Relativity can immediately ingest content stored in the archive to RelativityOne for e-discovery or surveillance.

“In addition to the technology this acquisition will bring to market, I’m thrilled to welcome the very talented VerQu team to Relativity,” said Gamson. “With their team joining us, we will not only strengthen our company culture, but strengthen our leadership in data collections of all types.” 

About Relativity 
At Relativity, we make software to help users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. Our platform is used by more than 13,000 organizations around the world to manage large volumes of data and quickly identify key issues during litigation, internal investigations, and compliance operations with SaaS platform RelativityOne and Relativity Trace. Relativity has users in 48+ countries from organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice, and 199 of the Am Law 200. Relativity has been named one of Chicago’s Top Workplaces by the Chicago Tribune for 10 consecutive years. Please contact Relativity at sales@relativity.com or visit http://www.relativity.com for more information. 

Many software applications are architected into three logical layers: the User Interface (UI), the Business Logic, and the Data Layer.

A very popular implementation of this architecture is called the Model-View-Controller pattern. A tester should be able to work with tools and concepts that are specific to each layer. When a tester can help pinpoint which layer an error is occurring in, its beneficial to the whole development team. This blog will be focusing on the data layer and the importance of SQL skills for testers and will walk through some common scenarios for testers and work through a solution.

Let’s get started with the first scenario:

Tester Level: Junior

Scenario:

Users of a website can either be a super user or regular user. The UI for super users has a lot more functionality represented with more visible menus and menu items. Tester Terry needs to be able to switch her User account back and forth from regular user to super user in order to work through different test cases in the test plan.

Architect Andrew explains to Tester Terry how to change a user’s rights in the database:

“Just update the integer value in column Level in table User_Rights for the row where the value in column Rights equals Administration. The integer should be set to 1 for regular user or 2 for super user. And by the way, there is foreign key in this table from the Users table so make sure you only change the admin rights for yourself!”

Terry responds, “No problem dude” and goes back to her desk – with 100% confidence that she can accomplish the task because she had just finished a basic SQL tutorial.

Resolution:

Terry needs to write and execute a set of SQL statements to make this happen. She will probably end up running this SQL many times during the project. What tools and SQL concepts will she use?

The tool needed to write and execute SQL statements against a SQL database is called a SQL administration client. There are many varieties of SQL clients to choose from but typically they will use the same tool the database developers use. I typically use Microsoft’s SQL Management Studio since many of our applications use Microsoft SQL Server as the database. Just google “SQL administration clients” to see a ton of other tools available.

Tester Terry will need some additional info from the database team to be able run SQL against the database such as the server name or IP address, the database name, a database username, and its password.

From parsing what Architect Andrew said, Tester Terry knows the following SQL concepts will be involved in a solution: tables, column, integer, primary and foreign keys, selects, updates, where clauses, and joins. (BTW, there are many online tutorials to learn and practice these concepts.)

It’s always wise to do some discovery work by examining the column names and rows in the tables you will be working with. Execute a few select statements with top which will limit the number rows displayed if there are lots of rows in the table. Use an * to see all columns.

Select top 30 * from Users
Select top 10 * from User_Rights

Before writing your SQL, I like to advise people to think about the logical steps needed to accomplish the task and write a quick plan in pseudocode (English fragments). It then becomes easy to convert it to SQL commands.

1. Find the row that represents you in the User table and get its primary key.
2. Use that primary key in step 1 to find the correct row in the User_Rights table. Don’t forget to make sure it’s also the “administration” rights row.
3. For that row, change the value in the “Level” column to 1 or 2.

Always write update and delete SQL as just select statements first to make sure you are grabbing the correct row to process.

Let’s start converting the plan to SQL. Column names are in [].

1. Select [primaryKey] from Users where [lastName]=’Hakimian’ and [firstName]=’Daniel’
2. Select [level] from User_Rights where [rights]=’Administration’ and [fkUser]=Users.primaryKey
3. Update User_Rights set [level]= 2

If a where clause has a comparison of column values from two different table, it’s an indicator that you can combine your select as one SQL statement using a join.

select

[level]

from

User_Rights left join Users on User_Rights.fkUser = User.primaryKey

where

User_Rights.[rights]=’Administration’ and User.[lastName]=’Hakimian’ and User.[firstName]=’Daniel’

Execute the select SQL a few times and when you are confident that it works correctly, convert it to SQL update statement.

update

User_Rights

set

[level] = 2

from

User_Rights left join Users on User_Rights.[fkUser] = User.[primaryKey]

where

User_Rights.[rights]=’Administration’ and User.[lastName]=’Hakimian’ and User.[firstName]=’Daniel’

This is one of many possible solutions to write the update in SQL. Whichever option you choose, I recommend you create and stick to a solid process that you can use to write simple to more complex SQL.

1. Create a quick logical plan
2. Write and test your SQL snippets as select statements prior to using them in updates and deletes
3. Optimize your SQL statements
4. Save your final working SQL in a file so you can reuse it throughout the project.

Now Tester Terry will be able to quickly switch her own user account back and forth from regular user to super user as needed during the rest of the project!

Part 2 in this series will hone in on a scenario a Senior Tester might see during a project.

Part 3 covers a scenario for a Senior Development Engineer in Test.

Original article posted here.

Segmented Communications to Drive Employee Engagement and Wellness Tops the List of What Companies Must Prepare for in 2021

CHICAGO, Dec. 15, 2020 – Evive, the leader in digital engagement and communication technology, today released its list of top trends businesses must prepare for around employee communication in 2021.

“Today’s remote workforce is changing the way human resource leaders communicate across organizations, accelerating digital transformation to automate personalized, relevant messaging,” said Prashant Srivastava, president and CEO of Evive. “Remote work requires mobile communication delivery at an unprecedented level. Many employers still cannot efficiently communicate if they are not in an office setting, but that will change with the right automated technologies to fill those gaps.”

The insights and predictions from Evive’s leadership team include:

Reaching specific employee populations

With the current and potential organizational disruptions, it is more critical than ever to send targeted and relevant messages. COVID-19 shed new light that sending an email to “all employees” is no longer good enough. There’s a need for more granular, data-driven communications that is personalized and meaningful.

More and more employers will need to use data to identify and target individuals with specific calls to action. Examples of segmented communications include employees of different geographies, cultures, age groups, medical histories, familial make-ups, genders and more.

Keeping employees up-to-date with evolving information

The pandemic has helped HR leaders identify the importance of regular communication. As the world moves into the next stage of the pandemic—vaccine execution— employers need to devise a data-driven messaging strategy to keep employees grounded and informed. They can alert segmented groups when a vaccine might be available in their area. They will also need to keep those communication lines open as they look toward workplace reopenings and ensuring employer safety. Companies will need to utilize email, SMS, applications, video conferencing and text messaging to communicate the right information at the right time.

Supporting mental and physical wellness

Employee’s well-being and health remain of the utmost importance in 2021. With workforces spread out and meaningful peer interaction significantly decreased, the need to connect with others has highlighted the increased instances of anxiety, depression and stress globally. A recent Evive study found that 60% of respondents were concerned about stress, loneliness, anxiety, and/or depression.

A platform that utilizes data to drive rapid, personalized communication to individuals in vulnerable moments could drive people to an employer-sponsored Employee Assistance Program (EAP), mental health treatment, or physical wellness program to gain the help or advice they need.

Understanding the state in which you’re reaching employees

In the wake of the pandemic, employees are stressed out, anxious, and need to feel a sense of community, making the right messaging key to success. Using data-driven communications to reach employees with what they need to hear in the right moments make employees feel engaged, informed, and aligned. Communication today may be more challenging, but with automated employee engagement technology, communicating directly with employees feeling workplace anxiety, stress, and burnout has a beneficial impact on the entire organization.

Boosting benefits utilization

Guiding certain segments of employees to the most useful benefits is still one of the critical outcomes of personalized communications. As employers realize their employee programs and resources are not always utilized, the need for the right people to engage with those benefits becomes evident. A personalized platform that segments the right audience for the right services helps HR leaders drive more benefits utilization. For example, a likely higher telemedicine investment in 2021 will mean HR leaders need to communicate how to engage with those services with employees who visited ERs in 2020 for non-emergent care.

Re-Examining the HR Tech Stack

The current economy forces companies to evaluate their software spend and effectiveness. Employers will continue to invest in programs deemed necessary, not nice-to-haves. Managing the employee journey and the right messaging through a platform no longer falls in the nice-to-have bucket.

HR leaders need to reevaluate their view on the employee journey. While the core stages of the employee journey remain the same, using data to communicate to team members at each stage must drive that messaging. In addition, supporting remote workforce, onboarding, and career growth for distinct employee groups no longer means an office meeting in a conference room. HR leaders need to leverage communications in an automated way to the right employee segments.

Overcoming Zoom fatigue for better employee engagement

2020 has proven the over-reliance on virtual meetings. Initially, companies and their employees were eager to shift their culture to these video calls. But the extended use of this approach has led people to Zoom fatigue.

Companies will need to invest in more useful ways to engage people and reach targeted populations. Data-driven messaging reaches people quickly and simply, meaning everything does not require video time. The faster employers can adapt to this, the better it will be for overall employee well-being.

“COVID-19 exposed a gap in employer-employee communications. It’s critical that leaders reshape and rethink how they communicate to employees,” says Srivastava. “The process is largely broken and fragmented, creating a void of understanding employees’ situations and an inability to communicate with them on a personal level. Employers that act to automate their digital engagement and communication technologies will see greater employee satisfaction and health, and increased profitability.”

Is your company prepared to embrace these trends in 2021? To learn more about the importance of personalized communication, visit 10 Features Your Communications Platform Needs to be Effective.

About Evive

Evive changes the way companies communicate. As the market leader in data-driven, personalized engagement, Evive has extensive experience helping large and midsize companies optimize the employee experience across their diverse populations. Starting with rich healthcare and HR data sources, Evive uses proprietary predictive analytics and behavioral science expertise to deliver highly segmented, multi-modal messaging that connects the right person to the right resource at the right time: driving individual action and delivering measurable outcomes across the spectrum of employee experiences. To learn more about Evive, visit https://goevive.com/ or LinkedIn. Contact press@goevive.com to learn more.

Media contact

Michelle Genser, Evive Vice President of Marketing

847.452.2723

press@goevive.com

Everyone would agree that 2020 has been a year of unprecedented disruption and change for businesses everywhere. It’s more important than ever to stay up to date on changing tax laws, regulatory changes, and more.

Our Year-end Webinar Series has four different sessions covering a variety of industry hot topics. From individual and business tax planning to a panel discussion on business performance strategies for CFOs, and more.

Sessions from the event include:

·       Individual tax planning during a pandemic and an election year

·       Business tax planning during a pandemic and an election year

·       Audit and accounting update

·       A panel discussion of business performance strategies for future-ready CFOs

Visit plantemoran.com to learn more.

In 25 words or less, what is Provi all about? 

We’re on a mission to better connect each tier of the alcohol beverage industry. At Provi, we believe that libations bring people together. It was that belief that laid down the foundation of our mission—to connect every tier of the alcohol industry.

What problem do you solve and how do you solve it better than the competition? 

Provi brings together all three tiers of the beverage alcohol industry in one place—giving them each unique tools and attentive support to help them all work better, together.

How did you get started? 

Our founder, Taylor Katzman’s family owns a distillery and saw firsthand how frustrating the process of ordering alcohol could be for bars, restaurants and retailers. He felt there was a better way and sought out to solve it. Not long after, Provi was born.

Are you headquartered in Chicago? What made you choose Chicago? If you are not headquartered in Chicago, what made you open an office here? 

Yes, we are Chicago-based. Our founder, Taylor, is from here and felt strongly that he could build a solid tech business with the wealth of talent that is here. Not to mention, Chicago has a bustling tech scene which has grown tremendously within the past several years. We’re excited to be a part of it!

What’s the coolest perk Provi’s office has? 

When the pandemic struck, we wanted to do something to support our customers. We launched WFH (work from home) Eats.  We reimburse $25 per week, per employee to get lunch or dinner from a local bar/restaurant to help give back to an industry that is hurting right now. It’s a win-win situation. Our employees get some good grub while also lending much-needed support to bars and restaurants across the country.

How has your company culture evolved as Provi has grown?

Our company has come a long way in the past four years, and with it, so has our culture. We now have a Culture Committee lead by our employees who have worked tirelessly to create our four core values:

●      Host: Inclusive & Kind

●      Serve: Collaborative & Empathetic

●      Deliver: Work Hard & Follow Through

●      Celebrate: Supportive & Have Fun

What’s the No. 1 thing on your to-do list? 

Expanding our DEI programs. We recently formed a DEI committee internally, made up of employees who are passionate about this. We are also working to engage an outside consultant to help with training programs and general best practices so we can attract and retain the best talent out there.

What do you do to encourage constant growth and change for your employees? 

We are diligent about sending out pulse surveys to get feedback on what we can do better for our employees, and we read each and every response! This has led to implementing numerous programs including the aforementioned WFH Eats!

How does Provi interact with the Chicago community?

Our engineering team wanted a way to give back and presented leadership with the idea of volunteer hours. We now have each employee accrue 1 paid hour per month that they can use to volunteer for a cause of their choice (up to 4 hours at time). 

What are the top reasons employees would say they love working for Provi? 

The people here are kind. Everyone is willing to stop what they are doing to help, answer questions, clarify, whatever you need.  We also are really good at giving shoutouts in our #Kudos Slack channel. It’s such a great way to recognize when employees are going above and beyond and demonstrating our core values!

Before launching a business, product line, or new service, it is imperative that a company understands how much of an actual demand there is for it as well as how financially viable the idea will be in the market. 

Failing to adequately validate a business idea can cost precious time, energy and money, as well as the opportunity cost of not investing resources in another area of the business that has greater long term potential to drive value to all stakeholders, the most important of which, of course, are customers. 

In this article, we will explore some of the ways a business can utilize digital marketing tactics to validate their business ideas before launching, as well as how one of our clients, a well-known manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, did just that before launching a brand new product line of air purifiers.

Measuring Demand

One of the simplest and quickest ways to begin to gauge potential customer demand for your product or service is to use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to estimate the number of searches for all the potential search terms a customer would use to find or describe what you are selling. 

For example, our client was interested in supplementing their traditional offering of vacuum cleaners with premium air purifiers. Using the Keyword Planner, we researched different ways consumers might search for this type of product and search volume for each keyword. Though our client already had a product they wanted to test in the market, keyword research is usually best done at the ideation stage to determine potential demand to reinforce the decision or avoid allocating time or resources to further developing an idea with little to no demand.

Sizing The Market

Another tactic to gauge potential demand is to use a social platform like Facebook or LinkedIn to measure the size of your target customer segments. Though you cannot measure actual purchasing intent to the degree that you can through looking at keyword search volume, you can determine the size of your target market in terms of potential customers. 

Our client piloting the air purifier had determined six customer personas they wanted to target based on their internal research. We were then able to look at which audience target options would best correlate with those personas, as well as how large those audiences were. 

Generating Interest

Whether you are a business that hasn’t launched or an existing business that is considering or in the process of developing a new product or service that hasn’t been released in the market yet, you can still start attracting potential customers by setting up a landing page and promoting it using paid channels such as search, social or display. This page should clearly define the product or service you are offering as well as your unique value proposition and a distinct call to action, which can be to enter an email address in order to learn more, get an early invitation, or even make a pre-order. If you are not generating any interest in the form of clicks to the page or capturing any emails, you may need to test different messaging on the page to know what will resonate more strongly with your prospects.

If after trying different messaging on the landing page, you are still not generating the desired interest, you may have an idea that your target customers are simply not interested in. If, on the other hand, you see a lot of traffic to the landing page as well as people signing up to learn more or receive updates, that is a strong sign that your prospects like what you are developing.

Determining Financial Viability

Of course, creating a company, product or service to meet existing demand is not enough. An idea worth pursuing must also have a clear path to profitability. Using the tools described above, you can forecast rough customer acquisition costs by estimating the number of ad impressions, click-through rate, and conversion rate. With these metrics, you can, in turn, estimate the number of clicks, cost, conversions, and cost per conversion or cost per customer. 

If you know or can model the immediate value of each customer as well as the profit margin, you can determine the approximate profitability of each customer. Determining customer lifetime value will obviously be difficult at this stage, but you can model that out using assumptions such as average number of purchases per customer or average subscription length if your revenue model is based on that. 

If it looks like the path to profitability will be too narrow, you may want to reconsider who you are targeting, your price points, other costs that could affect your margins, or even the feasibility of the idea itself. You could also try to determine which types of customers would be most profitable and focus your targeting on those segments and then broaden the approach after launch.

Testing Scalability

If you already have an initial product, such as our client, you can go a step further than just doing research or putting up a landing page and actually start setting up marketing campaigns to test whether you want to launch a new business or product/service line. 

Our client had one product, an air purifier, and wanted to determine how well it would perform in the market. If it went well, they would scale the number of air purifier products and marketing investment into the highest performing channels. Using a combination of paid search, paid social, and programmatic advertising over a period of four months, we were able to generate a significant number of sales as well as a positive return on advertising spend as well as profit factoring in cost of goods sold. The performance justified an expansion of their product line as well as continued investment in digital marketing, and today they are well-known players in the air purifier industry.

Bringing It All Together

The tactics described above can help you not just determine demand but also whether you can realistically acquire customers in a profitable and scalable way. As with all things marketing related, you can draw better, more confident conclusions with more data, so it will behoove you to try everything you can to validate your business idea. If you can create an initial product or service and put some budget into a limited marketing campaign, that will provide you with the greatest visibility into whether or not your idea for a new business, new product or new service is worth pursuing.

Humans are a social species: We all want to belong. Being part of a community allows us to feel safe, support each another, and discover shared experiences. Most importantly, it builds valuable relationships and gives us a sense of belonging.

At Centro, our goal is to create that sense of belonging by fostering community in our workplaces. Our programs and initiatives are geared towards working to ensure that people of all identities can join us, create valuable relationships, and bring their whole selves to work.

Centro Community Groups (CCGs) are one initiative we’ve kicked off to better cultivate a culture where everyone recognizes the power of their uniqueness. These employee-led, employee-organized groups are centered around common identities, interests, life experiences, and backgrounds.

Our list of CCGs is growing quickly! Here’s what’s Centrons have organized so far:

• Giving Tree
  • Encourages corporate social responsibility among all employees. The Giving Tree promotes volunteerism with various organizations across all of our local communities. Our goal is to partner with a diverse group of charities to drive positive change where we live and work.
• Women of the Workplace (& Women in Tech subgroup)
  • Our mission is to educate all employees on the different challenges women can face in the workplace, create understanding for all employees, and feed an open discussion in all offices across Centro
• Centropella
  • A group passionate about singing together. Because singing together is fun, builds community, and because music brings us together and unites our uniqueness.
• El Centro
  • We want to capitalize on the extraordinary resources of Centro’s Latinx employees and serve as champions for diversity and inclusion at Centro. We want to foster a safe space for all employees and help identify opportunities for us to become more inclusive.
• CentroOut
  • Centro’s LGBTQIA community group has an overarching purpose of fostering an inclusive, open, office community that helps advocate for advancing equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and allied people.
• Nom Nom
  • A place for foodies from all cultures to come together to share their experiences and background while eating the foods that mean the most to them!
• Reframe
  • A safe place to reframe how we think about mental health conditions and tips & tricks on how to overcome them. There will also be discussions around our experiences and how culture and society impact how we view mental health conditions.
• Parents @ Centro
  • Bringing together and supporting the community of Centro parents. This group will provide resources to help Centro parents navigate being a working parent. Centro Parents will strive to provide resources to help parents manage the work/life blend, and assist Centro in the recruitment and retention of parents.

As a company, we are committed to supporting these groups both financially and via professional development. Every month, members of Centro’s leadership team will meet with Community Group leadership to ensure that we’re cross-collaborating and providing mutual support. We also provide an external Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultant to train Community Group leaders so that they’re well equipped for facilitation.

We realize that there’s no end to the work of building an environment where everyone feels that they belong. We realize that we will fail and make mistakes along the way. And, we are committed to transparency, persistence, and humility as we continue our journey to a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace.

The results are in, and definitive. In response to the demands associated with COVID-19, last July Topstep’s Executive Team decided to test two work-week options. The goal was to prevent burn-out, while increasing employee engagement and satisfaction:

• A four-day work week included four, 10-hour days Monday-Thursday (@42% participation) Or,
• A “summer Friday” schedule of five, nine-hour days, with Friday afternoons off (@58% participation)

During the seven-week trial period, internal Friday meetings were banned across the organization, regardless of selected option. This was yet another innovation to improve employee health as the weeks since March have become very meeting-heavy and Zoom fatigue is real!

It surprised me that only 25 of 60 employees opted into the four-day test (42%). The data suggested a hesitancy to commit as seven weeks seemed too long combined with satisfaction with the already reduced half-day Friday schedule from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

However, 100% of participating four-day employees recommended permanently implementing this schedule! The reasons cited included feeling more productive (88%) and 92% noted an improved work-life balance. We also found Fridays to be the most desirable day off (96%) and that it’s essential to have the same day off for everyone. There were also good learnings about still feeling the need to respond to the Executive Team on Fridays. The feedback was shared and adjustments were made to address this concern (i.e. our CEO now indicates it’s ok to respond the following week in non-emergency Friday correspondence). 

We also found it doable but difficult for Trader Support to be on the phone for 10 hours. As it’s a nascent option, if there is greater interest from Support we will adjust hiring to provide this option for interested team members. Finally, it was great to see 64% indicated an improved stress level.

For those that selected the half-day Friday option, 89% said they were not negatively impacted by those participating in the four-day trial and in fact, 63% said they will switch to the four-day work week now that it’s a permanent option. An overwhelming majority mentioned the ability to get more work done as the primary benefit of no-meeting Fridays.

Findings led to the permanent opportunity for current and new employees to select either option, in addition to the more traditional five-day, eight-hour schedule. The majority (75%) selected the four or half-day options with an understanding it cannot be a week-by-week determination. It’s worth noting the qualitative data suggested that even if an external (partner/agency) Friday afternoon meeting couldn’t be postponed, participants took it in stride and still felt recharged on Monday. 

While the title quote isn’t mine, I share my colleague’s high level of enthusiasm and gratitude to be in a company that continually innovates to live its core value, “In the well-being of the team.” The above photos are of Team Topstep, Friday afternoons on Lake Michigan. We ask a lot of our empowered people and this change has positively contributed to our work hard/play hard culture.

Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom 

When addressing the question of Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom, there are a few different contexts you must keep in mind. These all have to do with one organizational profile and what they are looking to get from each platform.

Conferencing 

If conferencing software is your primary goal, then both platforms have quite good conferencing features. Microsoft Teams does not work with a dial-in number out of the box and requires an IT professional to set up and an additional license. 

It also does not do large “live” webinar events and requires an additional license and configuration. Zoom does both large conferencing and has dial-in features out of the box. If you need to expand your max webinar limit, it is a simple license upgrade that does not require an IT professional.  

Collaboration 

If collaboration is your primary use for the software, Microsoft Teams has advanced tools to aid in this process. Zoom does not really contain any of these advanced collaboration features, and therefore, cannot be recommended as a suitable software. Along with direct and group messaging, Microsoft Teams has dedicated containers with additional channels that allow for the effective organization of communication and collaboration. 

Microsoft Teams is also part of the Microsoft 365 Cloud Productivity Stack and takes full advantage of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint online. It can directly integrate with OneDrive and SharePoint online as well. The integrations don’t stop there! Microsoft Teams can integrate with many different applications to provide single-application expertise to end-users. Imagine having all your work in one application!

Security 

Let’s talk about the security of both platforms, as there has been a lot of news coverage around this topic – Zoom specifically. While there were some issues with Zoom security, most of these came to light during the heavy adoption period in March 2020 as countries shutdown for COVID-19. Zoom quickly moved to enhance its security features and was transparent about its efforts. At no time did Zoom have any egregious security issues, and much of this was overblown as sensationalism. 

Every application has security holes, whether discovered or not. It is essential to understand that both products are mature enterprise applications that have many resources dedicated to maintaining their security. Microsoft alone employs a team of over 3500, plus security professionals, alongside advanced AI systems to monitor and maintain the integrity of its product.  

Final Thoughts 

If your organization is looking for a simple web conferencing tool, isn’t on Microsoft 365, or wants to avoid extra cost and complexity, Zoom is the right choice for you. If your organization is on Microsoft 365 and is looking to increase communication, collaboration, and efficiency, then Microsoft Teams is the top choice. Some organizations will elect to choose both platforms because of the added cost and complexity of setting up all the extra conferencing features on Teams.

Read the original article here

How to Engage Employees in a Post-COVID-19 Workplace

Large organizations and their workforces are slowly re-adjusting to a post-COVID-19 world. In order to reinforce new policies and build population trust, there are many important steps employers need to take to ensure a safe workplace. The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the necessity of rapid, relevant communications—and as employees return to work, they need those communications more than ever: whether mass communications, segmented ones, or campaigns of one.

In this webinar, we’ll share compelling evidence from our national COVID-19 surveys that proves why tailored, meaningful communication matters. Employees who receive frequent messaging from their employer about COVID-19 updates, operational impacts, and news for returning to work report being more loyal to their company—which ultimately results in a more engaged workforce and successful business.

Learn how this approach to communication can better connect your employees with the benefits and resources they need, in the moments they need them, especially in uncertain times like the era we find ourselves in now. Help your business thrive and your workforce feel safe and confident in a post-COVID-19 workplace.

An Evive on-demand webinar

Blogging may seem like an SEO strategy from the MySpace era. But as Google continues to refine its algorithm and prioritize content quality over quantity, developing a concrete strategy is more important now than it ever was in the nascent days of online blogging. But where to begin? 

Brands and online businesses can leverage backlinks from sites with a higher authority to build the authority of their own content. But syndication alone won’t build the same brand awareness and organic search as developing a high quality content strategy through topical authority.

To find out more about topical authority and optimizing a blog for seo, discover Logical Media Group’s tips for leveraging this underrated SEO tactic to reach new customers and clients today.

What is Topical Authority?

In order to fully embrace and incorporate topical authority into a content strategy, it’s important to understand what it is. As many SEO experts describe it today, topical authority is the perceived expertise a blog or online publication demonstrates over a variety of related topics or a set of ideas. Google uses this perceived expertise and context to determine which website’s content best aligns with user queries and this, ultimately, helps generate results on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Identifying Topical Authority in the Wild

Analyzing SERPs is a great way to familiarize oneself with topical authority, for example, when a user searches “how to care for denim” the first results on the SERP are not surprising. An article published on Levi Strauss & Co. appears in the featured snippet at the top of the page, then content from The Laundress, Martha Stewart’s blog, and Burton Menswear trails closely behind. 

Despite being in different industries, all of these brands are relevant to clothing care and clothing manufacturing and Google understands how all four are relevant to that query. 

Conversely, on the same SERP, the pop culture blog, Coveteur, appears in the middle of the page, occupying a prime ranking position for this topic. While Coveteur’s content doesn’t directly relate to clothing care, the publication has created enough topical authority around wardrobe-related content to compete with Levi Strauss & Co. on a search for jeans.

This search results page is a great example of the strength of well-written content, and how blogs can use loosely related topics to build a content strategy and go toe-to-toe with brands that have existed in certain industries for almost 200 years.

How Can Content Strategies Use Topical Authority for SEO?

While this example from Coveteur might seem as though the key to achieving topical authority is simply to produce as much content in as many topics as possible, there are other SEO conditions at play that allows the pop-culture site to compete with Levi on a SERP about jeans.

For one, Coveteur has a high domain authority which signals to Google that it is a reliable source. Additionally, Coveteur has connections to other high authority publications like Elle and In Style to build a robust back linking strategy. All of these efforts greatly contribute to a brand’s ability to rank, but that doesn’t minimize the fact that topical authority helped Coveteur rank for this particular topic.

The first step to building a content strategy around topical authority is to understand the message at the heart of your brand. If your brand sells candles, for example, your online store will contain references to different scents, aromatherapy, maybe even ambiance. From these broader topics, you’ll be able to drill down into more loosely-related content and build some of your first blogs. For instance, instead of writing about the “benefits of aromatherapy”, you can create a blog about “fragrances that make people feel sleepy”. The more specific and creative you can be with your topics, the fewer websites you’ll have to compete with in order to rank and start building brand awareness one user at a time.

The most effective topical authority SEO strategies drive traffic from users at the very top of the conversion funnel and get them excited about your brand’s unique ability to speak to their concerns or interests. That is where brand awareness is built and when consumers are ready to make a purchase, you may just find they return to your site to make their next purchase.

If you’re curious about optimizing your blog for SEO or building brand awareness with a creative and data-driven approach, find out more about content marketing services with Logical Media Group and build a great brand today.