It’s all happening…!

How’s autumn shaping up where you are? Here in Suffolk it’s been a bumper year for conkers, and there seem to be more sloes in the hedgerows than last year. I’ve seen the first fieldfares, which come here to overwinter from places further north: they’re plump birds with a grey head and streaky, yellow-orange chest and they love fruit and berries, though if the ground isn’t frozen they’ll make short work of snails and slugs as well. Redwings have been arriving, too – another member of the thrush family. They tend to come in after dark, sometimes in quite large flocks, so listen out for their high-pitched, reedy contact calls on cold, clear nights. I used to hear them every autumn when I lived in central London, so do listen out wherever you are.

The last few months have been incredibly busy, incredibly stressful and incredibly rewarding. Building the Encounter app with our lovely Polish developers has been a very steep learning curve for me, but supported by our brilliant product manager, Martha, I’ve had the great privilege of watching a team of people work together whose brains function in a totally different way to mine. The prototype on my iPhone keeps growing in functionality, day by day, and whenever I’m asked to test another feature I feel an enormous glow of pride at how far we’ve come.

Our goal is still a soft launch in November, to you, our supporters, followers, and friends and family, and then a full media launch in spring, when people are going outdoors a bit more and engaging with the natural world. That’s when we’ll ask for your support to trumpet the app from the rooftops and help build our user base, which is what will help us attract partners and thus, keep the show on the road. In order for the app to keep doing good, we have to raise enough from partners to cover its running costs as it grows.

To prepare for our soft launch we’ll need some volunteer user-testers. If you’d be willing to have a play around with the Encounter prototype and give us your feedback, please fill in the form below. Unlike our earlier rounds of testing this will be a small group, so we won’t get back to everyone – but we do need a good range of people (and phones!) so if you’d be willing to help, please let me know.

Click here to volunteer

Finally, I’m excited to say that we have opened a new SEIS investment round. If you missed out the first time, but would like to invest a sum over £5,000 and help Encounter succeed, please email us at hello@encounter-nature.com.

If you’d like to read more from me, my book HOMECOMING is out in a few days’ time. It’s a fully illustrated nature journal designed to be a year-long course in connecting to nature, and I’ve written it for young and old, country and city-dwellers, nature newbies and experts alike.

That’s all for now. Thank you for reading, and for all your lovely messages and support.

Sending you all good wishes for autumn,

Mel

And… we’re off!

First up, some good news: we’ve filled our first investment round, hitting our target of £50k! Thank you to the new investors who came on board, and to our existing investors who increased their support. It’s no small thing for a new business to achieve, and we are so proud to have raised the money to build the first version of the Encounter app. Further investment rounds will follow so that we can add more features, reach more users and connect more people to nature, so if you’re keen to join us on our journey, watch this space.

Since our last update we’ve been deep in the process of choosing a team of developers to create the app, which has also meant focusing in on (and carefully costing) our feature list. It’s very rare – and often a bad idea – for an app to launch with a complete set of bells and whistles; usually, a launch version is created with enough under the bonnet to be beautiful and useful, and more features are added as people ask for them, and when the budget allows. Encounter is no different, and it’s been a tough but really worthwhile process working with developers to whittle down our ‘must-haves’ from the ‘nice-to-haves’ and adding the ‘not-yets’ to a wishlist of future updates.

As part of that process we’ve had to choose between developers who said yes to everything on our list (very tempting!) and those who said no to some of it (or ‘not yet’, anyway). I went into the process wanting to work with the people who promised us the most, but soon began to feel cautious – and in the end we chose a team who had carefully costed everything and showed us why we could have X but not Y. There would have been nothing worse than getting into an ambitious build and then finding ourselves out of money because some aspect of it turned out to be much fiddlier than anyone had thought, and hopefully we have avoided that possibility. Now the exciting bit starts: the actual build!

Encounter: an early prototype

Dear supporter,

Spring at last! What a horrible, wet winter it’s been here in East Anglia, and in other parts of the country, too. But it wasn’t cold, and that’s meant lots of spring phenomena have arrived early – and while it’s cheering to see an orange-tip butterfly in early March, it’s a bit of a worry, too. Still, we’re now getting firmly into the territory of bluebells and cow parsley, our local nightingales have arrived and are singing strongly, and I’m hoping for a cuckoo any day now. The next six weeks or so are by far my favourite time of year.

Since we were last in touch we’ve been beetling away making a rough prototype of the Encounter app and sending it out to our brilliant volunteer testers. We’ve got a fascinating set of results in from them, and now we’d like to open it up to you, our supporters. If you’d like to get involved, simply watch our tester video below, then click here to fill in a short survey, which will remain open until 6pm on April 26th. Thank you!

Another nice bit of news comes from Miles Richardson, our resident Professor of Nature Connectedness. He’s just finished writing his second book, Nature’s Gift: A year-round guide to reconnecting with the natural world. It’ll make all the latest research accessible to everyone, and will be out in autumn this year.

Spring is the perfect time to get outdoors and start noticing nature, as new things are happening every day. Look and listen out for joyfully screaming swifts overhead, most of which will arrive from sub-Saharan Africa around the end of April/start of May and will leave again in just eight weeks; take a moment to glory in clouds of greater stitchwort on roadsides and verges, newly leafed oaks with their soft, copper-coloured foliage, and holly blue butterflies dancing about on sunny days.

Two free nature identification apps that will help you learn more about what you see and hear are the birdsong recognition app Merlin (make sure you download the appropriate data pack) and Flora Incognita, which is miles better at recognising plants than anything that comes built in your phone, and also stores a list of what you’ve seen, which is useful when you inevitably forget what it was (or at least, I do).

The less mowing, strimming, weeding and other ‘tidying-up’ you can do in your garden this spring, the better – so consider that your excuse! Birds are nesting and need to be left undisturbed, wildflowers, if allowed to bloom, feed bees and other precious pollinators, and every square foot of lush, tangly vegetation means more aphids and caterpillars, which are vital baby food for chicks. To do your bit for nature, let it go, let it grow, and enjoy the wonderful, wild results!

Wishing you all the joys of spring –

Mel

Encounter team: assembled!

Christmas at last, and the last few months have been properly full-on. We have an anchor investor and a clutch of brilliant shareholders, we’ve applied for and been granted SEIS status, and we’ve issued our first shares. We have a website and socials, a growing mailing list, and we announced the idea to wild support at Green Man Festival back in August.

And now we have an amazing team in place: as well as me (vision and propulsion), Adrian and Mike are handling the business and marketing side of things; there’s James on branding and design; and Miles Richardson, Professor of Nature Connectedness, who’s come on board as an adviser.

In case you missed it, I’d like to draw your attention to this brilliant article in the Guardian about the transformative power of nature. I particularly loved the idea of ‘soft fascination’, a new term to me. The evidence really is mounting now for what many of us know already, by instinct: that nature is good for us, and that without a regular physical and emotional connection to it, we suffer – and eventually, because of that, nature suffers – in small but crucial ways. 

That connection is what we want to help create for people with the Encounter app. Thank you so much for supporting us, whether that’s via an investment, by giving us your time, spreading the word, or just by cheerleading for us as we make it happen. The fact that so many of you have shown that you’re interested is proof we’re on the right track.

Finally, it may be winter, but make sure you still take time to notice nature, whether it’s the jubilant song of a walnut-sized wren, a cloud of mistletoe high up in a bare tree, frost silvering a spider’s web or the low, golden sunlight of a December afternoon. And if you’d like to rewild your timeline a little I can thoroughly recommend following Phil Gates, aka Durham Country Diarist, and Jane V Adams, author of Nature’s Wonders, on Instagram or Threads.

Wishing you all the magic of midwinter – indoors and out!

Mel

Launching into autumn with good news

As we go into autumn we have two items of good news to share. The first is that HMRC has granted Encounter Nature Ltd an SEIS advance assurance certificate. SEIS stands for ‘Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme’; it was set up by the government to support new companies like ours, and help get them on their feet. Having SEIS status means that UK taxpayers who invest in our app can claim tax relief on 50% of their investment, up to £200,000; it also means that any returns they receive are exempt from capital gains tax.

This is a pretty big deal for us and we are thrilled to have received advance assurance. If you would like to support us by investing in the company and helping us fund the creation of the Encounter app – even in a small way! – there’s an enquiry form you can fill in here. You’ll be joining our anchor investor who has already contributed 60% of our £50,000 initial target.

If you know of anyone who you think might like to invest in Encounter, please do send them a link to this page– thank you so much.

The second piece of good news is that Miles Richardson, author of Reconnection: Fixing our Broken Relationship with Nature, has agreed to join us as an advisor to the project. In his other life, Miles is Professor of Human Factors and Nature Connectedness at the University of Derby, where he founded the Nature Connectedness Research Group. We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership as we feel Miles can bring research and insight to the development of the Encounter app that will ensure that it isn’t just a pleasure to use but actually changes lives, resulting in gains for people – and for nature.

It's been such an exciting couple of weeks, and we feel that from the giddy excitement of our initial idea we are now really gaining momentum. Our next task is to work out what we can deliver in the first version of the app, and what will follow in each update. We’ll be back in touch with news on that as things develop.

Until next time,

Mel