User-centred tech to beat the queues for legal advice — Guest blog from Nathan Denne, Development Manager at Advising London
Our Fusilier Nathan Denne writes about his experience of the Fuse process, eight weeks in. A version of this article first appeared on Digital Agenda.
At Advising London we have had a vision of using technology to innovate and transform aspects of our service delivery for many years now but we’ve never had the capacity, technical know-how or resources to explore the full potential. Being accepted on to this Autumn’s CAST Fuse Accelerator programme has provided the catalyst we needed to start to make this vision a reality.
Firstly a bit of background on us. Advising London is a free legal advice charity, providing a non-prejudicial, open-to-all advice service in the core areas of social welfare law: primarily debt, welfare benefits, housing, employment, immigration and consumer issues. Our legal advisers assist with over 7,000 legal issues each year, carrying out over 14,000 pieces of work for those that need our services. We are unique in the sector for staunchly preserving high-quality and comprehensive face to face advice appointments in light of pressure from within the funding environment.
One of the major issues facing our organisation is that we find ourselves at the absolute peak of current delivery capacity, while demand for our services continues to increase. As a result, people have begun to queue outside our main Advice Hub for increasingly long amounts of time — often before they even know whether we can help them. This ‘first-come-first-served’, queue-based system disadvantages anyone who is unable to wait for up to 2–3 hours or who is unaware of how the system works.
We applied unsuccessfully on several occasions for external funding to create a digital platform that might help tackle this issue, as well as other organisational challenges including prioritisation of need, internal efficiency, returning service users’ membership, and encouraging ‘self-help’.
An email about CAST’s Fuse accelerator from Comic Relief (which funds this year’s programme) popped into my inbox late last year, and it seemed to be the very solution we were looking for. Fuse invites organisations with tough problems to solve into an intense three-month programme, with the ultimate aim of kick-starting a digital solution that enables social change. It offers access to highly skilled and knowledgeable minds in fields of technology, design, project ownership and business development.
I am now just over half way through the programme. It has been an intense, enjoyable and occasionally frustrating experience — as we have at times hit dead ends. There is, however, method in the madness. The user-centred, test-driven methodology is creating solid foundations for us to build upon after the three months is over. We have had to explore several ideas and approaches, interview service users and do lots of testing. Through this process we hope to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that helps to tackle some of the core issues discussed above.
The approach that is emerging at this stage in the process is a digital tool that can assess the advice needs of a prospective service user. It will offer a face to face appointment to those who truly need it, and provide less complex guidance and assistance for those who have the ability to self-help. Due to the huge complexities in mapping our processes in social welfare law we are initially focussing on debt issues, and the real innovation in what we hope to produce is a tool that can determine the topic and stage of someone’s issue (i.e. initial warnings all the way up to potential court dates and eviction), by identifying keywords from recent letters and correspondence.
It’s still very early days yet, but we hope that the tool might be able to offer pre-booked face to face appointment slots with our advisers, prioritising those in acute need and assigning those who need specialist advice with an appropriate adviser. The prototyping we are coming out with at this early stage is very exciting and we will soon begin alpha stage testing with our existing service users to shape the design going forward.
On a personal level, this process has been a challenging but rewarding experience for me so far. It has at times been difficult to embrace the ‘done is better than perfect’ agile methodology through my well-honed eye for detail and a meticulous approach to work. I have however come around and can see why this approach is both beneficial and necessary when exploring new areas of work like this — especially within the VCS sector where resources and funding are in short supply. It has been fantastic to be given unrivalled access to some of the best minds in the ‘tech for good’ scene, as well as developers and organisational change experts. There is absolutely no way our organisation could have afforded to invest in their time to the degree we have had access over the past two months.
It was disheartening to be knocked back at the late stages of a handful of large funding applications over the past two years, when we so desperately wanted to invest in technological change. However, looking back through the lens of the Fuse Accelerator programme it is easy to see why. We just did not have the full comprehension of what was required, or a strong enough evidence base to ensure external confidence in investing in a large-scale build. To use the metaphor often used here at CAST: we were attempting to build the wheels of a car, when in reality we needed to try and build a working skateboard and then scale up progressively based on what we know works.
We’re well on the way to building the wheels of our skateboard, and if your organisation is also struggling to find the capacity, knowledge and resources to explore digital solutions to stubborn organisational issues I’d highly recommend exploring future Fuse programme openings.
