Fusebox — A platform for developing and supporting digital services for good
Dear CAST. Our work is focused on delivering a social impact and we want to make better use of digital in the services we provide, but where do we start? We’ve got an idea but what’s the right thing to work on? We’re not tech experts, what can we practically do with limited time and resources? And, how do I get the support of my colleagues or funders?
We’ve heard a similar story countless times whilst providing over 7,000 hours of support to hundreds of charities wanting to make digital a part of their services. Through extensive research we also recognised that the capacity constraints of smaller organisations meant they needed a more flexible support offer than intensive programmes like Fuse, or fixed-contracts with a digital agency.
With this in mind we’ve been working on a platform for developing and supporting digital services for good — Fusebox.
Currently in closed testing — at the heart of Fusebox is an online tool for planning and reflecting on the development of a digital service. It provides a flexible medium to capture key insights, strategic assumptions and practical details about your plans. Think of it like a common view or single source of truth that people can use to understand and support your digital development at a distance.
Because we work with people of varying experience and progress, the tool provides a framework that’s a guide for deciding what to work on based on your stage of development, yet remains flexible enough to adapt to your priorities and existing practices.
Though typically we’ve found people need more than tools and frameworks to help them make progress with digital — they need knowledge, skills and experience that’s often unknown or out of reach. That’s why we’re designing Fusebox to make it easy to share a summary of your progress and plans with colleagues and supporters.
By providing this common view of progress and plans, not only are teams better able to manage their digital development and get stakeholder buy-in through shared understanding, but we’re able to provide the right in-person or online support from our network of trusted digital providers.
This ability to dynamically expand a team’s capacity with targeted, external support is in direct response to the capacity challenges faced by small organisations wanting to adopt a digital approach. We’ve found small charities often have little to no capacity for evolving their services digitally, so having someone demystify the process into a set of practical steps appropriate for them is the only way they’ll start to make progress.
This blending of Platform + Support makes Fusebox unique, and is part of our networked approach to accelerating and scaling the use of digital to meet social and charitable objectives — it’s a flexible platform to plan and guide the development of your digital services, backed by on-demand support from CAST’s team and network.
A closed version of Fusebox is currently being used by a cohort of charities as we continue to test and refine it, and we hope to provide invite-only access to a wider group of users later this year. If you’d like a sneak peek of what we’ve been up to and can spare 30 mins for a chat to inform our ongoing research and development, then please get in touch (hello@wearecast.org.uk)!
