Gathering insights from our frontline staff in Barnardo’s services

At Barnardo’s, we’re committed to putting the voice of the child at the centre of our design work — making sure that every product or service we build considers, consults, and incorporates the needs and attitudes of the people we work for, and with, every day.

But what do we do when we’re building something that isn’t just for young people, but for (foster) parents, carers, teachers, friends, or even Barnardo’s employees?

You may have heard about our new website, and in particular the work we’ve done to our children’s services pages based on what users need.

We want our online content to meet the needs of the people who use it, at the point they look for help. Now and in the future, we will only publish content to meet these needs.

In this blog post, the first of a series of two, I want to share the internal research we did with Children’s Services as part of this work. The decisions we’ve made; what we did, what we found, and where we’re going with it.

This will be followed by a post on the work we have done so far with people outside the organisation — with the professionals, parents, and carers who might one day engage with us — to learn about their needs and expectations from the web pages.

Our starting point: Moving 600+ pages to barnardos.org.uk

Moving the web pages of the 600-odd children’s services that we provide around the country from our old website to our new one was no easy task. A lot of that content was out of date, not in keeping with the look and feel of our new website, or the ways people read online content — skimming to find the information they need. It had also become impossible for us to update this content.

Giving the responsibility for updating and maintaining service pages to our service staff may sound like a small thing, yet while we’re now enabling our people to ensure that the information on their pages is up to date, it is also important that anything we publish is useful and used.

So, what does useful and used content look like? To help us answer this, we put together a research plan, starting with three problem areas:

1. Ways of working: Who is contacting our services? How do they want to be contacted? How do we ensure they’re only contacted by users who they can help? How can we ensure people are not left at a dead end when we can’t help them?
2. Content: What is the right amount of information that a person needs to know whether the service is useful to them? What is the best tone of voice to use when talking to someone using your website?
3. Functionality: What are the commissioner requirements for online information and functionality? Does a service require an online referral form? What additional functionality would save service administrators time?

These questions helped us to focus on the best ways to make sure we didn’t repeat the mistakes of the past — with information and content being separated out into countless microsites and subpages with no clear way for a person interacting with the contact to move forward.

Image: A diagram which illustrates the centrality of user interaction in our work

Looking in: using the experience of our service teams to understand their needs

Barnardo’s is perhaps best viewed as a network of more than 600 services united under one organisational banner.

This geographically-dispersed structure means we don’t always have a clear understanding of the day-to-day workings of our services, the needs of our staff and the young people, families, and professionals they work with every day.

We need this service expertise — along with our own, in digital good practice — so we can recommend alternative ways to present our information to people who use our services. We can then share our collaborative efforts with them and get their feedback about what works and doesn’t, what they need and don’t at the point they need our help.

To help us get a basic understanding of how our services operate, who they speak to and work with, what they feel the content needs of their service users are, and what, if anything, their commissioners might expect of a service page, we turned to our greatest resource — the knowledge and experience of our frontline service workers.

In October 2019 we put together a survey for our service managers and administrators around the country. The response we received was fantastic, with feedback from representatives of more than 300 services of every type from adoption to young carers.

From these responses we created a discussion guide and set up interviews with staff from 21 of our services, covering all of our main service categories and weighted to ensure that we had fair and proportional representation across all of the areas of the country that we work in.

What we learned from our service-staff survey, and why it’s important

We’re mainly contacted by professionals, but we should write clearly and simply — to help any audience

One of the main things we wanted to understand was who was getting in touch with our services. This would help us confirm who our online content is for, and whether this varies by service category. What we found was that for almost all of our services the overwhelming majority of contact comes from professionals, with young people themselves making us a perishingly small percentage of enquiries.

We suspected that professionals were our (current) main audience because the existing referral process is for them to refer people into services rather than end-users directly.

Confirming this with actual users means we can be more confident when we publish content that we are meeting their needs. The goals of redesigning our children’s services pages are to make them easier to find, easier to contact, and easier to understand.

We need to be mindful of how contact from parents and families in particular might change with improvements to how easy our service pages are to find. However, we can now publish clear content for a general audience that won’t exclude professionals — who are busy and don’t have time to wade through pages of content to find (or discount) the service they need.

There are substantial gains to be made from going digital

We also wanted to look at how specific web functionality could help our services in their day-to-day working. Most services had some aspect of their workflow that they felt could be improved with digital help. These included:

• Links to external partner organisations to help ineligible users, and to reduce the number of ineligible enquiries we receive

Most of our services do not have a problem with ineligible referrals, but they might need to chase incomplete referral forms or screen referrals over the phone — work that could be supported by our web pages.

“I think in terms of a website just making it clear what we can cover and what we can’t cover would save people a lot of time because they’re spending time on a referral and then I spend time sending it on elsewhere.” — Hear 4 U (Scotland)

• Online referral forms in order to reduce the amount of time wasted chasing incomplete forms, especially for those services that have time-based KPIs

“If the application form was online to flag incomplete boxes and sections, this would save a mountain of time as we are always having to call parents up to complete their forms for them.” — Wetherall Nursery (London)

Online referral forms are also more secure, which supports our data protection obligations.

We all work better when we work together

This may seem like an obvious point, but as an organisation we achieve the best outcomes when we are all involved in the process of change. By consulting with our frontline staff as a starting point, we were not only able to focus our next phases of research better by understanding their needs more clearly, but we were also able to explain our plans to them and bring everyone along with us on the journey.

Having the understanding, support, and buy-in from our colleagues is crucial as we all try to make demonstrably better outcomes for the children, young people and families who we work with every day.

This of course works both ways, and in the digital team we are always looking at how we can better involve staff in our work, be that in the research, design, or testing of new products and services.

“With the old system pretty much unusable towards the end it was nice to be included and consulted about the changes the web team were developing. One of the services I work for called Mandala relies heavily on a web presence. It is their main source of new funding for work with children and families so it’s great that the service pages can now finally be edited again by us.” — Mandala Therapy (Cymru/South West)

Barnardo’s is a vast organisation, and we cannot make effective change without bringing everyone along . Starting the research with our frontline staff gave us insight into their world, their needs, and their knowledge, and gave them the reassurance that this is a journey we are all on together.

We have been able to use the findings from this research to guide our work, to set our priorities for the future stages of the work, and identify what we still don’t know. In my next post, I will share our experiences of conducting research with the general public — putting our web pages in front of the people who contact us for help every day — to try and close some of these gaps and validate our design decisions.

Henry is a user researcher in the Products and Service Delivery team, part of the wider #FutureBarnardos transformation team.

To get regular updates on the children’s services content, join our workplace group, or, to find out more, visit our Future Barnardo’s page.

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