The Power of Ideas — Lessons Learnt and Next Steps
On the 19th August we launched our first Idea Challenge — the Power of Ideas, and asked staff for suggestions around how we could raise more funds and save more money within our organisation. The challenge was a great success and in two months we received over 100 fantastic ideas from colleagues across all departments and a wide range of locations — from Inverness to Cardiff and the Isle of Wight. During the campaign we visited 21 offices and gathered valuable learnings and insight throughout the process. More about how this project started can be found here.
What were the results?
Out of the 106 submissions we’ve received a wide range of ideas including social enterprises, fundraising campaigns, internal process improvements and ways to expand our services and reach. We had the difficult task to shortlist 12 of them, the owners of which were invited to our dedicated pitch event in Manchester. There each finalist presented their idea to a panel of judges made of staff and volunteers from multiple locations, departments and levels and we were blown away by the enthusiasm, effort and passion that went into every presentation. The two winning ideas were then selected to be prototyped and tested with the support of the Innovation Hub in early 2020 and if successful made a reality.
Every submitted idea was explored by our team, received detailed feedback and suggested next steps. They were also passed on to the relevant team in the organisation to be explored further and be actioned. Many of these ideas have already been taken on board and are making a positive difference to the British Red Cross.
What have we learnt?
Even though we met and exceeded our objectives related to the Power of Ideas, we are excited by the opportunity to make the next one even better. In order to achieve this, we made sure to capture insights and learnings throughout the process.
Insight 1: Our colleagues have fantastic ideas, they just need a platform to share them
We knew our colleagues, especially those on the front line would have great ideas — that’s why we launched the challenge! However, during our journey it became clearer why in the past these ideas had been hard to surface:
· People didn’t always know how to share their ideas or who to share them with
· People didn’t always have the confidence to share ideas
· Some who had shared ideas in the past felt they hadn’t been listened to and so were reluctant to share ideas again
Step one in overcoming this was to launch a dedicated microsite for staff to submit ideas — staff now knew where to go if they had an idea. Next, we focussed our internal comms campaign around instilling confidence, both giving confidence that everyone had ideas worth sharing and confidence that all ideas would be taken on board. For example, in our messaging we emphasised that even ‘small’ ideas had the potential to make a big difference and we shared case studies of bottom up ideas that had made huge positive impacts in the past. We also committed to providing every idea with personalised feedback and passing it on to the relevant team to action, giving staff the assurance that each idea would be listened to and entering the challenge would be worthwhile.
Going forward it will be important to track and report on the progress of all the ideas to to continue to empower staff to share ideas — we hope to have many more successful case studies to share next time around.
Insight 2: The idea submission process must be simple and inclusive
Due to the nature of our organisation a large proportion of our staff and volunteers work on the frontline, directly supporting beneficiaries, and spend little time in the office. Even though a lot of effort went into designing the platform to be simple and user friendly, including explanations and advice, we found it still wasn’t inclusive enough and many of our colleagues felt they didn’t have time to take part.
To remove perceived barriers of submitting ideas via the platform, we launched a phone line and an email address — where people could tell us their ideas before we submitted them on their behalf. We also visited more than 20 offices to run ideation sessions, this allowed for dedicated time for staff to come up with ideas to be submitted in paper form. These were very successful with nearly half of the ideas gathered this way. Including the option to save the online submission as a draft and come back to it at any point also helped people take their time and spread the workload.
As a learning for next idea challenge, we will make sure the form is even simpler and faster to fill in, making sure everyone gets the opportunity to share their vision with us. We did find that using multiple channels and methods of collecting ideas was very successful, but we also need to consider a balanced approach since submitting ideas on behalf of our colleagues created significant manual work for our team.
Insight 3: How can we better capture, promote and scale up existing ideas?
Rather than only looking for the next big idea, sometimes it’s just as valuable to spend time capturing ideas that are already out there: what’s been tested, what’s been successful, what can be scaled? Whilst developing our awareness campaign we found many examples of innovative ideas that had been implemented at a local level and with a little help could be scaled across multiple locations and service lines dramatically improving their impact.
We therefore added a ‘scale opportunity’ category to the idea submission form and here were looking for process improvements, new systems or products we could help to scale. We wanted to emphasise that innovation doesn’t cover only disruptive change projects and wanted to encourage our colleagues to spot great ideas and help us expand them across all relevant locations and teams. However, with the start of the road shows, we quickly realised that there are more examples of these than we could have ever imagined and in fact one of the winning ideas came from this category.
Like every organisation we are always striving to be more joined up and aligned, going forward our team needs develop the processes to identify and foster these ideas. This learning has also been a valuable insight for another of our projects — setting up an open portfolio management system to all innovation projects in the pipeline and in progress to promote collaboration and visibility.
Insight 4: The power of networks — we need to create champions
And finally, this campaign wouldn’t be possible without the wider innovation community who helped us make the Power of Ideas a success — from the office managers who helped organise the roadshows, the line managers who encouraged their teams to get involved to our amazing comms team and to every member of staff who helped us spread the word around and got engaged with the challenge.
We also met multiple people who were passionate about innovation and are interested in getting involved more in future projects. As an Innovation team, our ultimate goal would be for innovation to be embedded in the culture of the organisation and to be part of everyone’s role rather than centralised into dedicated teams.
Therefore, for the next campaign, we will focus more on training and upskilling a community of innovation champions to be the local point of contact to assist with building awareness, idea submission and setting up ideation sessions.
What’s next?
In the next few months our team will be very busy undergoing design sprints for the winning ideas, hopefully followed by a 3-month proof of concept process. We have also provided feedback to everyone who has submitted an idea and will follow up with the ones that had defined next steps. We are super excited to see the results from all ideas our colleagues have contributed to the campaign.
Meanwhile we are in the process of launching our next sustainability themed campaign! It will be open beginning of March and this time we will be reaching out to both staff and volunteers for their suggestions on how we can make British Red Cross even more environmentally friendly. Keep tuned for updates on the next challenge, we can’t wait to bring you with us on our journey!
