List of Little Wins (Jan— Feb)

Keeping track of the small but meaningful indicators of organisational learning and change.

When the Digital Fund was set up in 2018, it was given the brief to help ‘build up the confidence, understanding and awareness of good digital grantmaking practice across the Fund and the wider sector,’ as part of a wider move to make The National Lottery Community Fund a ‘digitally savvy funder’. As part of this work, when I joined the team in October 2019 I was tasked with sharing what we’re learning internally and supporting colleagues to become better “digital grantmakers”.

This is a big task for a small team. Affecting change and sharing learning in an organisation as large and dispersed across the UK as ours, from a relatively marginal position, is tricky. It’s long-term, it’s difficult to measure or quantify and it’s easy to lose focus. Much of it takes place through small shifts that are hard to track and easy to miss.

So, I’m starting this new series, which I’m calling ‘List of Little Wins’, to give value to the small but mighty moments that indicate we’re affecting change. By paying attention to the ‘little wins’ we encounter in the day-to-day of sharing learning from the fringes of an 800 person organisation, I hope to demonstrate what we’re paying attention to and give weight to the qualitative. I think Emily Bazalgette (a brilliant Organisational Designer who worked with us on this last year) put it best when she described this as “important for making sense of subtle shifts over time and for sustaining team motivation when change work inevitably gets tricky.”

I’ve already written a bit about what we’re doing as part of this, including how we’re developing learning resources and taking a user-centred design approach to testing and iterating them over the next few months. Already, after just a couple of months of testing, new strands of work are opening up, from opportunities to embed learning into formal processes to facilitating and participating in new communities of practice. The more we test and learn, the more we discover about what else we could do or who else we should speak to. As the breadth of the work grows, I’ll be keeping track of the ways in which this growth is happening by documenting small “wins” as they occur across each of these strands.

Names and some details have been redacted for the public version of this list.

20–24th January 2020

Conversations & commitments

• Lovely call with [Funding Manager in Scotland], who has offered to help to set up my visit to Glasgow after we met in December. She sent out an email to all Scotland staff to let people know when we’ll be around, what we’re planning and that we’re keen to connect with colleagues and get some feedback on the grantmaking materials. Several responses have come in from colleagues volunteering to help test and discuss. She also provided background context to be aware of before visiting and made good suggestions for logistics.
• A great first call with [Head of Communications in Wales] on Monday who showed real interest in the work we’re doing. They provided lots of useful information on the Welsh context and suggestions for initiatives we should get involved with (like policy briefing breakfasts and podcasts), as well as internal and external people to connect with. The next day they forwarded an email that their Head of Funding sent out to the Wales North Regional funding team with a screen shot of Phoebe’s grantholder map, as they were inspired by this to make their own. They then put me in touch with this colleague, referring to our meeting the day before “fascinating” !
• Another good conversation with [a colleague in evaluation], who is running with our ideas for setting up a community of practice around grantmaking for digital, data and technology. She is going to take the idea to other colleagues in Scotland who have set up CoPs to get their advice and to recruit others. We’re setting up a first meeting during my visit to Glasgow next month.

Embedding learning

• Version 1 of our posters (designed to go up internally as a light touch way to prompt thought and conversation across the offices) are now with the branding team, so we are on our path to being on-brand!
• We got confirmation that we will be included in the development of an official grantmaking skills programme for staff, which is being developed by the organisational development teams and thematic representatives.

Internal and external engagement

• We had good engagement on Yammer about the Digital Funding Drop-in calls, with likes from [2 members of SMT] and people sharing to other groups that they’re in. This is the third time we’ve been featured as the first link in the weekly round up email curated by [Internal Communications Manager], which is showing some real interest.

Internal engagement on Yammer

27–31 January 2020

Conversations & commitments

• Tested Wales workshop and Good Digital Grantmaking materials with [Portfolio Officer in Birmingham]. She gave excellent suggestions and feedback and we had a good conversation about her experience with digital grantmaking. At one point she said,

“Hey, I know more than I think I do!”

• Met with [a Funding Officer in Birmingam] for the first time. After our tea she sent over an application that she is working on to get some advice and signed up to come to the Digital Funding drop-in call.
• Met with [Head of Internal Communications] for the first time and we discussed lots of ideas/plans for written content to be shared internally. Apparently they like what we’re doing so far!

3–7 February 2020

Engagement

• Received an invite to a interesting event that I didn’t know about from someone working on the Engaged Journalism Accelerator, who saw my WeekNotes and found them “useful and enlightening” (!)
• 16 people attended the learning sessions I ran in Newtown and Cardiff.
• Received a number of follow up thanks for the Wales sessions, including invites to other events, compliments on the materials, enthusiasm about what to do next with it and kind words about the sessions. My favourite feedback feedback from two funding officers…

FO1: Well that was more interesting than I thought it would be! Thank you.

FO2: Thank you for that, I didn’t know what I was listening to at first but I really understand it all now because you used stories. I’ll be your guinea pig!

• [A Funding Officer] got in touch with a digital application she needed advice on after seeing our Digital Funding Drop-In offer on Yammer.

Conversations

• A [Portfolio Manager in Wales] asked for advice about [a grantholder] who wants to want to become ‘more tech savvy’ with their data collection from their training sessions and from their delivery partners and are looking at possibly developing an app. We had a tea and a good chat about how they might approach this and together came up with a cheap and relatively easy data collection and analysis approach.
• The Digital Funding Drop-In call had just one attendee (less than expected from number of signups) but it was [the funding officer I met in Birmingham]. We had a great chat and she left saying she felt prepared to have a conversation with [the grantholder] now.

Engagement in learning sessions in Wales

10–14 February 2020

Embedding learning

• After meeting in Birmingham last month, [Knowledge & Learning Manager] tasked [a member of their team] with helping to get the Good Digital Grantmaking guide on the knowledge toolkit, which she is now working on.
• I worked with colleagues in Knowledge and Learning to update the Digital Fund page on the Knowledge Bank, so the new version is now live for all internal staff to read.

Conversations & commitment

• [Funding Officer in Birmingham] invited me to run a workshop in Birmingham after having an early conversation and look through our Good Digital Grantmaking together in Birmingham 2 weeks ago and offered to help organise a workshop in Birmingham with me it.

17–21 February 2020

Engagement

• Hosted a Lunch and Learn in Glasgow, to which 10 people came and participated with lots of questions and thoughtful comments. Enthusiasm and compliments too! (and only some mild indifference)
• Ran a testing session with 3 colleagues who were deeply engaged and generous with their time/participation.
• Hosted the first ever Digital, Data & Technology Community of Practice, which is now officially up and running with 5 members! All relevant channels and next 2 meetings are set up, with participants already sharing a paragraph about why they’re committing to being a part of the CoP.
• A number of people in Glasgow gave a lot of time over the 2 days we were in the office. One funding officer came to everything we ran (giving us 4 hours of time over 2 days) and 2 others came to 2 sessions, giving us 2 and 3 hours of their time.
• One colleague said the next day how much she enjoyed the Lunch and Learn, and told us she referenced what we talked about in an important meeting about her role and the future of their funding programme.

Testing session in Glasgow

Embedding learning

• Colleagues in Wales got in touch to ask for advice on embedding a question about digital into our funding programme’s application form. This was a useful question to be asked because its not something we have an answer to yet — but will need to figure out.
• Put up a few posters in Glasgow office to test responses.

24–27 February 2020

Conversations & commitments

• Caught up with [Funding Officer] who independently ran some testing of ‘It’s This, Not That’ with two colleagues in Cardiff. It’s great that she took this on herself and I’m really pleased with the insights she got out of it.
• Had a call with a [Funding Manager in Newcastle] who originally reached out for advice on an application for a new digital platform. She had heard about me through other UK Portfolio colleagues and wanted to know more about the Fund’s ‘digital strategy’. Out of this conversation she invited me to her team’s next team meeting to run a session for an hour.
• Good chat with [Funding Officer in Newcastle] about an application for a grant that she’s working on. She also invited me to local team meetings and gave lots of good insight about what they’re seeing coming in in Newcastle. Followed up afterwards to say she enjoyed chatting and said I could get in touch any time whenever I need to talk about digital or anything else.

Embedding learning

• An article about the Digital Fund was posted on the intranet, which is an important place for visibility and awareness raising. This is the first time the Digital Fund has been included there since the fund was launched in October 2018.
• Met with [Senior Head of Portfolio Development] and [a grantholder] to discuss how we might embed learning about digital into the Fund’s application process. This is a really exciting conversation to be involved in because we (the Digital Fund) have been thinking about how we should be involved in portfolio development.

Engagement

• Attended the European Journalism Centre’s event off the back of my first weeknotes and made good connections with other grantmakers working in a similar way on similar topics.