Micro Organisations Discovery Research with Stripe Partners

When we launched the Digital Fund in autumn 2018, we opened to applications across 2 strands. The first to support established organisations to use digital tools and approaches to take a major leap forward, and the second, to support newer organisations that had already launched promising services that use digital technology to scale or increase their impact. To date, we have awarded £12m to organisations across both strands.

Alongside this work, we made a commitment to “small charities” — in England that is likely to be micro organisations and unincorporated groups, in some of the other countries it may well be “small charities” — there will be different definitions but what’s important is that we’re focussing on organisations that have an income of less than £50K a year. This work, the often informal and less visible activity happening across civil society, is what keeps our communities connected, together and thriving, and is more important than ever. Last December we brought together a group of infrastructure organisations who support these smaller organisations and groups, and realised there is very little granular insight or segmentation data about them — in fact it felt like nobody really knows very much about who they are, what kinds of activities they are doing and what their challenges and barriers might be.

Before opening up some funding to strengthen these groups based on an assumption that their needs are digital ones, we decided it was more important to gain a better understanding of what the needs of these groups really are, and based on their behaviours and expectations, rather than just opinions.

We are delighted to have appointed Stripe Partners to carry out a piece of Discovery research for us. They will be working in all four countries of the UK over the next couple of months to spend time with different groups, micro organisations and small charities, documenting the work as they go, and resulting in us having real insights into these groups, their opportunities and their needs. This work will go on to inform how we shape any funding going forward, and whether that should specifically come from the Digital Fund.

An introduction to Stripe Partners by Cath Richardson

We specialise in ethnographic research. We believe that in order to really understand people and the needs and challenges that they face, we need to spend time in their world, listening and learning from them directly. We call this embodied insight.

We’re very excited to be working with the Digital Fund on this research. Our approach to this project will be participatory as well as ethnographic, and we’ll be inviting input from the micro-organisations we engage with to help shape the findings. We plan to spend time with a variety of micro-organisations engaged in different types of community activities in and around Liverpool, Dundee, Swansea, and Derry. We will be posting live fieldnotes from the places we visit and some blog posts along the way, so check back in January for updates.

Happy holidays!