Supporting grantees of the Digital Fund, what we are learning
We’ve been engaged with the grantees of the Digital Fund since July and we’re a week away from meeting the next round of grantees. Working alongside charities who are responding to some of the most complex challenges in society is always inspiring and engaging. As a support team we feel a sense of responsibility to ensure that our support impacts positively on the journeys of the Digital Fund grantees. Now that we have designed the initial support packages for the first seven grantees we have some learnings to share which cover common themes emerging across this cohort.
Attracting, building and retaining talent
For most grantees developing teams with specific digital skills is a core element of their project. For example grantees are recruiting for digital roles including User Researchers and Digital Product Managers. All of the grantees recruiting for digital roles mentioned the same problem:
It is challenging to attract talent to the roles they are seeking to fill. The salaries these charities can offer are healthy, although perhaps not quite competitive enough for individuals who are also job seeking in the commercial sector. All the same the Digital Fund enables grantees to adequately price these roles.
The roles are critical to the Digital Fund projects, therefore finding individuals who have appropriate skills and are a good cultural fit for the organisation is a high priority. An additional challenge for grantees, particularly those who have never had in-house digital roles before, was defining exactly what roles they needed to recruit for.
We have provided some practical support to grantees in the following ways:
- Sharing examples of job descriptions for roles to provide grantees with a template to work from
- Reviewing job descriptions for roles prior to the roles being advertised
- Sharing the job descriptions to wider tech focused networks in an effort to reach new audiences and encourage applications from a more diverse pool of talent.
- We also developed this short list of places to post jobs to provide ideas on where grantees might consider posting job adverts
We were asked to join interview panels. Collectively we agreed that this felt outside our remit. We want to avoid a situation where we might influence a hiring decision within an grantee organisation, as we believe the teams within the organisation are best placed to take that final decision. What we decided we could do is support the interview team in advance to prepare for the interview by proposing and/or reviewing questions. In this way we feel we can build the capacity of teams to prepare for, and run, interviews for digital roles in future.
The question of how charities can attract, build and retain talent in digital roles is a key concern for us. We have raised this within the Tech for Good Community Squad network as we feel more collective action is needed across the sector to inspire individuals to consider roles within charities.
Furthermore we need to understand what the barriers are. We know that overall the UK is facing a tech skills shortage and we’re concerned this will further compound the challenges charities face in attracting talent. CAST and DOT PROJECT have been working recently with Founders and Coders who have been placing graduates from their coding program into charities for the past few years. Recently Founders and Coders found that around 50% of the charity projects which started a few years ago with graduates still have the same graduates in place today. We’re keen to learn more about this success and explore other examples of how charities have attracted and retained talent.
Finally, existing talent within grantee organisations should not be overlooked. We’re pleased to see grantees assessing their existing workforce to explore how staff can take on additional digital responsibilities in their roles. In some cases we heard grantees are seeking to set up internal working groups to engage staff from different parts of the organisations and build digital capabilities within these working groups. We really support this as a way to create buy-in and create an approach to digital which is holistic and inclusive.
Finding opportunities to work together
Within the first cohort of grantees it has emerged that a number of organisations are working with similar audiences, are solving similar problems and in some cases have similar ideas about the digital product or approach they will develop through the Digital Fund grant.
We are keen to find opportunities to bring these grantees together at specific points during their projects to develop ideas and approaches together. Some of the ways we’re doing this so far include:
- Grouping grantees to develop coordinated packages of support: for example in this first round Shift is specifically focusing on grantees supporting families and children. In this way we hope that we can spot trends in challenges and opportunities for these organisations and, where relevant, deliver parts of the support collectively for example by delivering workshops to 2 or 3 organisations at the same time.
- Looking collectively at the consequences of the Digital Fund projects: DotEveryone are leading consequence scanning workshops for grantees. These workshops will explore how introduce responsible innovation thinking across an organisation. One approach we’re trailing, following a direct request from Addaction, is running a workshop with a focus on mental health with 3 Digital Fund grantees. Mind, who are not a grantee of the Digital Fund, may also join this workshop. In this way we can think about approaches to innovation and digital collectively, avoid duplication and build a shared understanding on the intended, and unintended consequences of project and organisational activities.
Identifying the unknown
We found from our initial discussions with grantees that is much easier to shape a support package to suit their needs when they are willing and able to identify what they didn’t know and or share things feel least comfortable about. This might sound counterintuitive, it’s certainly difficult to identify what you don’t know. Where grantees are able to highlight aspects of their approach which make them feel under confident or concerned we are able to dig deeper and identify how to really address the root of the problem. This is a key reason why we like to involve multiple people from a grantee team early on, so we can hear from different perspectives where potential pain points lie.
Uncovering the potential unknowns requires openness and an element of self-reflection, we really welcome this from grantees as it enables us to swiftly identify how the support team can respond. Ultimately it ensures the support we provide adds value to grantee activities.
We’re learning too!
This is the first time we’ve worked together as a support team and the initial few months have been spent piloting ways of working. To create a positive experience for grantees and use our resources most effectively we have put in place the following:
- A central coordinator for the support team: DOT PROJECT are playing a central coordination role, scheduling activities and coordinating inputs from the support team. This means the first person you’re likely to hear from within the support team is Cat Ainsworth from the DOT PROJECT team.
- Regular check-ins: we talk together as a support team every two weeks on a Friday, which is a good way to end the week! This provides an opportunity to identify where we might learn from each other and share information which may benefit grantees who are being supported by other members of the support team.
- Developing a learning approach: we’ve been working with Cassie at the National Lottery Community Fund to contribute to a learning approach for the fund. We have regular check-ins on this and you are read more about progress here.
Congratulations to the next cohort of successful grantees who come onboard soon, we look forward to sharing more once we’ve started working with them!
