The Digital Fund in a year.
This is our last post of the year, and instead of a Weeknotes, it’s a summary of the year.
The team
We started the year as a team of 8, with Tom, John, Joel and I, and 4 internal secondments. We lost most of that team — Tom, Joel and Billy left, John was promoted and 3 people internally were moved onto other programmes or went back to their previous roles once we’d cleared the 1200 applications.
We finished the year as a team of 5— Beth, Phoebe, Melissa and I, plus Maddy, who works with us for a percentage of her time. What’s great about this team is that they’re all permanently on the Digital Fund.
All of the team(s) have done the various exercises I designed when I came in to run the Digital Fund, from the User Manual for Me, to the Power + Privilege questionnaires etc. All those resources can be found here.
We’ve had 4 team away days (always 2 days with an overnight stay) — two in London, one in Newcastle and one in Belfast.
What we delivered
We got through 1200 applications, did 268 phone calls, and took 47 proposals to 4 UK panels and one UK Committee.
We awarded £12 Million to 29 grantees.
We ran 7 learning events in 4 different countries in the UK and 7 different Cities.
We commissioned a network of support partners for the grantees.
We hosted 3 different cohort kick off days across the year with the Support Partners— welcoming new grant holders to the cohort following the UK Panel decisions.
We made a commitment that all the Digital Fund grantees would undertake Doteveryone’s consequence scanning process to ensure that the tech we’re funding is being put out into the world with an awareness of its potential impacts.
We designed a learning plan and articulated a set of assumptions about the first round of the Digital Fund, that we will use to gather evidence and insight about over the next year.
We published Weeknotes on 48 weeks out of 52.
We took on stewardship of two larger strategic grants from the UK Portfolio — Catalyst and 360 Giving — both are important platforms for civil society’s future.
We’ve spoken at events in Wales, Scotland and at DCMS’s “tech for good” team away day — offering provocations to inform their future strategy.
We developed a set of grantmaking materials and content for ‘Good Digital Grantmaking’ — to be used internally across The National Lottery Community Fund. We’ve also tested it with other Foundations and opened sourced it for others to use and adapt.
We designed a set of tools for having tech policy discussions in organisations.
We brought together 27 “sector support” organisations who sell services to the sector in relation to digital. This is the beginning of us trying to bring more coherence and consistency to how support organisations describe their services.
We commissioned Stripe Partners to undertake a piece of Discovery work to gain a better understanding of what’s happening at that very local and informal layer of civil society — unincorporated groups, community action, micro-organisations — what will help strengthen them? We’ll be documenting this work from Jan to April 2020.
We took 3 ideas for the next round of the Digital Fund to the UK Committee this December — all three of which received positive feedback. Over the next 3 months we will be scoping them out further for the UK Committee to make a decision on in March 2020.
What didn’t work
Earlier in the year, after receiving many applications from hospices — none of which were suitable for Digital Fund money, but were noticeably similar in their needs — we saw an opportunity to try a different approach.
We invited all the hospices who had applied to the Digital Fund to take part in a collective design process. The intention of this was to demonstrate what common needs and opportunities existed across the hospice community — from sector tech (the potential for shared infrastructure) and capability building, through to new products and services that could be built together rather than in isolation— and see if there was a way for the community to prioritise these. We wanted to fund the hospice community, not individual hospices, when it felt like there was going to be so much unnecessary duplication of effort at a time of huge resource constraints.
We started with 40 hospices on the first Zoom call, by the second it was 32 and for the workshop in Birmingham it was 22. We wrote about that workshop here, and then did a much more detailed write up of the common needs, and the co-designed ideas. However, although the workshop day itself went well, and it felt like there was alignment around 3 particular themes most suited for a collective approach, the engagement after the day dropped — the minimal engagement is very evident in the Googledoc’s linked to above! I’m regretful that we weren’t able to pursue this, but I still believe in the idea, and perhaps we will be able to pick this up again in 2020.
We’ll be blogging a lot more next year on the Digital Fund Medium if you want to follow.
A huge thanks to so many people, but especially to John, Yvonne, Temoor, Angela and Nigel in the wider UK Portfolio team, who’ve made so much of this possible, often behind the scenes. To Sonia and Emily for their work on the ‘Good Digital Grantmaking’ materials and content. To all of the Support Partners — CAST, Dot Project, Shift, Snook, Doteveryone — so much expertise for the grantees (and the Digital Fund team!) to draw on, and a willingness to test and learn in an ongoing way to really figure out what works. Most of all though, a huge thank you to the Digital Fund team!
And I’m grateful to Rachel Coldicutt for the concept of “Just Enough Internet” — this is something that the Digital Fund will draw on next year — and we hope to continue to develop the wider sector’s ability to engage with that question — what is enough internet for civil society?
