Weeknotes 62 (17–21st February)
A look inside the work of the Digital Fund
Hello! Another Weeknotes from me — with three sections:
- What we’ve been doing
- What are we learning
- What are we celebrating
Whoever from the team is doing the Weeknotes will share a bit about what they are reflecting on and learning about, whereas ‘what we’ve been doing’ will give you more of a collective view.
What we’ve been doing
This week I’ve been in Glasgow with Melissa at the National Lottery Community Fund Offices to meet with colleagues from the UK Portfolio (the lovely Rhian and Conor) and other colleagues from the Scotland team. This is one of my favourite aspects of this job — being able to travel around the UK and meet others from different offices — helping create the kinds of connections and relationships which ultimately allow things to happen in a large organisation like TNLCF. This kind of building of the relational field helps spread ideas, innovation and shared context throughout an organisation.
It was really exciting to share what we’ve been doing in the Digital Fund and get that reflected back in our colleagues’ questions about how we do things and the sorts of results we are seeing from doing things that way. Melissa and I ran two workshops — the first a “Lunch and Learn” which was basically an introduction to our team, how we’ve allocated funds, how I’m working with grantholders and how Melissa is developing the Good Digital Grantmaking learning resources. We invited colleagues to bring a brown bag lunch and it was quite informal with discussion throughout which worked well.
We noticed that people were especially interested in how we are structuring the grantholder learning and how to work with grantholders where we have funded large scale, complex change. It made sense to everyone that if you are funding complexity, you can’t expect KPIs and impact measurements in the traditional sense… There was a lot of vigorous nodding when speaking about taking the iterative, responsive and less “cookie-cutter” approach to grant management 💯.
We noticed that testing new materials was perhaps more abstract and harder to connect with in the format of a talk — so it’s good we structured a separate, hands-on workshop around this to allow people to really get stuck in.
Check us out looking chirpy about our room set-up:
The second workshop was a small focus group intended to test the Good (Digital) Grantmaking resources and get in-depth feedback to help develop these further. This is the strand of work Melissa is stewarding, and as we are hoping to create more and more cross-over between our strands of work, we hosted this workshop together .
The way the workshop was structured was to allow people to dive straight into the guide as it is — which is in quite a serious ‘beta’ mode —we are purposefully working out loud and bringing people in on the journey of developing these resources — part of this is sharing an unfinished product! We encouraged colleagues to be as direct and blunt as possible about feedback and made it clear we are not precious about this — the more honest the feedback the better. We shared both a paper and digital copy of the guide with them and post-its to record ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t’, with a time limit of 15 minutes.
This created some urgency and focus, in a kind of ‘hack and scratch’ way which was really good. The idea is to tear it apart and spot the holes early, so that we don’t keep building on resources that may not be useful for the final user. We then invited everyone to share high level feedback and talk through their post-its — we received some great points such as:
- Eliminating jargon — e.g. ‘machine learning’
- Thinking about re-structuring the guide to better suit actually using it, instead of simply going through and learning from it — i.e. colleagues may need to refer back multiple times to some sections, and read others once
- Separating out or even eliminating sections that talk about high-level impacts of digital and tech on society — this could go elsewhere
- Input from someone on the Communications Team from past experience designing online toolkits, and how to arrange this as a grid for ease of use
Overall a great session — Melissa has now run a feedback session in Cardiff, now Glasgow, and will continue with these in Northern Ireland and other TNLCF offices, integrating the feedback as she goes.
Cassie and Beth were both off this week, so my hope is that they were both enjoying some well-deserved time off — Beth at home in Northern Ireland and Cassie on holiday in Sri Lanka! 🍹🌴
The Digital Fund grantholders and support partners
Just a wee update about the grantholder cohort — while up in Glasgow I had the pleasure of meeting with Euan Miller from Children 1st and hear about their work with Nick from Shift (one of our support partners) and the large shift Children 1st have been going through in re-thinking how they do their helpline service and integrate it with their other services — using a data-driven and user centred approach.
I’m also excited because things are starting to pick up on the Grantholder Slack for Digital Fund grantees to share opportunities, challenges and learning as they go. Here’s a screenshot from one of the prompts I’ve been putting in to help in some community building:
Some responses:
Hiring new people is nerve-racking! I’ve spend the weekend trying to map out how decision making processes should work across the new positions and trying to get a handle on what I need in place to be able to manage people well…. new team was hired on Friday and starts on Monday, so wish me luck!
Lots and lots of challenges this week — one I’m grappling with is how to support our staff through a period of change (we’re developing a new strategy).
Our challenge: how do you keep the focus on the new and the discovery of fresh insights whilst balancing some really tricky, really rabbit hole tech issues? One win this week has been a great conversation with one of the other grantholders who are a little further on their digital journey than us, giving us reassurance and plenty of food for thought about the challenges and opportunities of bringing people with you.
I’m really excited about this cohort model of grantmaking — and the vulnerability that grantholders are showing in sharing very real challenges. One of my inquiries is how can we structure grant-making differently so that we can create win-win dynamics because competition in the charity sector makes no sense at all IMO. More on that below.
Responses have also started to trickle in from grantholders answering questions on Leadership — more on that soon.
What have I been learning?
Just a brief bit from me here on what I’ve been thinking on and learning about as someone who is new to the philanthropy / grant-making sector.
I’m thinking a lot about where charities fit into society, and the assumptions that are baked into how we fund charities and the hypotheses of how we believe the best charity will “win”. One theme that has come up while talking with grantholders is how difficult it is to switch from a competitive, “win-lose” mindset to one that is truly focused on sharing learning, building services together, and not doubling up on efforts and competing to develop the same services.
My background is in networked organisational governance design that encourage win-win, not win-lose dynamics. This has ranged from community owned assets, collaborative economy models, decentralised autonomous organisations and participatory budgeting, decision making, or even just culture within organisations. This is about shifting power and finding ways to “bake in” collaborative approaches into things like ownership, decision-making and incentive setting — and designing governance approaches that suit this.
NB: when people hear that, most people think I am talking about participatory grant-making (the approach to funding cedes decision-making power about grants to the very communities impacted by funding decisions). This is great and if this is of interest, I encourage you to look at the work of Hannah Paterson and Rose Longhurst who are both leading great research, experiments and work in this area and write about it on Medium/Twitter.
It’s definitely a really exciting area of innovation and to be honest, it can be surprising to comes across parts of the funding sector where the idea of including the voices of the people they wish to fund in their decision making… There are contexts where solely including the voice of communities is not enough, but as a starting point this should be foundational practice to avoid replicating the same colonial and extractive dynamics that created a lot of the problems philanthropists are trying to solve.
I’m interested in how we can change the way collaboration and work happens in the charity/civil society sector and the role philanthropy can play in that. For example, how do we create collaborative infrastructure / change the incentives so that the outcome we have is well-designed, partnership-driven, user-centred and large-scale services which do not leave patchy coverage across a geography / sector / user landscape. I’ve had a couple of people reach out on Twitter so will be speaking to various people to get a better understanding of what’s already been tried / tested in this area.
Part of my call with support partners this week was reflecting on what may be blocking grantholder organisations from sharing their lessons with the sector. Some of the things we reflected on were: lack of skills/experience how to do effective collaboration, behaviours and culture, the set-up of a fund influencing what collaboration is possible, funders funding competitive behaviours, the way funding is structured not allowing significant discovery phase that would be needed to properly understand complex challenges and co-design solutions between more than one charity. It’s great to have CAST as a support partner who is incubating the Catalyst collaborative which may be the best placed in the sector to make meaningful, large scale interventions in this space.
“We are a coalition of major foundations, digital design agencies, civil society bodies and the UK government, seeking to massively accelerate the use of digital in the UK’s voluntary and charity sector.”
If you have thought a lot about these topics or want to think along with me, please get in touch — just send me a message on Twitter @solarpunk_girl.
I’ll be giving a workshop at the EDGE Funders conference in Berlin at the end of March, which will focus on decentralised decision-making for organisations — so they are embodying the kind of dynamics they wish to fund in their movements. I had my first call with the amazing Tobias Troll this week to discuss the workshop and excited that we are really on the same page. I’ll write more about that in a future post!
What we’re celebrating
Lots of things! A few:
- Connecting with our TNLCF colleagues in Glasgow
- The interest shown from across the Fund in ‘digital’ and new ways of working — and desire to try things out
- First steps taken in setting up a “Digital, Data and Design” Community of Practice at the Fund 💪
- Getting the hang of the new Grant Management System at the Fund — and releasing payments
- Our posters about “digital” being finalised and ready to share by the TNLCF design team
- Our first monthly learning event on the topic of Leadership in large scale, complex change coming up in March, three amazing grantholders speaking, and lots of sign ups already…
