Weeknotes 61 (3rd — 7th February)
Last week we announced a new era for the Digital Fund Weeknotes, in which the team would either write them collaboratively or we’d take turns. This week we remembered that only one of us regularly works on a Friday… So, until we work out a better publishing schedule (on Monday), it’s another one from me with contributions from Cassie.
We didn’t have much team time this week due to being scattered across the country. Beth was at home in Belfast, Cassie was WFH (working from holiday) in Suffolk morning-only, Phoebe was in London and I was mostly in Wales to visit our Newtown and Cardiff offices. There was still plenty of chatter, strategising, encouragement, planning and gif-action taking place across our Teams and Whatsapp chats though. Especially around one exciting announcement.
This is big news. Whilst Cassie will be moving on from her role as the Head of the Digital Fund, she will still be overseeing it from her new role as the Senior Head of the UK Portfolio. She has written all about what this means to her and what her plans are in another blog post (see here). I know the rest of the Digital Fund team and I are incredibly proud and whilst we’ll miss being the centre of her attention, this feels like a bold and bright step forward for the wider team. Well done Cassie!
Better digital grantmaking
Our strand of work around developing good digital grantmaking practice internally had quite a lot on this week. On Monday Phoebe and I hosted the second of our regular ‘digital funding drop-in’ calls on Teams, a case clinic style session for staff across the Fund to bring any digital-related applications or grants for discussion and support. These are great and we’re planning on hosting them more regularly as they’re a really low-effort, high-reward way to connect with colleagues around this topic and support the organisation to become more confident and capable when it comes to making judgements about digital, data and technology. If you work at the Fund and would like to drop-in with a particular case in mind, sign up here.
The main focus of my week was my trip to Wales. On Monday I set off for Newtown in North Wales, where The National Lottery Community Fund has one of two of it’s Welsh offices. I was going there to meet our Newtown colleagues and host a workshop to test out some of the better digital grantmaking materials that we’re developing, before doing the same with the Cardiff office the following day. This was the first time I’d run one of these workshops and luckily had the brilliant Amy to help plan, host and co-facilitate with me. Amy is based in the Cardiff office and worked part-time on the Digital Fund last year before moving to a secondment on the Service Design team, so she has a ton of invaluable expertise.
In these workshops we tested three slide decks that are intended as talks/resources/activities. These are version 1.0 and we’re testing them to better understand a number of things. We want to know if the content, format and flow makes sense, if it’s relevant or if anything’s missing. We’re also keen to find out about segmentation and audience — a big question for me right now is who needs to know what and when? What does a regional funding officer need to know in learning how to make good decisions and judgements when it comes to digital, data and technology compared to their manager or the Senior Management Team? We also asked about the Welsh context and how this fits in, as well as questions around learning styles and how people access new knowledge or skills in their grantmaking practice. This was also a great opportunity to find out more about what kinds of ‘digital’ applications or grants people think they’re seeing come in across the organisations many different funding programmes, which is something we don’t know a huge amount about.
This is how the workshops were laid out:
- First I asked people to share what they’re working on and why they decided to come today. My favourite answer was “Because I thought it was mandatory”(!) — I respect that honesty and value that that same person said “That was more interesting than I thought it would be!” by the end. This is tough stuff and people are incredibly busy, so I appreciate them taking the time to participate in something new.
- Then I asked what people associate with the word ‘digital’, to acknowledge that it’s a pretty confusing term before using this cafe analogy to demonstrate the many different ways that the sector understands digital. This story is an incredibly simple tool for anyone trying to convey the definitions and use of language around digital. All this led us into really interesting conversations about where we see these things in our own daily lives, as well as in the applications we assess and grants we support. We found that people seemed to really engage with the opportunity to first talk about how this relates to them as individuals, as a way into understanding how this relates to the communities they work to support and therefore their job.
- This conversation led well into the next section where Amy talked us through a slide deck called ‘It’s here and happening now’, which demonstrates how technology is affecting society and how that relates to us as a major funder of community activity. The version that we presented was a cut down version but we still found that it could be even shorter for certain audiences and though interesting, some fed back that it could use some refining to remain clear as to how it relates to people’s jobs. We learnt a lot about our assumptions about the language we use, for example finding that phrases like ‘civil society’ lack meaning in Wales.
- After lots more talking and questioning, we moved into pairs for an activity based on another of our materials — ‘It’s this, not that’. This is a great exercise for bringing to life the theory about what technology can afford and giving people some quick examples of what we might want to fund and what we might not want to fund, without them having to read through a load of applications or decision papers. In Cardiff we overran talking in the other sections so not everyone got on to this but Amy will sit down with people in the next few weeks to test it with them one on one. In Newtown, everyone was able to take their time and scribble notes on printed copies to let us know what made sense, what wasn’t clear and why.
- We closed with the question ‘what’s next?’ and invited people to stay and chat, where we got some great suggestions for ways we can work together with different teams as we keep working on this.
I only got back yesterday and so am still thinking through everything that we learnt but feel really happy with how these went. The intention was never to develop deep knowledge in participants at this stage, but really just raise awareness of what we’re doing and build some desire to contribute and engage. This is long-term work and will require lots of minor interventions and iterations to get it right, as well as a huge amount of relationship building and collaboration.
That’s why I’m starting a ‘List of Little Wins’, which will debut as a blog series either bi-weekly or monthly (depending on how lucky we are!) The idea for this is to give value to the small but mighty moments that indicate we’re affecting change. This is specifically around this better digital grantmaking work, for which we’ve been given the broad-ranging brief to ‘build up the confidence, understanding and awareness of good digital grantmaking practice across the Fund and the wider sector’. This is hard to measure or quantify, so by paying attention to ‘little wins’ I hope to demonstrate what we’re paying attention to and give weight to the qualitative.
When back in London I also got the chance to work with our branding team to develop some posters that are part of this set of materials. They’ll help us to get everything on-brand so they are as effective as possible when we share them internally. We had a good conversation about some of the messaging, which is really hard to get right for such a broad audience!
Grant stewardship
There was a lot of grant stewardship taking place in the team this week, as Phoebe met with a number of grantholders, worked on back-end processes and designed a series of learning events for the Digital Fund grantholder cohort. I had more work than usual on this as I only look after two large strategic grants, including meeting with Rachel Rank, CEO of 360Giving for the last time before she steps down from this role — she’s led the organisation through some amazing work and I look forward to seeing what she does next and meeting her successor!
Micro organisations Discovery research
The team at Stripe Partners have been continuing their tour of the UK to find out what micro-organisations need to thrive for us in their third and penultimate week of fieldwork. This week they’ve been in Derry in Northern Ireland meeting a range of different organisations, observing how they work and conducting interviews as part of their ethnographic approach to this discovery research. Today they’re hosting their usual end of week workshop in which all participants throughout the week come together to share their experiences, discuss similarities and differences.
Keep up with all their live fieldnotes here — they’re a really brilliant read.
