Weeknotes 67 (30th March — 3rd April)
This will be my last week writing Weeknotes as part of the Digital Fund team. From next week I’ll start writing from the perspective of my new role and may try something a bit different. The brilliant team will keep these up — and I will still get to work with them, just in a new way.
It’s been another busy week again for us.
Phoebe Tickell is trying to balance being responsive to our 29 Digital Fund grantees and their questions and concerns in the midst of Covid-19 whilst continuing to gather learning and insight to share with the wider sector and plan our next Digital Fund online event. The latest post from one of our grantees is by Laura Bunt, CEO of With You. Phoebe’s also working closely with the Digital Fund support partners who are at the centre of an impressive effort to mobilise a whole network of organisations for supporting civil society with digital, design, tech and data expertise at this time.
Melissa Ray is fielding all kinds of enquiries from colleagues internally who are getting lots of urgent requests from grantees about how to use digital tools, and how to move their services online. In response she’s made the monthly Digital Drop-in sessions weekly instead, and is documenting all the questions and observations colleagues are bringing from the frontline. We will share that soon.
Beth Bell has been working with Stripe Partners to see how the Discovery work they finished for us last month can be useful in relation to Covid-19. — not just to other teams in the fund, but also to the wider sector. She’s also been starting to plan how we operationalise the next round of the Digital Fund which feels more relevant than ever in the current context.
Both Beth and Melissa have also been supporting me on all the interviews and calls I’ve been doing, taking notes and documenting the urgent and emerging needs people have been describing.
I’ve been on Zoom a lot — 28 calls with different grantees (and tomorrow’s still to come), several meetings with Dawn our CEO, daily catch ups with the team and with colleagues (especially Faiza and Elly who it’s been such a pleasure to work with) and I’ve been joining the England Senior Managers calls so that the UK Portfolio and England Portfolio can work more closely together in our Covid-19 response. I joined a call with our Advisory Group to talk through some of the insights we’ve been gathering about what civil society is facing at this time and what our grantees are experiencing. And I wrote a piece for Alliance magazine about how foundations and philanthropy can design ways to coordinate their efforts to respond to the Covid-19 crisis.
Alongside all of that I’ve been starting to get my head around my new role, the team, our budgets, our funding response to the current context and how we need to adapt some of this years plans. With all of that, and to draw the curtain on this phase of my time at The National Lottery Community Fund, it was lovely to receive this out of the blue from someone yesterday —
“You must be so insanely busy right now but just want to let you know that in so many convos with lottery grantees I keep thinking about how pivotal you’ve been to steering the Digital Fund to become what it is…in doing so it’s created such an important enabler for so many key charities right now.”
Lastly, as I took over leading the UK Portfolio team on Wednesday, we needed to celebrate and say thank you to John for doing a brilliant job of being in the role over the last 9 months. We marked the occasion, organised by Beth, with the team all donning hats.
