What is essential?
At The Children’s Society we have just finished working on our monthly insight submission to The National Lottery Community Fund Digital Fund (TNLCF) which has asked ‘What is essential?’
The approach of the Digital Fund towards reporting and impact measurement is slightly different to other funds we’ve experienced before — with an emphasis on learning and constant iterative reflection around different themes that are set each month. During the month, we receive a Typeform survey to focus our reflections, and from there grantholders are supported to write about and open-source their learnings, or speak at the monthly Digital Fund learning panel hosted by Phoebe Tickell and her colleagues. We are also invited to reflect eco-systemically on our role in the wider civil society ecosystem.
This month, Phoebe and the Digital Fund are encouraging us to share on the theme of what we believe is essential to us right now: what we are letting go of and what we want to continue for the future.
Our work to digitally transform The Children’s Society (TCS), supported by TNLCF has accelerated significantly since Covid. Prior to the crisis we had started the redesign journey for our ways of working to become more digitally mature, but this work was in its infancy.
Since the crisis, we have pivoted our focus to ensure we can still support thousands of disadvantaged children up and down the country through our services for children from the age of 10 upwards. The maintenance of this support has been entirely facilitated by online and telephone contact from staff to young people within our existing core programmes and services.
“We moved the whole organisation online in 9 days…Through a ways of working group made-up of cross organisational experts, staff in information governance, safeguarding, data and technology and digital, who met daily and made decisions in a matter of days compared to weeks or months” (TCS staff member).
At The Children’s Society we have initiated an illuminations project to learn from what’s happening in real time, supporting colleagues to reflect and enable us as an organisation to make sense of the new ways of working and measures we are putting in place. Adam Groves has written about this here and we continue to chart its progress. The beauty of the TNLCF grant making approach is that it builds on this learning, encouraging us to consider insight and answer new questions to help us reflect on our work. Here Phoebe Tickell, who leads Learning and Insight at the Digital Fund describes the approach. We are genuinely excited to work in this way building systems change capability within the organisation.
This offers a similar lens to that set out by Ian Burbidge in his article considering how we create lasting change from our crisis response, with endings, amplification, letting go and restarting. We are doing this because we know that the organisation is going to emerge differently from this crisis. The behaviours we are able to show now, may define the future. We want to be able to remember what it was like, without rose tinted glasses.
“If we want change to happen, we need to think about how we want that change to happen, not just the future we want to see” (Ian Burbidge).
What is essential at The Children’s Society?
1. We’ve adapted and modified our support with young people
Continuity of support for the children and young people we work with, as well as reaching out to those in need we have not previously supported is essential for us. It’s the reason we exist. Maintaining existing relationships, letting people virtually ‘drop-in’ and keep safe from harm. In order to do this, essential development to our communication channels, specifically online — website, email, telephony, software — have been made, supporting staff to work in new ways.
“We have torn up our service, rewritten it to work via phone and landed with a service that is live and beginning to support young people” (TCS staff member).
“Working with external and internal colleagues to have a mental health call back service that is tested, safe and up and running for young people to access 7 days a week. It took 5 days from TCS suspending business as usual to be ready to take the first query……….this is inspirational and amazing!” (TCS staff member).
2. We are learning and getting feedback from staff on what tools they are using
It’s essential right now to keep gaining feedback from the colleagues who are working directly with children and young people, to hear their experience of the new ways of working and ensure we are proactively and effectively supporting them. Our use of (and trust in) data to inform decision making is also important. With less face to face or informal evidence, data is even more important. For example, we could see 80% of the workforce are using Skype, which led to us proactively addressing the barriers faced by the remaining 20%. And when we can say that 300 people were using Teams, we knew we needed to formalise support for this, and provide training and guidance.
3. Collaborative working groups with skills to focus on priority outputs and impact
Creating new relationships with colleagues and collaborative, fast-paced working, bringing together specialist skills to focus on priority outputs and impact. Day to day work feels more focussed and delivery driven for example, moving all front facing staff onto digital platforms, with the right confidence levels to commence supporting young people in this way (providing a ‘pop-up’ digital advice line).
“Pre Covid — to get TEAMS rolled out and people actively using it would have taken months. We have done it in weeks” (TCS staff member).
In her blog, my colleague Ellie Fairgrieve provides details and top tips from our work behind the scenes to create these rapid shifts in our working.
“Lockdown has been difficult enough for us to navigate and ensure continuity of delivery to young people in need, with the added work and life pressures we are experiencing. We have intentionally not bombarded staff with lots of different guidance for multiple platforms” (TCS staff member).
4. Top priorities
To achieve this high level of change in such a short amount of time, our internal and external collaboration has been and will continue to be essential and is strengthening day by day. This is exemplified by the need for our work to remain relevant to the young people and families we support. Covid has provided the clarity needed for us to address deeper challenges we have to ensure young people’s voice and influence. Convening a 27 strong group of staff, with a passion for young people’s engagement and insight mid-Covid is progressing this.
5. We’re more actively connected with our peers and networks externally and acting as one voice
Reaching out to The Children’s Society’s external support networks — gathering information (sector survey from our policy team), sharing what we learn and our learning approaches — hearing from other charities and statutory providers in the sector. This is really essential to the organisation right now. We are all learning so much, in such a short space of time. It is our duty to share our experiences if that will help others. Maintaining a keen eye on the multi-agency work and partnerships that happens at different levels of the organisation is especially important, in the context of safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults.
What couldn’t we have done without?
1. Specialist skills
To flex our delivery and support for young people, we could not have done without the specialist skills we hold for example in safeguarding, information governance, quality practice, design, digital, legal. The skills of our staff, to engage young people effectively — moving from face to face to online. Staff ability to pivot, work flexibly and with ambiguity for our collective endeavour is staggering.
2. Solid infrastructure
The strong infrastructure within The Children’s Society, offering the core building blocks to enable our work with young people e.g. case recording system, established policies and processes, ability to work remotely, refreshed technology rollout — have provided reassurance that we are delivering to the usual standards and provided a solid platform to build and develop quickly.
3. Leadership through open communication
The open communication that has been modelled by our Executive Leadership Team, sharing updates and information with colleagues across The Children’s Society. This has been warmly received by staff and for some is a further source of motivation when things are feeling difficult.
“We all are connected to each other, we are all in this together. I dare to believe on the other side of this we will have discovered again the power of community and belonging. But please know, together, we are making a huge difference in the lives of young people across the country. They need us right now” (Mark Russell CEO TCS).
4. Refreshing grant maker / grantee relationship
The understanding that TNLCF and others funders have shown us, allowing us to flex and respond to the crisis, supporting and not pressuring us has been welcome. The link to wider Digital Fund grant holders through a dedicated Slack channel and online sessions has given us the chance to share and reflect with those in a similar space. We are now reviewing our approach, recognising how Covid has accelerated some of our intended work and may change some of our focus.
What are we letting go of and can leave behind?
Face to face meetings have obviously been left behind, travelling long distances to visit colleagues in different parts of the country is off the agenda. We don’t intend to let go of this, but welcome restarting and reintroducing purposeful travel when it is safe to do so. Our rapid move to 100% online working and meetings shows us what is possible, but everyone we work with misses the human interaction, the ability to pick up on cues, and to support each other emotionally.
Elements of decision making that were slowing us down
Traditionally lengthy decision making processes are being kicked to the sidelines, in favour of real-time, pragmatic, risk informed decision making. We are working rapidly, and progressing work that previously would have taken months. The imperative to change has taken hold. We must let go of long and drawn out decision making.
We have reconsidered some decisions for example volunteers and smart phones. We are looking at the viability of smart phones for volunteers supporting young people directly as an advocate or mentor to enable this relationship and one-to-one work to continue.
We have also left behind previous assumptions about the tech kit that we could donate to young people. After receiving donations from 3 and Tesco Mobile we are addressing some of the digital poverty young people are experiencing right now. Young people and families without access to phones, data, kit, making it impossible for us to connect and support them, for them to study and them to be connected. We have taken a serious look at this and developed a safe approach, with appropriate consents and risk assessments, to giving donations of tech / data / phones to those in need.
The examples above indicate that we can leave behind potentially historic, and often risk averse decisions that have been made. Leaving the door open to challenge and re-look at elements of practice that would really improve the response we can offer.
This blog offers only our perspectives on the essential at The Children’s Society at a moment in time. Much is not included, but if you would like to hear more then please get in touch. We are starting to see patterns across our work and intend to share the monthly reflections that our insight gathering for TNLCF enables us to achieve.
Nerys Anthony
This blog was developed from collaboratively created content within The Children’s Society, with particular input from Lucy Wappett and Bill Griggs.
