Learning and insight with the Digital Fund: What’s been hard?
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’s been hard?’
This blog follows our reflections at The Children’s Society on ‘What is essential?’. It is part of a wider learning journey we are undertaking through the Digital Fund that Phoebe Tickell is guiding us through. These reflections are shared from the perspective of working in our digital team during the Covid crisis, but try to capture the wider organisational experience.
I’ve realised it’s not always easy to write about the hard stuff. As a children’s charity we are used to talking about difficult challenges that affect the daily lives of young people. Through Covid, supporting young people has, in many ways, become much harder.
So, what has been hard for us as a team and organisation when we have been responding to Covid-19?
- Meeting the increased needs of young people
We know that the current situation with Covid is having a very damaging impact on young people who are already vulnerable. These include young people who are looking for mental health support, young carers with responsibility for caring for a loved one at home, those living with alcohol dependent parents or carers, those with abusive and challenging home lives, young people spending increased un-supervised time online, or living in families impacted directly by poverty.
There are many young people in these situations in need of support that we cannot reach, or are struggling to reach, for many different reasons. For example, it may be they don’t have access to technology or connectivity for us to contact them. Or they are isolated in a home environment that is difficult and complex making it hard for them to interact with us. Or perhaps, the usual referral mechanisms via schools and other support services are not operating as they normally would, or there are significant language barriers that prevent simple communication. Young people themselves also don’t have the opportunity to just drop in and see us when they need to.
It’s hard for us to accept that the number of referrals for our work right now has gone down. We anticipate a huge spike in the demand for our services as Covid related lockdown eases and schools, and wider services in our communities open.
For the many young people we have kept supporting, it’s hard knowing we can’t see them and reach out to them in the ways we would usually. During the height of the lockdown we were unable to do simple things like take them for a walk away from the troubles they are facing. One of our practitioners sums up that, “it can be challenging and frustrating to maintain a relationship with a young person without face to face contact”. A lot of our work during the lockdown has been ‘holding’ young people, rather than being able to deliver the interventions and deeper support that we would normally be able to when offering face-to-face support. Colleagues are balancing their own safety from Covid and adherence to government requirements, whilst being responsive to the problems young people are facing and wanting to reach out.
2. Different experiences of our colleagues
Our brilliant Team TCS have been working tirelessly since lockdown started with clear focus on immediate priorities — and there are lots of positive new ways of working we can point towards. But we know this has also been a difficult time for colleagues. New ways of working have meant increased emails, meetings and screen time (“working at a screen all day is quite intense and tiring and you need to step away and not feel guilty!”). There are difficulties in navigating the work-life balance when the boundaries are blurred (toddlers have been frequent guests in meetings). There has still been uncertainty sometimes when being asked to focus on the next urgent thing to do, when there are other competing demands and pieces of work in train.
More time is having to be spent on maintaining positive staff morale, and emotional wellbeing. As teams are dispersed we’ve needed to consciously create new and different rhythms and ways of working to maintain cohesion in teams. There are countless small examples of colleagues taking the initiative to address this challenge. These range from virtual social meet-ups and peer-led classes, to the two email signatures (below) that have been adopted by many colleagues during the outbreak:
‘My working hours may not be your working hours, so while it suits me to send this email now, I do not expect a response or action outside of your own working hours.’
It has also been hard to put a number of colleagues on furlough (over 250 at the last count), reducing and breaking up some teams.
3. Financial impact
As our CEO told The Sun in April, Covid has had a big financial impact on the organisation. It’s hard that we see our income reducing.
Without charity shops, resource is a huge challenge. We are currently forecasting different financial scenarios to understand the possible impact in the future, and what this might mean for the future of the charity.
4. Technology and our digital plans
We have moved forward quickly in many areas of digital. Moving quickly has been hard — without all the skills, capabilities and experience we’d ideally want (and are developing through our work with The Digital Fund). It’s also hard knowing there are still gaps to fill when it comes to embedding digital ways of working. For example, ensuring a user-centred response has been hard as our initial interactions with young people were focused on making contact and ensuring the basics were in place, such as up-to-date contact details. We realise we haven’t been able to work together with young people to make decisions around tools and tech as we would aspire to. We are aware this wasn’t part of our initial crisis response and want to work towards changing this so that we have better ways to involve them in future.
The use of new software and systems has been hard for some colleagues in our direct practice teams as this is not usually their day to day way of working and we are all getting to grips with new tools. For example, MS Teams which we had planned to rollout later in the year but our response to Covid has accelerated this so we have quickly provided guidance, created an advice line, and organised online training sessions for multiple attendees which has been hard. Hosting large workshops, especially those with a creative element has been difficult (with both colleagues and young people), new rules of engagement, new tools to enable breakout groups and ‘post-it’ sessions, consideration of language barriers have all required additional time to plan and test in advance. This feels like it’s getting easier as we learn and share our experiences. Not being able to use some of the tools that young people would like us to even though they are using themselves in their personal lives e.g. the age limitation for WhatsApp means we can only use it with young people who are 16 years old and over.
Where has it been hard to integrate our learning?
In terms of our digital journey, we are pivoting significantly in the area of service delivery. We have made great progress in a short space of time with staff working remotely, providing online services in place of face to face, specific training being provided much more quickly and decisions being made. For different people the learning will be at different stages and we have initiated a cycle of learning to consolidate this.
For some colleagues, the integration of learning is the next phase, coming out of Covid (gradually and safely) and how we transition — re-mobilising our services and reviewing plans to see what we would still like to progress. We will be offering a blended service for young people, quite different to that provided before Covid. We know that The Children’s Society will come out of Covid looking very different, so it’s important that we ensure we continue to build on what we are learning and basing the next stages on user insight.
For other colleagues, they are in implementing their learning right now. Many of us are learning how to pivot, reflect, think and act differently. We are seeing we can make changes and work differently and the power of collaboration.
What’s been hard in collaborating with others?
We have collaborated well with a number of organisations and partners, especially where we already had contacts. Our initial response was very focused on the immediate needs of our service users and providing an online version of our face-to-face services, so sometimes finding time to reach out proactively was a challenge and some organisations also had their own immediate priorities and were unable to respond.
At a local level, our service staff continue to work in partnership, as this is an essential component of effective safeguarding. We are noting that working with some local partners, such as local authorities and other charities is difficult in some localities due to competing demands, which we understand.
We are also noticing the challenges of agreeing on shared software and technology to use. Agreeing a piece of software that all partners have authority to access and can access it using their hardware is becoming an increasing problem. There is no consistency on the use of software, with different organisations issuing different rules about use. Which means for some of our work, partnership delivery is being inhibited by technology, rather than being enabled by it.
The majority of The Children’s Society funders are being very understanding and flexible with us. There are a handful who have set unrealistic expectations and are difficult to engage with. This is the minority, but where it is experienced, it is hard.
Where are we seeking support?
The Children’s Society are looking at various tools and technology to support young people, wanting to be user focused and use technology in the way that meets their preferences. However, the area of online safety, safeguarding on platforms and keeping data and privacy secure is where we have been looking for a lot of support. We are seeking support from 3rd party suppliers and the sector more widely. This has involved sharing our own experience and understanding the experience others, specifically related to set up, security and decision making. We have sought legal advice from external experts to support with some elements of reviewing terms and conditions of software.
We also continue to support to each other — communicating more on shared platforms, like Yammer — sharing stories and supporting each other to work in lockdown. We have had interesting and fun team sessions, shared lunches and tea breaks, chair yoga sessions and shared pet stories — to support and motivate each other. And we recently held our first whole organisation ’town hall’, engaging all colleagues equally no matter the geography or role.
The experience of Covid has been one of the biggest challenges that most of us will ever have to work through in our lives. This blog offers only our perspectives on what’s been hard at The Children’s Society at a moment in time. Much of our Covid response reflections are 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.
This blog was developed from collaboratively created content within The Children’s Society, with particular input from Nerys Anthony and Adam Groves.
Related blogs
How we are learning during our response to the Coronavirus outbreak
How has Coronavirus changed ways of working in The Children’s Society?
Sharing The Children’s Society’s guidance on using digital tools with young people
