28 October — 11 November weeknotes
We’re changing up how we write weeknotes, so instead of a whole team effort they’re being led by a few members of the team, so you’ll get a more themed or focused update from us.
This week, Kat, Olivia and Jo are leading on the notes, and we’ve changed the format a bit. We’ll focus on three areas, or bits of the service that we’ve been working on and why they’re important.
If you haven’t read our weeknotes before, Jo is the User Researcher on the team, Kat is working in the team on secondment from her role as an Engagement Manager in the Nottingham team and Olivia is on secondment from her usual role as an Investment Manager in the Cambridge team.
How people accept our funding
Over the last few sprints, we’ve been working on the steps people need to do to accept funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Initially, we were testing patterns about how people might use this part of the service. This has allowed us to be a bit more certain that what we’re going to propose works for users and is accessible.
We know from other research that the content in the terms of grant, and the way we present this information to people who are awarded funding, can be a bit overwhelming and confusing.
So, in the last two weeks, we’ve been testing some new content for our terms and conditions of grant with some external users. We’ve included people who had never applied for funding, had applied for our funding a while ago and people who applied for our funding recently so that we can understand if the content makes sense to people with different experiences.
This is important for our inclusion goal and making our service more accessible for people who aren’t familiar with funding. It’s important to make sure people know what they’re being asked to commit to by accepting our funding, how long that commitment lasts and how to ask questions about those commitments.
How we pay people their grant
Once we’ve worked on how people can accept funding, the next step in the journey is to pay them some, or all, of their grant. As a team, we’ve been doing analysis and mapping to show what the current process is for this, who needs what information and when they need it. We’ve also been thinking about what’s technically needed and feasible within our new service.
We already had a lot of research findings about the experience of requesting a grant payment and processing a payment request from discovery interviews we did in the summer. We haven’t conducted any more primary user research about this experience, but instead, have spent some time refamiliarizing ourselves with what we saw in the earlier user research.
Next sprint we’re going to prototype and test a new idea for how people tell us about what they’ve spent their grant on and provide evidence for some of those purchases. This is important for grantees, staff and our finance team.
The Community Fund’s Partnership funding
We had a session as a team with Jayne from the Community Fund to tell us about how the Community Fund has changed their approach to funding partnership projects. They can fund either one of the partners or they can fund both partners as part of the same project — which is very different to how we fund these types of projects.
The Community Fund used to ask to see partnership agreements, but now the partnership arrangements are owned by the partnership themselves. Organisations/grantees still need to have an agreement, but just need to tell the Community Fund that it’s in place. The Community Fund also provide information about partnership agreements and templates on their website to help people understand what options are available and how the funding can be managed. Through user research and content design they’ve reduced the partnership agreement from 40 pages to 11!
Jayne also showed us how partnership funding works in their staff system which uses Salesforce, the same tool as our new service! So it was great to see the potential and where it’s working for Community Fund members of staff.
Links we think you might like
A good (but old!) blog about why we can test with low numbers of people.
