Discovery: JRF online
A look into our discovery to align the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) online presence with our evolution into a social change organisation.
Pivot to social change
As Claire Ainsley laid out in her blog, over the past two years JRF has made significant progress moving into a new outcome oriented social change organisation.
These changes to our strategic direction and external profile led us to our need to establish a starting point for the next version of JRF online, as the services, content, and channels that people outside of our organisation interact with are still mostly geared towards JRF being a think tank.
We’ve also been doing a lot of work internally to transform our ways of working: to create a new operating model; form outcome oriented delivery teams; and, create our design principles and playbook. We’re becoming digital from the inside out.
Our website jrf.org.uk is a gateway into JRF. Most people who interact with JRF touch the website at some point in their journey. Now we are moving on to transform our external channels.
In doing discovery, we are also defining the requirements of the JRF website to deliver its strategic outcomes, and define the services that will be delivered on or accessed through the JRF website.
In addition to this, through discovery we are using our website to hold conversations and understand how people want to engage with JRF and how we need to change our offering. JRF Online is central to our digital transformation; it’s a touchpoint that exemplifies a much wider change for us.
The insights we find will help us to develop our external channels to showcase our outcomes, solutions and stories in the best possible way to achieve social change.
Our discovery with Snook
Following a three-part tender process that I led earlier in the year, we selected Snook to partner with us and work alongside our internal team to deliver our discovery using design-led approaches.
Together we are defining a shared vision for the purpose of the JRF website, what it is for and isn’t for, and how it connects with other channels. We are gaining a clear sense of who our users are across all of our services and what they need and want from JRF.
Crucially, we are gaining a clearer view of what JRF services are.
In doing discovery, we are building a shared pool of knowlege to drive our work, to inform design decisions and we are continuing to develop a common language between what is still a recently formed user-centred design team within JRF.
The discovery started at the end of June, we are currently more than half way through and will be complete by the first week of October.
We have just completed a phase of organisational research, and have just agreed on priorities for a low-fidelity wireframe prototype.
Over the next three weeks we will take the prototype into external user research / interviews. This is all very exciting and another step forward for members of the team.
One last thing
Members of the team working on this discovery, they’ll want to share things they learn as a consequence of discovery too (key insights and observations). If you are interested, do follow our Inside JRF medium.
