Organisation research for web discovery — understanding our services & stakeholders as well as starting conversations
What we did in the organisation research phase of our web discovery project to understand what we do and who we do it for so that we can solve the right problems when we design our next website. Also starting some good conversations, grounded in evidence, to keep us improving.
JRF is changing into a new outcome oriented social change organisation, so we need a website that represents who we are and what we do . That’s a really simple thing to say, but there is so much more to it than that.
We have a new operating model that’s identified that we’re experts in:
- Working with people with experience of poverty
- Advocacy
- Campaigning
- Evidence
- Solutions
We’ve been working with the service design agency Snook to understand what we do (our products and services).
The aim is that once we’ve identified what we do and for who we can:
- design our website for those who use it
- share what we’ve found with colleagues so that we can all understand and agree what JRF does and use the opportunity to have some conversations that we’ve not yet worked out.
The project is a balancing act between getting what we need for the website and getting what we need to understand our whole service offer.
I’m sharing where we got to at the end of the project kick-off and orientation and organisation research phase of our Discovery project to shape JRF online.
Our approach
Firstly, we got Snook up to speed and reviewed what we already know. The great work that’s been going on organisation transformation put us in a good place to understand what JRF does now, but we wanted to get to the next level of detail.
We want to know what our colleagues do and who they do it for. Once we have a picture of that, we can start to understand what needs to be online.
We also reviewed where the team had got to with the work last year in some pre-discovery workshops. There were great themes in there telling us what we needed to work out.
Organisational research: what we’re trying to achieve
JRF is a complicated organisation. We may be a relatively small team, but we work with lots of people doing loads of amazing work. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to colleagues across the organisation and hear more about the great work we do.
This project has had loads of expectations on it. In organisational research our objectives were to:
- Clarify who JRF’s external stakeholders are
- Explore what JRF’s service offers are
- Begin to establish what JRF’s external stakeholders’ motivations and expectations of the website are
- Draft external stakeholder journey maps
- Understand JRF staff’s needs of the website
- Identify what currently works well and what does not on the JRF website
- Gain enough information to enable us to prototype certain parts of the website
So not much, then?
Organisational research: our phases
Then we worked our way around the organisation to work out how things fit together:
Leadership team workshop > to kick the project off and make sure we’re solving the right problem
Outcome leads workshop > to understand what services are provided to deliver the outcomes
Team conversations > to get the real detail of who our colleagues work with outside of JRF, what we work on, and, how the role of the website plays into that
Holding the team conversations
We were on a mission to book in 19 conversations for a 2 week period, our colleagues were very accommodating and we had very busy 2 weeks, we learnt so much!
We used this discussion guide to structure the conversations and recorded the 1 hour conversation on Teams. We had one note taker and one interview in every conversation so the notes were ready at the end of the call.
Because there were two teams of interviews we had a half hour catch up most evenings to share how the calls had gone, tweak the discussion guide or process and just download to each other.
The team conversations gave us an amazing amount of insight and we’re so grateful to everyone for sharing their time so willingly. When we took all of what we’d heard and looked for the themes on a Miro board and then turned those into insights with quotes to back them up.
I felt so proud of the organisation I work for after these conversations. There is so much amazing stuff going on, it was an absolute pleasure to hear it all.
What we found
Here are the insights we found from the organisation research:
The website doesn’t reflect JRF’s transformation
JRF has gone through a massive shift to become a social change organisation, but our website doesn’t represent the new work that we do now and will do in the future.
The website needs to support us to deliver our outcomes
Our website needs to help us achieve our outcomes, and that we should be mindful that our outcomes are an internal structure. Our website structure needs to reflect how users consume our content and what we want them to do next.
Older research reports are a popular part of the current site and they need to be available in future
Research and analysis are areas we’re known for and people come to the website to access this. However, this is not the key reason to access the website for all users and because it’s a dominant part of the site it might exclude some people.
The website needs to support making connections and building partnerships
JRF wants to build deeper relationships with others and the website could be used as a platform to encourage people to reach out and work with us. By making these relationships and how we work transparent we would also enable our networks to make links with one another.
The website needs to be adaptable
JRF is an organisation that adapts as the world around it changes, adapting what we do and how we do it. Our website needs to be flexible and responsive to support the changing needs of our organisation and our users.
What we need to explore further
There were some insights that were more questions than insights:
What do we want people to do?
Although our website is a known and trusted fount of knowledge, there aren’t clear calls to action for visitors to take. There are assumptions that we want to use the website to form partnerships and encourage people to take action to solve poverty.
We need to be clear the website is part of user journeys and what we want people to do help reduce poverty.
Who is the website for?
JRF influences and works with a variety of people. Currently, our website is aimed at audiences within government and academia who already know of JRF and are motivated to solve poverty.
There is an assumption that our website can be used as a tool to win the hearts and minds of the public; to increase their understanding of poverty and have their opinions changed and want to join our campaigning efforts.
Moving forwards, we need to be clear on who the website is for and what they need from us.
What do we want to say?
As JRF becomes a social change organisation, we will become more active in policy making, and as such we will start being more open about our policy positions alongside our policy recommendations. This may be time limited content, but could affect our overall neutrality and may deter some of our existing users.
We need to bring together and clearly state what we’re doing, thinking and know about a topic. We can then decide how the website is used as a tool to communicate this.
How should we share the stories of those living in poverty?
Although some people use our website to access and amplify stories of those living in poverty, others are uncomfortable with JRF using our platform in this way. It’s currently unclear how to best use the website for this, and if our website is the right platform.
We need to determine how to use the stories of those living in poverty to inspire action, while balancing amplification and ownership.
Sharing and using our insights
We held a show and tell and invited the whole organisation. The benefit of working virtually is that we can record the show and tell and share it with people who couldn’t make it, and people who start afterwards.
I was really pleased with the questions we got at the show and tell. It told me that people understood what we were doing and were really interested in the project. The questions ranged from, big picture — feels like we want to meet the needs of a really diverse set of audiences: do you think it is realistic to expect a website to achieve that? to which social change organisation has the best website? and do external users understand what a social change organisation is?
We’re going to use the insights we have found to create a prototype, which is a very high-level, light touch wireframe of what the future website could contain a sketch of what our website could contain.
We will share the prototype with external stakeholders, and it will help us start conversations. It will also help us to see if we are on the right lines with our thinking, as we are using it as a tool for learning, not as a suggestion of what the website could look like.
These insights, in combination with the external user research findings, will help guide us on what our priorities are for the next version of the JRF website. This is a great start to understand what a future website should be and do.
Next steps
The next phase of this discovery project will be led by our User Researcher (Laure Duchamp) and will be the external user research. The main objective of that phase will be to start to understand the motivations, expectations and journeys of a range of external stakeholders. This will allow us to explore in-depth the different services that JRF offers, test our assumptions from organisational research, and draft journey maps related to these services.
We will bring everything back into the organisation in Autumn, and finalise what we’ve learned so that we can move forward to the next phase.
If you’re doing something similar or want to have a chat about what we did feel free to reach out on jude.webb@jrf.org.uk
