Designing an insight service with the Emergencies Partnership
Working well together and having a solid, shared understanding of what’s going on is vital when responding to emergencies. The Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (or VCSEP) helps large, national organisations and smaller, more localised organisations to collaborate and coordinate — and in the early days of the pandemic, they started building digital products to help partners get that shared understanding of emergencies. This eventually became the Emergencies Toolkit.
But users found all the different products a bit confusing and weren’t sure which ones to use in which situations — so were barely using them at all — and the technology underlying these products was complicated and expensive to run.
The Emergencies Toolkit needed to be simplified and made coherent. My team was brought in during summer 2021 to work with the VCSEP in developing a strategy that will help partners improve how they plan for and respond to emergencies — and we had to do this within six months.
To help us along, we hired the service design agency formerly known as FutureGov to research what partner organisations need in terms of information, insight, and knowledge, and to collaboratively design what a good service could look like.
Rather than go through the intricacies of the service design process, I instead want to share a handful of things I learnt along the way. Hopefully these will help anyone else who’s designing a strategy or service that produces and shares information, insights, and knowledge.
Get agreement on your guiding question and stick to it
We initially proposed a research question to guide the user research and service design phases. We then spent some time collectively finessing and refining it, but we realised — right near the end of the entire process — that not everybody had the same understanding of the guiding question.
Coming to a decision can be hard. In the words of Fraser Battye from the NHS’s Strategy Unit, “Decision-making is undervalued.”
One approach you could try is using the Decision Quality Chain; another is concordance. (I’ll be writing much more about decision-making approaches in the future.) However you do it, make sure everyone agrees with the research question and commits to sticking with it. And write it down.
Write down decisions
It sounds obvious, but you — and your colleagues — will forget. Be kind to your future selves and write things down so you can find them months or years ahead.
Be clear on what you expect from the agency you hire (and what they expect from you)
There are many ways to engage with consultants. Choose one consciously, be clear what’s needed from whom every step of the way, and be clear what outputs and outcomes you expect.
Be clear who your users are — and aren’t — and how they will benefit from your service
We found it hard (and continue to find it hard) to define and agree on who our users are, because there’s such a diverse set of organisations in the Emergencies Partnership. Taking a design thinking approach helped bring some clarity to this, and also made us realise what we don’t know.
Map the systems and environments you’re working in
I’m a big fan of Geoff Mulgan, especially his thoughts about how systems work and could work better. One thing he recommends is building a map of the system(s) you’re trying to improve: how people inside and outside the system view its main actors and relationships; where power and influence sit; where the interdependencies and feedback loops lie.
FutureGov led a workshop to collaboratively draw a map of the UK’s disaster management system, which then informed later aspects of designing the service and its strategy. You can also use system maps when thinking about communication, advocacy, information-sharing, and anticipating future behaviour.
Make sure you understand the challenges you’re trying to solve
A key part of a good strategy is having a clear view of the challenge(s) you want to solve. Our user research really helped bring clarity, so now we know that:
- The role of voluntary organisations in emergency planning and response can be ill-defined.
- The voluntary sector doesn’t always plan for emergencies, and planning is inconsistent.
- We lack anticipatory planning and action.
- Knowledge about what works well for emergency planning and response is siloed within organisations.
- There isn’t shared, timely information about people’s needs, risks, and vulnerabilities, which means some people might be missed or under-served during an emergency.
What’s next?
We’re now at a point where we’re ready to start delivering the strategy. The VCSP has hired a dedicated role to take ownership of the insight strategy and my team will continue working closely with them to build some exciting insight products, including a new tool to help with emergency planning — more about that soon.
