At SIDE, we’ve set ourselves a challenge. In the next 5 months, we will launch a digital project that makes a social impact.
The website Charity Entrepreneurship says Founding Charities is One of the Highest Impact Things One Can do. They would say that I guess. But it supports our priors and it doesn’t sound too crazy.
Where to start?
It’s a weird moment when you confront the question “how can we do some good?” You might imagine you’d have loads of ideas of where to start. But instead, we got a bit of a blank wall feeling (perhaps inspired by schlep blindness). Our first step was to create a big, messy Miro board.
A longlist
We started by considering three categories.
Passions
Areas we are keen to work on.
- Debt Support
- Climate Change
- Gambling Harm Reduction
- Effective Altruism
- Inequality
Domain experience
Areas where SIDE has experience.
- Mental Health (YMCA)
- Design Education (Design Club, MADE — coming soon)
- Migrant Communities (Refugee Action, CARAS)
- Elderly Care (Amba)
- Energy (Rebel — coming soon)
Help voluntary sector use tech better
Building on previous work:
- Tools e.g. Dovetail, Tools for Good, Digital Candle.
- Digital training programmes e.g. Catalyst Community Definition, Refugee Action Explore, SIDE Academy.
Our shortlist
We decided to focus on two areas for the first month.
- Migrant Communities — the area we know best
- Climate Action — the area the team is most passionate about
We split into two teams. With the caveat that these are rubbish initial ideas, here’s what we’ve been thinking about.
Migrant Communities
We’ve done lots of work for Refugee Action Good Practice in the last 18 months, giving us a sense of the area. Some possible projects:
Help migrants start in the UK
Arriving in Dover as a migrant, you are scared and overwhelmed. Would it help if there was an app where you’d already filled in all the questions you’ll be asked dozens of times?
It would remove fear. It might even increase efficiency, particularly if there was a way to automatically transmit the data.
Linktree for frontline migrant organisations
The UK migrant support sector comprises hundreds of small organizations providing local support. In general, these organisations have poor websites.
This causes real-world problems: migrants get bounced from one organisation to another when the information is out-of-date or unclear.
One reason websites are bad is that the organisations try to appeal to multiple stakeholders: funders, volunteers and migrants. Multiple stakeholders get in the way of being user-focused. At SIDE, we ran a whole programme to help frontline organisations improve their sites.
The idea would be a sort of Linktree for frontline refugee organisations.
Automated legal advice for migrants
There are approximately 500,000 migrants in the UK who could get their status regularised if they had access to legal aid or an OISC registered volunteer.
Inspired by Farewill, which helps you write your will, what system would help migrants sort out their legal status?
First MVP
As a first trial, we are prototyping the ‘Linktree for migrant organisations’ idea: https://www.migrant.services/
We’ve just started showing it to a dozen or so organisations who might benefit from it. Any comments or feedback, Noam would love to hear.
Climate Action
Whoah… I’d never really stopped to think ‘What could I do about Climate change?’ Once you ask that question, it looms over you like a towering doom monster.
We interviewed a handful of people who been involved in climate action. It was noticeable how frequently burnout and depression came up as topics. If you are going to face up to the climate situation, part of the job is just trying to stay positive.
Enable political action
From Bill Gates to Greta Thunberg, there is agreement that getting your voice heard is one of the most important things an individual can do.
I went on a climate march… once. It was OK, but I wasn’t really sure what to do. Also, I’ve considered going a handful more times, but typically got bogged down in the logistics of finding out where and when to go.
If we approach climate action like an online sign-up flow, can we reduce friction and get more people engaged? Can we make it more viral?
Obviously, we don’t own the sign-up flow — in fact, there isn’t really a sign-up flow at all! — but if we think laterally, perhaps there are areas where we can reduce friction.
Repair cafes
We love the energy around Repair Cafes.
They prolong a product’s lifecycle. They help those who can’t afford new products. They tackle the consumerist mindset. They foster community.
Could they work online? What could we do to boost this emerging form of behaviour?
Support high impact orgs
Piggybacking this research by Founders Pledge, we wondered if we would make more impact by helping a high-impact underfunded climate organisation?
Other ideas
We’ve also mulled over:
- Barcode scanner for recycling. Cross-reference product barcodes with local authority recycling information to see what you can recycle.
- Personal carbon emission tracker. Offset your journeys
- Infographics about climate change. Population-level stories make sense via graphs not anecdotes. Data visualisation was hugely influential in shaping the understanding of Covid.
- Where to get started guide. There’s no shortage of guides and resources, but I‘m still stuck. Could we do a better job?
To be honest, we’ve found climate change rather overwhelming. Feel free to email Andy with any suggestions of where a small digital product studio such as ourselves could get stuck in!
We will be back…
