Q&A: Refugee Action’s experience of a CAST Design Hop
CAST’s free Design Hop course teaches innovative techniques from the digital world, leading participants on a journey to solve a real challenge for their respective organisations.
Participants leave the course with increased confidence in digital service design processes, insights into their users’ needs, and a ‘starter solution’ to their own particular digital challenge.
As well as the general courses — which are open to anyone working for a social impact organisation in the UK — CAST also works with charities and infrastructure organisations to deliver Design Hops to specific cohorts, based around their shared field of interest. The most recent of these was held with Refugee Action late last year, as part of their Explore, Adapt, Renew programme.
We caught up with Tori Ellaway, CAST’s Head of Digital Practice, and Polly Mae Redfern, outgoing Service Designer at Refugee Action, to discuss the processes involved in the Design Hop, as well as the benefits, barriers, impact and key learnings.
Can you summarise the format and content of the Refugee Action Design Hop?
Tori: CAST delivered a Design Hop over the course of six weeks, from 5th October until 9th November 2022. This consisted of three Zoom sessions, with self-led study, optional coaching, and activities in between the sessions.
The course covers fundamental basic design-thinking principles and best practice. Skills and topics that organisations learn or develop during the Hop include:
- What a design process is and why it’s important
- How to learn more about your users through interviews and research
- How to start small, reuse existing tools and minimise risk
These topics are delivered through a range of Zoom online sessions, videos that explain some of the concepts, exercises as individuals or in groups, and practical user research activities.
This broad range of formats means that participants have access to resources and exercises that they can come back to in future as they continue to develop their skills, and they can use the Zoom sessions with the facilitator and peers to reinforce what they learn offline.
Were the design processes covered new to the organisations participating?
Tori: The design processes were new to many of the organisations who took part in the Hop. Of the 14 individuals who attended at least one session, when asked about their experience of using digital processes, 43% indicated they either didn’t know what digital processes were, or were unsure if they had experience in using digital processes. From this we can extrapolate that this 43% were new to these design processes.
Which organisations were eligible to take part? How did you promote the opportunity?
Tori & Polly Mae: This Design Hop was specifically intended for organisations working in the refugee and asylum support sector. Refugee Action initially arranged some personalised outreach to organisations within their networks, then we extended the offer out to other organisations, via CAST’s network and on social media.
Who took part?
Tori & Polly Mae: In total we worked with 13 unique organisations:
- East European Resource Centre (EERC)
- Refugee Welcome Homes
- Shpresa Programme
- Together Now
- Migrants Organise
- Refugee Action
- Refugee Support Group — Reading
- Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex & London
- Karmabank CIC
- Great Yarmouth Refugee Outreach and Support
- Bloody Good Period
One organisation, EERC, had multiple representatives at the Hops.
Ab Brightman (a freelance coach for socially impactful organisations, contracted by CAST) and Polly Mae co-facilitated the Design Hop sessions.
How did Refugee Action (RA) and CAST prepare the programme, in terms of dividing up the delivery responsibilities?
Polly Mae: From the start we knew that Ab (a freelance coach, contracted for this initiative by CAST) was going to be delivering the Hop. I was supporting to develop relationships with participants and RA and offer relatable examples of how methods like the Hop have worked before in the refugee, migrant and asylum sector.
How were service users involved? How did organisations collect users’ feedback and insights?
Tori and Polly Mae: As part of the Design Hop, organisations were provided with guidance and support on how to conduct user research interviews with their users to understand their needs and behaviours.
Participants carried out user research interviews over the course of the programme with their own service users, to learn more about their individual needs and how they could better respond to those needs with their services.
Attendees demonstrated a strong appetite to take part in the user research activity. Both of the survey respondents indicated they had each conducted interviews with nine or more service users.
At least one of the individuals shared their user research questions with the rest of the group so they could be used by the other participants.
What digital solutions were used? Did the organisations reuse any existing tools to adapt their service?
Tori: The Design Hop gets participants to the point where they have the knowledge, insight and tools to find and explore something to reuse or create. This often only happens after the Hop has finished, so to respond to this question reliably we only have the data from the survey.
One of the organisations who responded to the survey detailed that they had implemented a text reminder solution, using an off-the-shelf tool called Text Magic. The use of text messages as a reminder of appointments is one of the examples used on the Design Hop.
This same organisation has also started to use online forms, using existing software online. The other organisation mentioned using Zoom recordings as their solution.
What went well? How did Hops contribute to developing organisations’ digital and design skills?
Polly Mae: There was a clear desire amongst participants to collaborate even more closely on shared service users’ challenges and solution testing. Participants who carried out user research learned a lot and challenged their assumptions about their service users. Participants who replied to the survey made changes to their services as a result of the user research they’d carried out as part of the Design Hop.
The theme of sharing also emerged strongly: not only did participants learn from one another during the session, they also connected with other peers in the refugee sector who are working on similar challenges, and shared their experiences of other challenges more generally. Additionally, those participants who replied to the survey said they had shared learning from the Design Hop within their organisation, spreading the impact of the Hop with colleagues.
What could have been improved? Were any barriers faced?
Tori and Polly Mae: The main barrier for users taking part in the design process and the Design Hop more generally was, unsurprisingly, time. The attendees had pressing responsibilities at their organisations which made committing to the full design process challenging.
“I am so sorry I was unable to continue with this — work took over, colleagues down with flu and Covid and other emergencies took priority. Gutted to have missed it but have all the material shared to feed into our digital access.” -Anonymous participant
The Design Hop had a low completion rate, going from 15 participants at the first Zoom session down to just 4 at the third and last session. We understand attendance has been a challenge across some design and digital elements of the EAR programme, and we’ve seen some levels of drop-off in other Design Hops also.
We would like to explore ways to improve attendance for future versions of the Design Hops. One option we’re exploring is implementing a small deposit, refundable on condition of full attendance — we’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and any other suggestions for maximising attendance; please do leave a comment here, or get in touch with us at designhops@wearecast.org.uk.
There has been a very low response rate for the feedback form. For future iterations of the Design Hop we’ll build in time for participants to fill in the form during the last session to ensure we get more consistent feedback.
Participants would benefit from even better and more extensive tool examples, and additional time to spend looking at them.
What did you learn?
Polly Mae: Refugee sector organisations have regular contact with their service users but benefit from support on how to ask the right questions to understand the underlying needs and behaviours of their users. Adopting a more user-centred approach can reveal surprising and useful insights.
Participating organisations seem keen for more engagement between them to address shared challenges and problems. Making time for this, though, remains a challenge.
When we talk about specific tools or solutions during Hops, we have a responsibility to talk about a broad range of possibilities, as not doing so may lead to organisations jumping to a solution rather than following the true process. Awareness of a broad range of tools, software and case studies is important to build people’s knowledge, understanding and confidence.
What impact has this programme had?
Tori and Polly Mae: The Hop seems to have provided organisations with time and accountability to learn about and carry out user interviews, which has led to interesting insights into their users’ needs — such as:
“Service users have busy lives like us and to help them continue engaging in beneficial activities that they need to improve their lives, they need reminders similar to the ones that help us keep medical appointments.”
“The challenges that came up the most were how time poor people were which massively influenced our decision to make the training 20 minute recordings, not 2 hour long sessions.”
The two organisations who responded to the survey indicated that they’d changed some of their practices as a result of the Design Hop and the processes they learnt:
“We now use text reminders, and we will begin to use an online form for a new mentorship project.”
“We are now recording our training sessions on Zoom and sending those to hosts.”
Both organisations have plans to continue to develop digital services or improvements within their organisations in the near future:
“We are assessing where digital tools can help us help others better, without removing the human element.”
“We will need to deliver more training and will continue to monitor and evaluate how useful our delivery is and to see if we can adapt it and improve it to make it more relevant and useful as circumstances change.”
What changes (if any) will you make to future Design Hop courses, based on what was observed and learned this time?
Tori: We’ll make the sign-up process more straightforward. We will likely move away from our online training platform and keep course content and activities all in one Google Slides document or similar. This is to make it less confusing and use fewer tools. We’d like to experiment assigning ‘buddies’ as part of the course, to encourage greater interaction and provide support along the course.
From RA’s perspective, what were the main benefits / what was the value of the initiative?
Polly Mae: There was real benefit in introducing organisations in the sector to digital design solutions and a way of working that is human and community centred. Projects like the Hop help spread this way of working across the sector. There becomes a ripple effect because people talk, and work with others and spread the skills they learnt along the way.
Was there anything surprising or unexpected that happened along the way?
Polly Mae: It was surprising how people reacted so differently to it. Some people were like magpies, picking out the shiny things they needed from the project, like new digital platforms they can use as solutions for challenges they have at the minute, whilst others focused more on the user research element, thinking through how they can do that process more in future.
What advice would RA give other charities considering working with CAST to run a Design Hop for multiple organisations / participants?
Polly Mae: Make sure you have a clear and concise process of advertising the opportunity, explaining what it is and what it involves. Theme any direct communications around ‘solving a problem you have’ rather than ‘trying a design way of working’: it’s more relatable for many. Embrace it, and let participants take what’s most useful for them from it.
Are there any plans for further RA Design Hops? If so, how can people sign up to be involved?
Tori: There will be a new Design Hop for refugee and migration sector organisations running as part of EAR Digital Campus, which takes place between May 2023 and June 2024. Any organisation working with communities with experience of migration or forced displacement is invited to register their interest via the link on the EAR Digital Campus page before 10am on 28th April.
How can other organisations request a CAST Design Hop?
Tori: Any organisation keen to run a Design Hop can get in touch via designhops@wearecast.org.uk.
How can individuals sign up to a general Design Hop?
The next general Design Hop will be starting on Thursday 25th May. Visit the CAST website for more information and to sign up.
Organisation in focus: Karmabank
Karmabank joined us on the Design Hop, and despite having only been able to attend two of the three sessions due to a diary clash, made a lot of great progress on the programme.
They carried out user interviews with over 9 service users, and learnt that:
“Service users have busy lives like us and to help them continue engaging in beneficial activities that they need to improve their lives they need reminders similar to the ones that help us keep medical appointments”. -Andrew Standen Raz — Karmabank
This insight led to them exploring a new, off-the-shelf tool called Text Magic, which sends automated text messages. They’ve now implemented this to help their service users to remember the various appointments and sessions they need to attend:
“The Design Hops digital design process has been super useful for making me more aware of our digital design needs, and how we can improve our services using tools like text reminders. Our English teacher notified me last week that class numbers were fluctuating and suggested Text Magic as a solution.“ -Andrew Standen Raz — Karmabank
As an organisation, Karmabank will be assessing where else digital tools can help them help others better, without removing the human element.
