Catalyst project: Coffee Connections
Making it easier for people in the charity sector to connect with and learn from each other.
General details
- Outcome area: Practice & Network
- Phases: Delivery
- Timeframe: Ongoing
- Doing the work:
CAST — Tested “Randomised Coffee Trials” in May 2018 as a way to enable serendipitous conversations between charity staff.
Summary of work
Randomised Coffee Trials is based on this Nesta initiative. The trial has now evolved into Coffee Connections.
Coffee Connections is a scheme to help charity and non-profit staff connect with others within the sector and have conversations about their roles, projects and charities. Once a person has signed up, they are matched completely randomly with another charity worker by email. Then it’s up to them to arrange a coffee or a remote call, if they’re not based in the same city or area.
See the CAST Coffee Connections landing page.
Intended output
Lots of coffee meet-ups over 6 months, then tweak the process if necessary.
Feedback on other useful ways of matching people up: location, causal area, size of charity, etc.
Fit with Catalyst purpose
By linking two people up in a completely random fashion, we’re hoping to create more connections between charities and: “Galvanise an effective, sustainable and collaborative cross-sector network to drive sector change.”
And by enabling conversations about digital and other things, we hope that this will contribute to: “A growing number of nonprofits making effective use of digital, design and data to improve their services and their organisational resilience
Key contacts
If anyone would like to discuss or build on this work, please get in touch:
- Tori Ellaway— Project Lead
