Dovetail x Catalyst: reflections on helping non-profits find a digital partner that fits
Introduction
This blog post talks about our journey helping non-profits find their perfect digital match. After four years of working alongside Catalyst, we’d like to share our impact, learnings and future plans. And say thank you!
About the initiative
Dovetail is a website and digital partner directory aimed at non-profits. It was born out of a piece of research in 2019, exploring the relationship between non-profits and digital agencies. Here is the Discovery playback.
Today, Dovetail’s mission is to help all non-profits find a digital partner that fits. Here’s an overview of Dovetail’s audience, goals and outcome:
- Audience — Staff working at non-profits who are involved in the partner-selection process.
- Goals — Educate and increase confidence in our audience by providing resources and guides.
- Outcome — Enable fit between non-profits and their digital partners, leading to greater impact.
Dovetail aims to support non-profits via:
- A comprehensive partner directory, listing more than 250 digital design, tech and data-led agencies.
- “How to” guides, including running a partner-selection, writing a brief, building a shortlisting and evaluating partners.
Impact and success stories
Dovetail has an impact page, linking to publicly available website analytics. Our most recent research uncovered the following reasons as to why non-profits use Dovetail:
- Find the right digital partner — The most common theme that emerged while looking into motivations, was that charities were looking to find the right digital partner for them.
- A good mix of choices — Charities reported the most useful bit to be searching through the directory of partners. Appreciating a curated selection of potential partners, with sector knowledge.
- Referring charities — One of the form respondents mentioned that they use Dovetail to refer charities to when they are prepared to take the next step with their project.
- Accessing resources and guides — Respondents reported that guidance on evaluating partners was most useful. Some reported that partner-selection stories and shortlisting partners was most useful.
Non-profits freely use Dovetail, without needing to share their data or create an account. This makes it hard to create a relationship and gather feedback about Dovetail. Saying that, we have managed to get a few positive, insightful quotes:
What non-profits say about Dovetail
“There are so many agencies out there so it’s great to have a curated selection that you know will understand the needs of a charity digital project.”
Ruth Davies — Digital & Communications Manager, Unlock
“It is not an exaggeration to say I use the platform weekly whilst trying to find decent partners to work with Wildlife Trusts on new projects.”
Alice Kershaw — Head of Digital Transformation, The Wildlife Trusts
“Dovetail has been SUPER useful! Definitely would have found it so much harder without it.”
George Matson-Phippard — Digital Lead, Rape Crisis England & Wales
Appreciation from partners
“In case it’s helpful, Dovetail is good for seeing people’s day rates, what sort of charities they’ve worked with before, what sort of work they do, etc.”
Sarah Jackson — Communications Consultant & Copywriter, Sarah Jackson
“I love to refer charities to Dovetail, particularly for best practice when working with external partners.”
Charles Sladdin — Managing Director, Purple Banana
Lessons learned
From our 2019 research (mentioned above), we learned that non-profits find it hard to identify a suitable digital partner. Dovetail makes the task a bit easier, but there are many jobs-to-be-done during the process.
Key learning #1: system and behaviour change is hard work
On the whole, we know that the product fills a much-needed gap. The directory and “how to” guides are a big help.
However, the real problem is both systemic and behavioural. Many non-profits adopt a typical procurement process. This usually starts with a hefty RFP, an un-targeted approach and big ask from many agencies (creating wastage and far too much assessment).
We created a guide — How to run a partner-selection process — to help shift this way of doing things. The challenge is to get this approach adopted and shared by funders, infrastructure, membership and capacity building organisations.
No Free Pitches is a 10-point manifesto and resolution, signed by over 6,000 creatives who “refuse to participate in unpaid creative pitches from this day forward.”
Perhaps the tech for good agency community needs to come together to protect itself from unfair and outdated practices — changing the way procurement is done?
Key learning #2: we need to invest more in marketing
Raising awareness of Dovetail is a tough nut to crack. We haven’t even scratched the surface.
Finding a digital partner is an infrequent activity. It’s a big, complex purchase. It might happen every 2–3 years at the average non-profit. This means that Dovetail needs to present itself when someone is in the early stages of looking for a digital partner. This is a very small window of time.
Again, I believe that funders and infrastructure organisations have a role to play. Their audience is Dovetail’s audience. We need to somehow signpost to non-profits early in their partner-selection journey. Dovetail needs to be front-of-mind when it comes to supporting non-profits when it comes to the jobs listed above.
We don’t invest enough in marketing infrastructure and capacity-building tech for non-profits. Catalyst granted around £150k to Dovetail over the last 4 years. About £15k of that was spent on marketing. That’s not enough. That’s not Catalyst’s fault. But, with Catalyst being part of CAST, we tend to invest more energy somewhere along the line of discovery > design > build.
Future plans and sustainability
Dovetail has secured £30k in funding from Esmée Fairbairn.
This new funding covers a 2-year period and will pay for a mix of tech costs, community management, product development, marketing and transitioning to a sustainable model. The strategic focus over the next year is marketing. The priority is to build trust and raise awareness of Dovetail.
To build trust, we plan to share more partnerships & stories, and show who is benefiting from Dovetail. To raise awareness, we plan to build relationships with funders, infrastructure organisations and influencers, finding ways for them to effectively signpost their audiences to Dovetail.
For example, City Bridge Foundation has a dedicated landing page to signpost their grantees to. ACEVO are signposting their members to Dovetail via a members-only area on their website.
Looking ahead
The funding from Esmée is part of a wider grant to CAST. We’ll work alongside CAST and other initiatives including Digital Candle, Digital Trustees, The Curve, Agencies for Good and Digital Leads Network.
Our collective mission is to continue to build critical digital infrastructure for the charity sector.
It’s a shame that Dovetail is no longer a part of Catalyst. But it makes sense, given Catalyst’s new vision: Shaping liberatory technology for just and regenerative futures.
I’m grateful for the funding, expertise and support from Catalyst and the network over the past 4 years. If it weren’t for Catalyst, Dovetail and many other initiatives would never have existed.
Thank you Catalyst x 🙏
