Support and training update #3: rain won’t dampen our summer progress
Our third co-written blog. Written in 5 minutes by members of Catalyst’s support and training circle.
Tools used: Google Forms, Medium
Time to create content: 5 minute activity during July’s support and training circle meeting, inputting into this Google form.
Time to format and publish: 15 minutes, using Medium
Catalyst Resources
By Joe Roberson, Working with Joe
Content that helps non-profits improve their understanding of design, digital and data.
What’s making me happy about the service, right now
Getting up a new post about ideation (how to generate ideas when trying to solve a problem through digital). It talks about what you need to think about when you ideate, different ideation techniques and how to decide which of your ideas you want to test. We’re filling a resource gap because nothing similar exists for non-profits in the UK.
What’s challenging right now
Planning our content work for October onwards — whether to focus on one subject (e.g. funding digital work) or multiple subjects for a while.
What we’re doing in response to the challenge
In September we will review what Content Seeds projects delivered over the summer and use that to inform what we do next.
Further information
Read our post: Ideation: how to generate ideas when trying to solve a problem through digital
Dovetail
By Noam Sohachevsky
Dovetail helps charities to find their perfect digital partner.
What’s making me happy about the service, right now
Interviewing people who’ve used Dovetail. Finding out what they used it for, tips for finding a digital partner, and why they think it’s important to find a digital partner that fits.
What’s challenging right now
Gathering feedback and impact continues to be a challenge. Finding a good digital partner can take many months and contain many steps before starting to work together. Impact for the charity can take months and even years to materialise. Measuring all of this is a challenge.
What we’re doing in response to the challenge
Trying out different analytics tools, such as Hotjar and Fathom. We’ve also introduced user accounts. Accounts allow users to access resources and the shortlist builder. If account holders give us permission, we’ll also be able to send surveys and product updates.
Further information
To see changes and updates on Dovetail, click this link: https://www.dovetail.network/updates
Design Hops
By Tori Ellaway, CAST
An introductory course to digital service design techniques for charity digital people.
What’s making me happy about the service, right now
Seeing and hearing positive feedback on the programme after such a lot of work, tweaking and improving over the years by Ellie, Ab and other facilitators and collaborators!
What’s challenging right now
Figuring out the difference between Design hops for the general public, and Design Hops for teams from the same organisation. Should they differ, and if so, how? How much time do people need for user research activities?
Also thinking about funding for Design Hops so that we can run them regularly and support more charities each year.
What we’re doing in response to the challenge
Reviewing the feedback from each of the most recent Design Hops to compare. Capturing learning in a way we can implement it into the next round of Hops we run.
Exploring different funding avenues for Design Hops.
Further information
Test Drive Tools
By Ab Brightman
An introductory course to digital service design techniques for charity digital people.
What’s making me happy about the service, right now
I was shadowing a completely different organisation’s co-design sprint the other day, as part of that they had to speed teach miro use which was fun to see how they did the basics. But also they were super stringent about the equipment people needed to even join the session (eg second screen)
About to set some dates, just need to double check them, some kind of Autumnal theme to a series
Some people I have asked about tools or the name have asked if there are in person events — made me wonder if any Catalyst funding supports this any more, what the benefits vs trade offs are, collabs with TfG groups etc
What’s challenging right now
Choosing exact name and visual identity.
What we’re doing in response to the challenge
Canvassing opinions, what makes sense to describe what it is.
