This week’s brain dump

or — Digital Inclusivity through the medium of INTERPRETIVE DANCE

Warm up — shake it loose

This week has me thinking about the work Third Sector Lab is doing with Catalyst on the Digital Trustees initiative. The whole aim of this strand of work is to try and get a digital professional on each charity board in the UK.

What we eventually hope to achieve is a third sector that is well-versed in what digital can do for them, and tech professionals who feel like they can make an impact for societal good.

We currenlty offer two things — one is a 30 minute board session. This basically means either me or Ross McCulloch comes along to your board meeting and gives a talk about the what, how, where and why of recruiting a digital trustee to your charity board. (It’s more fun than it sounds).

Kick-ball change, shoulder shoulder

The second is our series of Digital Trustee Match Making events. These are intended as a kind of speed-dating affair for charities and digital professionals. Ideally it cuts a long recruitment process short, but it can also just be a nice way to start talking directly to each other, rather than writing applications and interviewing people.

We always aim to have a 50/50 split in charity and digital attendees. What has suprised us is that, usually, we have to push much harder to get attendees from the charities than from the tech sector.

Goalpost arm turn, pas de chat

One of the things we’re trying to do to keep it fresh, as it were, is to partner up with different organisations for these events, or centre them around a theme. Our next one is with DataKind, and the one after that with UK Black Tech.

This is really a ‘suck it and see’ approach — we don’t have any particular evidence to suggest this will have the desired effect of drawing more people to the events, other than the general knowledge that variety is the spice of life.

Double arm reach, embrace, rag doll

In this context, I’ve been thinking about inclusivity. Yesterday I attended a the Catalyst Network Meetup on Inclusivity — tagline ‘from lip service to action’- which fanned that flame more still. How do we make sure that we don’t just reach the same people all the time? How do we make sure we are inclusive without being tokenistic?

The answer usually ends up being — just keep going with the little things. Organise an event with a partner organisation outside your normal network. Take time to consider who you want to work with, and approach them. Just do the thing.

Start where you are, use what you have is a phrase I’ll borrow from Ellie Hale’s latest blog.