Helping social mobility organisations in an emergency pivot to digital provision
How do you rapidly move a charity’s learning programmes online during a global pandemic? How do you iterate on and move past ‘good enough for now’?
Update! download the toolkit here: https://bit.ly/SMC-toolkit
We Are Open members have recently been helping charities as part of three projects funded by Catalyst and the UK government’s Social Mobility Commission.
The main deliverables were:
- Quality framework
- Benchmarking survey
- Toolkit for online delivery
These were the result of targeted interventions with 10 charities, followed by in-depth work with one of these as they rapidly took one of their programmes online.
We had the good fortune of being paired with Erica Neve and Pedram Parasmand for this work, from whom we learned a lot. We’re now even bigger fans of tools like Mural and Miro than we were before!
“Thank you so much for all of these materials, the sessions were really helpful for us in terms of taking our programme virtually and thinking about how we can improve what we’re already doing online”
Sarah Crossan (Aspiring Professionals Programme Coordinator, The Social Mobility Foundation)
Our work was informed by a digital skills and confidence survey that was completed by 83 members of the 10 charities we supported in the first of the three projects. The data from this told us that:
- Just less than half (48.7%) of respondents didn’t feel like they had the right tools to do the job when moving to digital provision
- While respondents were comfortable in using email for communication, and video conferencing for meetings, they were much less confident in creating online learning content and leading engaging remote sessions.
- There was good awareness around GDPR and safeguarding, but respondents were keen to understand good practice in this area.
The series of workshops we designed therefore focused on:
- Designing for online delivery
- Online Facilitation skills
- Tools for online delivery
While we can’t share the very colourful Mural boards that were the result of these sessions, we were impressed with the ideas generated and the commitment of the organisations involved to level-up their delivery.
“Massive thank you again for the workshops, they were very helpful. We are piloting some of the new tools in our upcoming workshops with our young people, so very exciting!!!”
Will Cole (Power2)
Our in-depth work over a number of weeks was with UpRising, an organisation that previously prided itself on the quality of its face-to-face provision. With a new CEO arriving during the UK lockdown, time was ripe to rapidly pivot to online provision.
We supported the UpRising team through workshops, materials, coaching, and critical friend services as they moved their Fastlaners programme online and set themselves up for future funding. That experience set us up well for the third of the three funded projects: the quality framework, baseline survey, and toolkit for online delivery.
This final work was informed by desk research, our previous work with other organisations, but particularly what we had learned during the previous two projects. In particular, it was clear how quickly committed staff could level up their mindsets and skillsets.
Our final playback and report to the funders made three recommendations for the sector, well-expressed by Erica:
Act now. Reframe risk.
There is a lot of guidance out there for the charity and voluntary sector about ‘digital’ more broadly. However, there is very little structure to it, with overlapping terms and messaging presenting a confusing picture to those in positions of responsibility.
2. Commit.
Focused commitment to transform requires new org structures, programme management styles, with the time, resources, funding to do this. Now.
3. Results.
Product suites not programmes, delivered at scale and impact- providing breadth and depth. Move the dial on many, in-depth impact for some.
In terms of recommendations for the funders, we suggested follow-on work from the deliverables we produced, but also expressed how useful the sector would find guidance around new roles that might be necessary post-COVID.
Overall, these were enjoyable projects to be part of, not only in terms of what we learned from the experience, but the feeling of being genuinely helpful at a time for crisis for the sector. We’re looking forward to working on similar projects in future! Get in touch if you think we can help.
Download the toolkit or make your own copy of a web-based version via this link: http://bit.ly/SMC-toolkit