WAO is in the midst of our latest Catalyst-funded project, having spent the majority of the pandemic supporting charities through digital transformation.

Catalyst itself is undergoing a transformation, as explained by Ellie in this blog post. In a nutshell, Catalyst responded well during the emergency situation caused by the pandemic and is now looking for how it can be more decentralised, equitable, and partnership-driven.

To help with that, they created several “temporary, experimental working groups” — one of which WAO got involved with. This was the Network Engagement Working Group, which met four times, facilitated mostly by Tess Cooper, although Doug did facilitate the third session while Tess was away.

Outputs

Skipping straight to what the group achieved, we spent a lot of time in Miro, but also one week in Etherpad (given WAO’s love for it, no prizes for guessing which week that was!)

Etherpad

There was a mix of organisations represented, from small charities to larger network organisations, as well as digital agencies and individual freelancers. In the Slack channel there are 19 people, with about 12–15 of them being on any one call.

Next steps

Zoomable version of this image available as Frame 8 on the Miro board

We took the opportunity as a group to plot our ideas on two axes: useful and feasible. More useful ideas go towards the top of the green rectangle, while more feasible ones go further to the right.

Once we had gone around discussing and moving these based on everyone’s input, we colour-coded them based on our original brief. Are these to do with core Catalyst business, reach and engagement, or both?

The list, sorted by colour from the top right is below.

Core

  • Design-hops and other practice training approaches
  • Come up with an open standard of what good digital practice/ infrastructure looks like within the charity sector
  • An evolving open-standard that can fit on a slide (process & product)
  • Define what Catalyst areas need focusing on most e.g. services, resources, how orgs are engaged, reaching diversity of orgs e.g. through their networks

Reach / engagement

  • Explore and articulate what people can get out of engaging beyond money
  • Connecting UK Tech for Good organisers network with the local (generic and specialist) infrastructure organisations in their areas
  • Test assumptions about when, how and why people would engage and contribute their time and energy to influencing Catalyst’s work, network activity and direction of growth and money required
  • Train the trainers programme for tooling up infrastructure organisations so that they can carry actively support their members in digital transformation

Both

  • No-code expert to build relationships with suppliers and share how charities can easily apply these tools within their organisations
  • Deepen understanding of the diversity requirement — is it diversity of voices / reaching and supporting contribution from organisations that service under-recognised communities / social sector organisations that face disadvantages themselves (e.g. regional barriers, small team, niche issue)
  • Identify patterns of need, and connect that with digital best practice — build on the rich research that’s been done over the last year, keep adding and deepening and SHARE it across the network
Image CC BY-ND Bryan Mathers

Stars and wishes

We closed the final session talking about ‘stars’ and ‘wishes’ — i.e. highlights of the process as well as what we’d like to improve in future. The following were noted down by Ellie and shared in the Slack channel.

Stars

  • openness and feel of this group
  • so many of us care about this!
  • hearing people’s thoughts
  • being part of this conversation as a smaller, local org
  • learning from others in the room and being prompted to think about things differently
  • interesting collage of different peoples’ day jobs and experiences
  • great facilitation from Tess and Doug
  • grateful to connect in to this group, gives great energy to see people wanting to collaborate and find solutions
  • watching people think through a gnarly problem
  • contributions and insights of this group have been amazing

Wishes

  • to take what we’ve created on Miro and put it into a form that others can understand/input into
  • have something more tangible/manageable to engage with for next steps
  • something more tangible
  • cross referencing things across each working group will help shape the next bits (maybe it’s because we’re in a bubble that it’s confusing for us)
  • we remain connected in some way and see what comes out of this and other groups
  • keep this going in some way, shape or form
  • that Ellie gets all the support she needs
  • meeting in-person! getting to know people better outside of this convo
  • apply digital best practice to the way we’ve approached this group — user research, prototype then learn
  • tangible actions from this to take forwards

Next steps

Catalyst is hiring a new team over the summer to reconfigure its working practices and take forward some of the ideas of each of the working groups, where appropriate.

We Are Open would love to continue to be part of this exciting network, doing the hard yards of helping charities in their digital transformation journey! 🙌

If your charity, non-profit, or for-good organisation needs some help, why not get in touch? https://weareopen.coop/contact