“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” (Winston Churchill)

A couple of months ago, we announced that we’d been asked to help eight charities with some digital support through Catalyst’s ‘Continuation ‘programme. This has now come to an end, so we thought we’d wrap up what happened and what we learned from the process.

First of all, we tracked everything we did. This was vital not only to account for our time but also to co-ordinate with one another and fairly distribute our support amongst our eight charities. Doug and Laura collaborated to provide advice and support over the course of the programme.

Chart entitled ‘How we spent our time’. June (2 weeks)shows a small amount of planning, lots of coordination, and some delivery. July shows a small amount of planning with mostly delivery, and August shows almost all delivery.

The work being done by charities was diverse and different, and we didn’t have a lot of time to plan what kind of support we were going to offer. As our eight charities were in different places, we needed a plan that would be quite flexible. Consequently, we decided to run weekly office hours in which charities could randomly show up, meet whomever else happened to have shown up and ask questions or just chat. In addition, we offered weekly 1:1 sessions for each charity.

Our digital support was optional, which meant that some charities used their full allocation of time, whereas others touched in occasionally or used us as accountability partners.

Pie chart entitled ‘Areas of support’. Just over half is labelled ‘Charity support’ with about a third ‘Office hours’ and a small amount ‘WAO Admin’

From WordPress training to Typeform remixing, advice on SSL certs and hosting packages to analytics, GDPR, CRMs or discovering if a particular tool had its own API, over the ten weeks, we helped charities with a wide range of technical issues.

I don’t believe we would have been as effective or achieved as much in this phase without the help, support and direction of the you as our Digital Mentors. (Christine Brown, Ideal For All)

We also gave advice on community engagement, peer to peer learning, architectures of participation, user testing, UX and many other socio-technological phenomena. All of this kind of consultancy can only happen by understanding the wider context a charity is working in, so we are pleased that our participation in previous Catalyst programmes had given us that insight and understanding.

Really appreciate everything you’ve taught us and that goes for the rest of the team too. (Lindsay Woodward, CFF)

We’re so proud to have had the opportunity to work with such a wonderful group of charities and human beings. As we wrapped up our participation in the Catalyst Continuation programme, we made sure to let our charities know that they are always welcome to reach out and share with us what they’ve been working on. After all, the relationships don’t end just because the beginning does!

We Are Open were as clever as they were time efficient, a valuable resource throughout. (Kat Lewis, The Margate Bookie)