Supporting charity digital development through savvy grant funding

Over the past year at CAST, we’ve been supporting charities with digital service design in many different ways — through our flagship accelerator programme, Fuse, by developing digital leaders in our Fellowship and through a range of events across the country that encourage social sector organisations to take their first steps towards digital services.

Alongside this we’ve also played an important role within the grant funding process: adding expertise and support to established ‘tech for good’ grant programmes.

One of the things we hear from charities all the time is that they don’t have the funding or resources to move forward with any sort of digital project. Whilst that can certainly be true, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. Most charities are still relatively new to the world of product/service design, which requires a very different set of approaches to the digital comms and fundraising practices they’re used to.

We’ve been working closely with Comic Relief on a series of Funder + programmes, where CAST sits between the funder and grantee to supercharge their progress within the funding period.

So what does a Funder + programme of support involve?

Whilst we have tailored our support depending on the grant fund and the needs of the grantees, a typical programme would include:

It’s been fascinating to sit alongside each of the teams as work through their phases of user research and prototyping. Many are now at the stage of piloting their ideas. Throughout this we’ve been on hand to help them make sense of interview data and work out the next step to prioritise. We’ve also helped make connections within the projects to propel their work forward faster.

Tech vs Abuse Programme: Case Study

With support to take a user-led, test-driven approach, they soon realised that the women they were engaging with already recognised that they were in an abusive situation — their challenge was actually in having the confidence to act on that knowledge.

Based on their user research and with our support, The Haven therefore shifted their focus to supporting women to be confident to take action. The stories they are collating now show the positive impact of reaching out for help, and guide women to contact The Haven, or other support organisations.

We’d love to support more funders who are awarding digital grants to maximise the impact of their funding, and the progress that their grantees can make, through expert guidance. If you’re a funder and would like to chat, drop us a line at hello[at]wearecast.org.uk.

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