Helping nine charities build their digital skills

From needs to opportunities, to ideas and plans

We’re used to working with one client at a time. So working with nine was a special kind of challenge!

Luckily the steps we needed to go through were the same as we’d take with any project.

Firstly we needed to make sure the charities understood the needs of their users. You can’t design solutions if you don’t understand what people need.

Secondly we needed to help them explore their ideas gathering feedback from users and stakeholders, and gradually narrowing them down to those that are most valuable, usable and feasible.

Lastly we needed to help them win support for their ideas and plan for delivery.

So we set up a 10 week programme to take them through these steps, with a combination of training, mentoring and a sprinkling of hands-on design work.

When we interviewed each charity it became clear that they each had their own goals, target users and level of digital maturity. So we segmented them into three groups, each with a different Panda mentor.

Alastair focused on charities with content design challenges. Whilst Ben helped the charities thinking about the structure and design of their sites, and Jon helped those with new product ideas.

Over the course of the 10 weeks we ran group learning sessions,  did lots of one-to-one mentoring as well as some side-by-side collaborative working, crafting prototypes and testing them with users.

We also provided original training content for the charities to consume between sessions.

Giles Turnbull produced a series of videos on the basics of content design.

And Jon Gibbins did a series on designing for accessibility – ensuring everyone can benefit from the content being created.

Better services, better skills

Every charity got stuck into the activities and made fantastic progress over the course of the 10 weeks. It was really rewarding to work with people so focused on helping their users, for no other reason than that they need the help.