Loomio
Fri 3 Jul 2020 12:56PM

Capturing client data for a national mental health charity

DM Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Public Seen by 36

Summary of work

In response to COVID – 19, Mind has rapidly re-designed some key services for delivery at distance. We now face the challenge of measuring the impact of those services and ensuring we have a consistent way of sharing information.

Loomio discussion period

6 - 12 July

Loomio decision date

26 July

Proposal deadline

Pitch calls with Mind

Monday 20th of July 12 pm

Latest start date delivery

Expected contract length

(TBC)

Budget range

The total available budget for this work is £18,000 (incl. VAT). This budget includes a £3,000 grant to Mind.


About the work

Why the work is being done

Lockdown and social distancing pose challenges for Mind and local Minds to support our services users. Face-to-face counselling and therapy services at local Minds are unable to operate and yet the need for mental health support is increasing. Our Service Design and Development team have in collaboration with our network redesigned some key national services for delivery at distance (phone, and/or using video conferencing platforms). We were successful in gaining funding to prototype this new delivery method and over the next six months we will evaluate the impact and reach of the project.  Technology is a key part of our solution to ensure people can still receive high quality support at a time when they may need it most. The project has positioned us well to understand the customer experience and create new ways of accessing services. However, we have identified a significant gap in funding and technical expertise to allow us to develop a tool to support the secure and efficient return of data.

Problem to be solved

Within the current model, practitioners are faced with manual input of data from various assessment forms and therapeutic measures. This helps us to understand the efficacy of the intervention and monitor the mental health of our service users.

 Unfortunately, using a heavily spreadsheet reliant process causes practitioners to spend a significant amount of consultation time on the assessments, time we’d love to be spent on the interactions with and support for people accessing the service. The current process can also lead to low completion rates of the assessments and poor quality data.

 We’d love to find a better way of capturing client data which could be replicated and amended for future adaptations of services.

Who the users are and what they need to do

We hope to support our practitioner and manager teams at our local Minds by finding a solution to address the need to return client information to our Service Delivery and Research and Evaluation teams at National Mind.

Each client interaction requires collection of demographic information and therapeutic impact measures. The therapeutic measures embedded within the service are used with the client to enable their understanding of progress.

Our Service Development and Research and Evaluation teams will use collated data to evidence the success and impact of the service and allow us to improve and learn.

It is also worth noting that the digital experience within local Minds varies and we are keen to find a simple and effective way of capturing this really valuable data.

 

Expected outcomes for this work

  • An outline of a simplified data capture process

  • A prototype of a data capture tool

  • Testing of the prototype with 4 local Minds

Any work that’s already been done

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vy671cs3yi_8cCya3FIOQ7Ivg6YbuAdA/view?usp=sharing 

Who the Digital Team will work with

Lel Proctor - Service Design and Development Manager

Local Mind staff 

How many days can your team commit to this project?

8 days (x4 local Mind test site grants £750 per site – each site giving 2 days £350 per day). National Mind team committing to x4 days pro-bono.


About the organisation 

Mind is a mental health charity in England and Wales. Founded in 1946 as the National Association for Mental Health. Mind offers information and advice to people with mental health problems and lobbies government and local authorities on their behalf. https://www.mind.org.uk/



Partner skills and experience

Essential skills and experience

  • User research and testing

  • Database design and management

  • ·UX Design

  • Evaluation

 

Nice-to-have skills and experience

  • Experience of working with health/mental health sector

  • Visual design

Reporting

List reporting requirements

Playback session

Recipe for Catalyst website 

DM

Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Fri 3 Jul 2020 12:57PM

Please contribute to the conversation by adding your thoughts and comments about this brief, including any helpful links or insights that might help improve/inform the brief and responses to it. Thanks! 🙂

J

John Tue 7 Jul 2020 1:29PM

@Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Thanks for sharing this! It looks like a great project and I think we'd do a really good job on this at DEV.

Two questions jump out initially:

1) How does the Loomio process and the pitch to Mind work? Are we trying to figure out here who'll go for it and then we have a call to pitch with Mind or do we need prep decks etc.?

2) Looking at the dates, we possibly only have one week between pitching and the latest possible start date. Is this fixed? The issue for us would be holding enough capacity spare; finding out with a few days notice that we either need four weeks capacity in the next month or that we don't. It's a bit of a headache and risk for scheduling, any thoughts on flexibility with dates either in extending delivery or bringing forward confirmation?

DM

Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Tue 7 Jul 2020 2:46PM

Hi @john63,

Great to read you have an interest in working on this brief. Great to know how you feel you could contribute.

As for your questions:

1) This is our first real life test of our open projects approach. Digital agencies and experts are encouraged to comment on the brief, share knowledge relevant to the problem, maybe also examples of other organisations who have or are wrestling with a similar challenge.

This is also the place for digital agencies to indicate if they would like to work on this challenge with the nonprofit, what skills/expertise/knowledge they bring.

As this is a Phase 2 project (development) with a greater budget, we will require interested parties to submit a proposal next week. Depending on the number of proposals we receive, we will shortlist 3 agencies for this project, who will pitch to Mind.

2) I appreciate that there is not a lot of time currently between pitch and start date for the project and you are right to highlight this! I will liaise with Mind if it can be pushed back.

To improve our processes, it would be helpful to know how much time you a) would ideally like and b) would be the minimum time you would need to plan and schedule the delivery of work.

J

John Wed 8 Jul 2020 12:24PM

Thanks a mill @Debby Mulling (Catalyst)!

1) Great, that sounds good. We're definitely interested in working on this one and don't really have many questions, so will we hold on here until you flag the next step for what you need from a proposal and for when?

2) Yeah this is always a tricky one! Will try to give you the breakdown here from how it works at DEV but it might be different elsewhere:

2.a) Unhelpful answer = as much as possible! As an agency, we're scheduling in projects around each other all the time, so the more notice we have the better. The key though is around confirmation because the big risk for a team like ours is having an uncertain project in for the near future. If we need to hold 10 weeks capacity from our team (so we can deliver on schedule) but might have only one week's notice that it's not going ahead, we're potentially in a really bad spot if it doesn't land as we can't guarantee filling that space in our schedule.

2.b) There is no minimum either I'm afraid. Sometimes we pick up projects at very short notice if we have the capacity to cover it, so there's no hard and fast 'we wouldn't do that' line. However, if it's less than 4-6 weeks out say from when we can confirm the project to when it has to start, my confidence that we will be able to deliver it goes down. That means we either don't pitch (depends on the process and the time investment) or we do but we have to put an * beside all the dates and say 'TBC' because we couldn't give an iron clad promise to hold the time without a contract in place.

We're happy to go ahead with this process but I think the issue might be certainty on dates and if we're trying to coordinate with other groups. Maybe though this is just a bit more like a typical RFP process? The details are in the original post and groups go for it if they want or not but in that case, we'd need to have a bit more detail on submission.

Hope that's helpful!

DM

Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Wed 8 Jul 2020 3:25PM

Thanks John for taking the time to get back to me.

I haven't heard back from Mind yet. However we did lock down a time for the pitches: 24th of July 2-5 pm. We will require proposals for this brief next week, so you could get ready for that if you definitely want to bid for this. There are other organisations on this thread who have indicated a strong interest, so we are suspecting a number of proposals.

J

John Thu 9 Jul 2020 10:30AM

Great Debby, super useful to know! Are there any specific requirements or constraints for the proposal?

DM

Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Fri 10 Jul 2020 7:10AM

Hi all, Here is the Proposal Template for this brief.

DM

Poll Created Wed 8 Jul 2020 12:58PM

Contribute to this Digital Team. Please complete the poll - you can update your vote any time. Closed Mon 13 Jul 2020 1:03PM

Outcome
by Debby Mulling (Catalyst) Wed 15 Jul 2020 7:21AM

Thanks for your input everyone! 🎉 Apologies for posting this update a day late. I spent most of yesterday in bed feeling unwell.

To summarise, we have five organisations who have expressed a strong interest in this brief.

  • Ten4Design @John Stewart (Ten4 Design)

  • Reason Digital @Lucy Bushby

  • The Developer Society @John

  • Datakind @Giselle

  • Neontribe @Harry Harrold

@Abigail Murphy (Outlandish) offers additional expertise, and we think they could provide additional value to this project. Please feel free to get in touch separately to explore.

As we would like to test another step in our new open project process agencies will have to submit their proposals via Survey Monkey Apply as well as provide us with additional information to enable us to complete due diligence requirements by grant funders.

Please be reminded that the £18,000 (incl VAT) funding for this project includes a £3,000 grant to Mind.

The link for SM Apply is: https://thecatalyst.smapply.io/prog/digital-team-proposal. Deadline is Monday the 20th - 4PM

There will be the opportunity to chat with Mind for all the organisations who submit an application on Friday the 24th of July between 2 and 5pm. We will confirm times Wednesday morning next week.

The best placed agency to work with Mind will be chosen by the Catalyst Team , considering the points below:

  • Appropriateness of approach

  • Capacity to work on this brief

  • Demonstrable skills and expertise through previous work

  • fit/synergy with Mind

  • Originality – the project  achieves more than the incremental development of a single discipline

  • Importance – the work will enable further research or development

  • Significance – the proposed approach has relevance outside a single field, and is able to excite those working in the wider civil society sector

  • Merit – the quality of the approach and methodology, and the suitability for the realisation of the proposed objectives.

  • Value for money - e.g.: not just costs and number of days but also added value being offered to the charity

If you would like to have a look at what is required, please have a look at this G-doc - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j8DA9UajyX76dh61IvxV-KM3-UMKpYqsHxt3IOXJz0U/edit?usp=sharing

If anyone else has any comments or issues with this, please add them to the thread below, or emoji vote 👍 or 👎 on this outcome post.

This poll enables Digital Partners to indicate their interest in this brief.

Results

Results Option % of points Voters
This one isn't quite right for me/us 35.7% 5 DS JBA M DS AB(
I'm signalling interest in delivering all expects of the project 21.4% 3 HH JSD LB
I'm signalling interest in the design role 14.3% 2 AM BW
I'm interested, but don't have capacity within the time frame indicated. 7.1% 1 PP
I'm interested and will give an answer by the end of the week. 7.1% 1 DS
I'm signalling interest for a role I think should be included but isn't currently listed. 7.1% 1 J
I'm signalling interest in the data role 7.1% 1 G
I'm signalling interest in the digital role 0.0% 0  
Undecided 0% 14 AM DB CLF SH ALP S EHC SD DM NSL G HH JD( RA

14 of 28 people have participated (50%)

J

John Wed 8 Jul 2020 3:07PM

I'm signalling interest for a role I think should be included but isn't currently listed.

We're interested as a team but would ideally pitch for the project as a whole. If it needs to be split out into different sections, then that would be a great thing to discuss in the thread and get a sense of those requirements

AM

Abigail Murphy (Outlandish) Thu 9 Jul 2020 8:40AM

I'm signalling interest in the design role

To collaborate with the main agency on a design sprint approach at the start of the project

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