Capturing client data for a national mental health charity

Deadline for Proposals for this brief will be July 20th . Pitch calls will take place meeting for this cluster is confirmed for Friday July 24th between 2 and 5pm (30 min per pitch). I've updated the above.

Our (Outlandish) position on this: This project is right up our street - we love data focussed projects, have worked with Mind before on research and developing a brief for a employer mental health gateway and have created a number of impact and outcome measurement tools for charities. So on the face of it we would normally be up for putting in a proposal for the whole project, but the timescales and our availability in August for our data and dev people (they are pretty much booked out at the moment) means we can't put ourselves forward for all of it. We would love to be able to come in for the design and idea development part of this - so potentially collaborating on a design sprint approach, sharing the project and knowledge/experience we have with the team that goes on to building it.

Questions from a process/open proposal point of view:
- @Lucy Bushby is already across the project and her org are able to take the project on. Therefore from an efficiency point of view (and the normal way these things tend to work!) is that if they have a good relationship, Mind like the direction it is going, and 8they want to do it, then why take the risk and the extra overhead of bringing in other deliverers?
- that leads me on to the next question, which is what outcomes do you want to see from the open brief process?

If it is for more agencies to collaborate and work across projects (so not a single relationship with a charity and an agency) how can we all help to make that happen without feeling like we are pitching for the same work?

For example, I've suggested we could come in and collaborate on a design sprint style phase at the beginning so we can bring our skills/experience in to contribute and add value, but not compete for the main work, but my concern with this is that the budget is tight to have two agencies collaborating to start with, and still have enough budget to build the thing at the end.

So I think my conclusion is, for the ask, and the budget available, and that there is a happy client/supplier relationship going on, the easiest and happiest route to delivery for this project is for that relationship to carry on. AND that doesn't really change anything in terms of how charities and agencies work together. So what do we want to change, and how can we support it to happen?

Great points and questions! Here's a stab at some of the things we might want to change - I'm sure everyone in this thread will have their own ideas to add and I'd love to hear them!

@Noam led a super piece of work last year looking at charity-agency relationships last year, which I know some of you were involved in and you can see here.

The top challenges for charities were:

1. Experience of process – Contains many steps, complex for anyone

2. Knowhow from lead – Limited knowledge of digital

3. Cost awareness – Unsure how much good costs & struggle to afford

4. Shortlisting – Building a long/shortlist of partners is time consuming

5. Finding fit – Undervalued/hard & charities can’t gauge skills

6. Briefing – Hard to articulate problem & unsure what partners need

7. Lengthy procurement – Adopt traditional & time consuming process

and for 'Tech for Good' agencies:

1. Unclear briefs – Unclear or full of requirements without research

2. Guarding budget – Don’t share budgets early, meaning left in the dark 

3. Restrictive budget – Unrealistic budgets & expect deal as charity

4. Undervaluing of digital – Don't understand the effort & cost for talent

5. Unqualified people – People procuring & leading don’t get agile/digi.

6. Stakeholder management – Many peripheral people & hard to align

7. Process education – Bias defining solutions over problem exploration.

for general agencies:

1. Restrictive budget – Same as T4G + more pronounced as rates are x2

2. Undervalue digital – Same as T4G + worry that crucial services (i.e. help people contemplating suicide) weren’t getting enough resource

3. Unqualified people – Same as T4G + charities are too risk averse

4. Need purpose – Want more purposeful work for their people, bits of paid charity work and pro bono help satisfy and boost morale

5. Finding opportunities – Don’t get approached, but don’t add to list of targets or market to charities. Plus don’t know where to look for opps.

This led to some How Might Wes:

• Adopt new ways of doing procurement to help find fit more efficiently?

• Get the right people leading the procurement process?

• Find potential agencies that fit their charity and their project?

• Make the longlisting & shortlisting process more efficient?

• Understand their needs and write a good brief?

• Understand the cost of digital?
  
  We're testing this process as part of our response to these, and the additional challenges we all know of needless duplication across the sector, and a fragmented support landscape that makes it harder for collective wisdom to be built and built on.
  
  Alongside this, we're working towards two key outcomes in this Open Projects process:

• Increased capacity of civil society organisations in digital, design and data, and

• Civil society enablers (incl. funders, delivery partners and sector infrastructure) adopt, reinforce, embed and share best practice across their networks.

  
  Our hope is that this very process of open discussion and sharing helps contribute towards 2., not just the make-up of the Digital Teams themselves, which could be just one org as Debby says above. For example, you've mentioned your previous work with Mind, and whoever then gets the contract (assuming you've already withdrawn due to capacity reasons) will then be able to get in touch with you and find out more about that, build in some of the learnings and make the overall outcome better as a result. They might even want to do so on this very thread so that it's openly viewable and therefore useful to everyone/anyone working on future similar projects :)

  The Catalyst vision will need all of us working openly and collaboratively, and holding each other to account, to achieve. So we're keen to make these contracting decisions as collectively supported and 'owned' by the network as possible, while holding the ultimate legal responsibility for them as CAST. Your suggestion that perhaps Reason Digital should continue, since they seem to have a strong relationship with Mind already, is very much a contribution to that, and will help contribute towards a final decision that is discerned by Catalyst and presented back to the members of this thread.

  That's the plan/hope anyway - as you know, lots to test!
  
  Would love any other thoughts/comments on this, and apologies for the long post :)
  
  As an aside, if anyone knows how to to indentation formatting on Loomio, I'd love your help as I seem to have failed rather here...
  

Looks like this is essentially (a) questions about appropriate data capture methods in the context of mental health information as well as broader demographic info etc, and (b) a digital and design project about the UX for collection, presentation, use of that data. We can help advise on (a) but, like others, would happily step away if these needs are being met already / by other partners who can take on more of the work

This project sounds a great fit for Ten4 and we would be interested in playing a role in all or part of the project - particularly the design and build. We have the skills inhouse to tackle this.

Thanks @John Stewart (Ten4 Design), that's fab, would you be able to add a little more context? e.g. about any work you've done before that you feel makes you a great fit. This one has quite a few people interested so we're going to need more info to be able to make a fair selection :)

Gotcha - sorry, wasn't sure if this was just registering interest or pitching our services.

We've worked on a few relevant projects for example the British Dyslexia Association on their new website. This involved lots of initial user research around how to structure content and services, followed by prototypes for various online tools (training, assessments, memberships, donations) which were tested with users before moving into production. Our focus was to make the tools as accessible and intuitive as possible and testing with dyslexic users helped us understand how experiences might differ and how best to support this. We then designed the website and built the underlying architecture (content management, databases, API integrations) to process the data including integration with centralised CRM system. More info here: https://www.ten4design.co.uk/projects/british-dyslexia-association

Other similar work includes Starlight Children's Foundation (online donation portal with CRM integration), Bat Conservation Trust, Farleigh Hospice (website, CMS and CRM integration) and National Youth Choirs (audition, event booking).

Hope this is along the lines of what you wanted :-)

Thanks @John Stewart (Ten4 Design) for providing some more information regarding your experience on similar work. As there is a higher budget for this brief we will require interested agencies to submit a proposal. Template for the proposal is here and deadline for it is Monday 20 July - 12pm.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j8DA9UajyX76dh61IvxV-KM3-UMKpYqsHxt3IOXJz0U/edit#

Thanks Debby. If we have questions on the template - should we comment on the Google Doc?