How do we best prepare for an uncertain future?

I was privileged to take part in a panel in the Third Sector’s latest Leaders Forum to discuss the future of how the society does good. The day was designed to provoke and it started by exploring the world and the sector in 2030. We talk about how disintermediation will impact the sector as people want to directly create impact or donate, the new role for businesses to do good, how people are overloaded with data and becoming increasingly attention deficit and how new generations of supporters and the ‘beneficiaries’ will challenge the status quo.

And yet whilst we heard how leadership in the commercial sector were embracing the change in digital and societal transformation, the general consensus was that impact of these changes were not high on the agenda on the boards of charities. It is imperative that we help prepare charities for the opportunities and risks in an uncertain future.

So how do we best prepare for a world where there are so many unknowns? The room was divided. Some want the fundraising sector to double down on what we have known in the past, a world of career fundraisers who are technically expert and have only worked in fundraising. Whilst others felt that we should be looking outwards, learning from others, celebrating diverse thinking and testing and trying new models and ways of working. You can probably guess which camp I’m in.

I then remembered an inspiring talk from the Institute of Imagination I heard at one of Good Innovation’s Huddles. The Institute is a space for children and young people to re-imagine the world. It was set up to best prepare children in this uncertain world. This makes total sense as the World Economic Forum estimates that 65 per cent of children today will end up in careers that don't even exist yet.

They have 5 principles for their approach

• Collaborate. They believe in working together, sharing ideas and problem solving as a community.
• Inter-disciplinary. They believe in the fundamental need for inter-disciplinary learning, combining the arts, sciences and digital technologies.
• Failure positive. They believe in ideas and imagination and think the best learning opportunities come through an iterative approach.
• Playful. They believe there is enormous value in learning through play, we believe that through play vital skills for the future are developed.
• Participant-led. They believe in experiential learning environments that strongly encourage participants to lead their learning, avoiding pre-determined outcomes.

So what can we learn from these principles:

Collaborate. Charities can’t solve society’s biggest problems by themselves – we need to learn how to collaborate to achieve our missions. At the beginning of 2019, we will be sharing our lessons on collaboration from the Good Lab – a collaboration of 12 leading charities and entrepreneurs with a mission to find new ways to raise funds for the sector.

Inter-disciplinary. We need to broaden people’s skill sets. As well as fundraising skills, people need expertise in designing and delivering innovation projects, in using new digital channels and developing venturing skills.

Failure positive. Charities need to challenge the risk averse attitude,  be open to learn from outside the sector and use agile techniques to test new ideas.

Playful. Recruiting and retaining great talent requires us to think differently about how we really engage employees and volunteers. We need to give them the tools to be resilient and thrive in their roles. Working in the social sector should be the best jobs in town

Participant-led. We need to be human centred – whether our focus in on supporters or indeed the users of the services. How can we ensure that fundraisers engage and co-create with supporters and start with an understanding of their needs.  

Whilst I know that working in a world of uncertainty can be hard and none of us can predict exactly what 2030 will look like, I think we can learn lots from the Institute of Imagination on how to we can best prepare for the future.

 I’d love to hear your thoughts.  

 Janine

We're really excited to share that a couple of months ago Good Innovation became a certified B Corp.

According to the official blurb: 

Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose

 B Corps have to sign up to a declaration that really resonated with us:

we believe

That we must be the change we seek in the world.
That all business ought to be conducted as if people and place mattered.
That, through their products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and benefit all.
To do so requires that we act with the understanding that we are dependent upon another and thus responsible for each other and future generations.

B Corp is still quite an early movement. There are over 2,700 B Corps around the world, including big names such as Danone, Ben & Jerrys and Patagonia, and approaching 200 in the UK. It's great to be part of this fast growing community of people who have the same values.

We had to go through quite a detailed certification process over a couple of months - there were nearly 200 questions to answer on our governance, impact on staff, customers, community, environment and our impact, with a follow up interview. 

We'll also be amending our Articles of Association to expressly embed our commitment to achieving a ‘triple bottom line’ – seeking to have a positive impact on society and the environment, in addition to promoting the success of the business.

We do believe business can be a force for good - we've been exploring charities and corporates can work together in a more fundamental, strategic way in the future to do good well - so it felt brilliant to be aligning ourselves with a recognised standard of businesses that balance profit and purpose.

Developing Mindful Monsters

aka what it takes to win 3 Gold and a Silver award at the DMAs

We had a big night at the DMA awards last night, where, alongside Scope and Open, we won three Golds and one silver for Mindful Monsters. We won gold for best creative execution, gold for best launch, gold for best health and wellness campaign, and silver for best charity campaign.

It was an amazing night!

The challenge

We were approached by Scope to help them acquire new donors. Their challenge to us was big and broad.

“The ideas need to be ambitious enough to challenge the budgets we put into face to face fundraising, which we’re over reliant on. This isn’t simple. In fact, we’ve not cracked this for the last three years.”

Scope, and the wonderful team of Karen, Claire and Alex, were really open to where this could take them. They knew they didn’t want this to be another traditional cause-led DM campaign as those weren’t working well enough. In their words:

“Our cause can be a tricky one. Kids, cats, cancer – there’s lots of competition out there…. We’re really looking for a route that’s led by audience insight – and we’re happy for that insight take us where ever it will.”

It’s important to note that several agencies were involved in bringing Mindful Monsters to life. We uncovered the insight, developed the idea and how it would work, and then helped prototype the concept, Open then developed the creative execution and Media Lab and Equimedia did a great job of buying the media.

In this blog, we’ll take you through how we took the brief from a blank piece of paper to the concept of ‘mini mindfulness’ that had been prototyped and was loved across the organisation, and to where Open took over and developed the ‘Mindful Monsters’ creative execution with Scope.

How we got there 

We got to this (award winning) idea through an insight-led approach.

Whilst we love the agile, sprint based approach to innovation, there’s a fundamental requirement that to do this well you need to have a strong foundation. You can’t run a sprint without having a base level of knowledge.

We describe it as “think, then sprint”.

First, we needed to create some focus. Who should the target market be? What did success look like? What constraints existed? Through working with people from across the whole organisation – not just fundraising – and reviewing past research and data we developed a consistent view of success that everyone bought in to, as well as an agreement around the target audiences – families.

Scope didn’t have any insight into the target audience and how they might be able to relate to them and offer some form of value. Together we needed to get a foundation layer of emotional insight to develop ideas from.

So, we went off and spoke to loads of people. And we took the Scope team with us – we trained up them and they got stuck in to travelling the country and talking to people. For some, this opportunity to speak to their audience was the highlight of the whole project.

From this we created a series of insight platforms that articulate the needs and wants of the audience. These are essentially start points for ideas. A few leapt out, including one around mums wanting their children to resilient.  

We used these insight platforms to create a whole series of very early ideas over a couple of days. Using a series of tools including quant, online co-creation and stretch and build workshops we whittled these down to three big, new ideas.

Together we developed each of these into a concept paper that drew out the core idea, the features and benefits, the subscription business model, the insight, the audience feedback and the proposed supporter experience.

We then helped Scope design and plan how to prototype the three ideas. We knew that parents liked the three ideas in theory, but how would it play out in the real world. The team from Scope created minimum viable products for the Mini Mindfulness idea, creating the cards themselves.

The prototype ‘mini mindfulness’ cards

The prototype 'mini mindfulness' website

And it worked. The feedback from the prototyping on the Mini Mindfulness idea was amazing.

Responding to the idea, parents would say “I love the idea, if this works it will be a huge benefit to me as a parent”. Then, after the prototype, they’d tell us that, “yes, it actually worked”.

We heard all the insights reflected back to us, and we had some of the strongest feedback from a prototype in terms of both appeal and effectiveness. We had real world stories of mums and dads using the cards to help them on a day to day basis.

It also helped break down internal barriers. The prototype quickly and cheaply proved that the idea also worked for children with impairments and conditions, such as autism and learning disabilities, which ultimately helps their charitable purpose.

This then gave the Scope team the confidence to justify further investment in taking this idea forward, and Open were engaged to develop the creative execution. The rest, as they say, is history! The results are amazing, smashing all targets on acquisition volumes, acquisition cost, retention and payback.

We loved working on this project, and it’s a true testament to the power of insight-led product development.

“Working with Good Innovation has transformed the way Scope recruits regular givers. We learnt so much about innovation and know the approach works. They were such an amazing team to work with”. Claire Whitney, Supporter Marketing Manager at Scope

Our May Huddle focussed on the theme of Failure, with some fantastic speakers sharing their very different perspectives. Huddle attendee Clare Coatman, from the TUC, wrote this piece for us on what she took away from the session:

A lot of innovation projects fail. So why is failure in general, and after specific instances, so rarely explored? Good Innovation's latest Huddle sought to tackle this issue, examining how we can 'fail well'.

A few common themes and key lessons emerged from the excellent and varied set of speakers. Here's what came through most strikingly to me:

The right analysis isn't enough

Samuel West, founder of the Museum of Failure shared an incredible story of excellent insight being scuppered by a failure in leadership. Blockbuster correctly foresaw the death of video rental at the hands of online streaming and had the foresight to invest in streaming provision themselves. Why then do we not all have Blockbuster accounts? The board lost their nerve at the prospect of such a fundamental shift, fired the company director, ditched online, and were decimated by Netflix inside two years.

In facing failure we have to face our own psyches

Failure is a particularly painful concept to face up to, as Jonathan Wise, founder of the Comms Lab, is acutely aware. Dealing with a sense of failure can shake the core of your identity and taps into difficult psychological issues around worth and self-esteem. Jonathan managed to come out the other side of a deep challenge to his work, partly by reframing success on his own terms. He also learnt to appreciate that the feeling you feel when you fail is proportionate to the potential depth of learning.

Casper Craven, entrepreneur and advendturer, learnt about failure through the world of business and sailing around the world not once but twice, the second time with three kids under ten. He has also reframed failure to the point of removing the word from his vocabulary. Instead, he thinks of himself as a scientist doing experiments, getting reactions and learning from the feedback.

The key exception to organisation's avoidance of facing up to failure is the aviation industry where the literal life and death stakes provide enough impetus. Change is painful, and we must accept that reality and work with it when attempting to engage more with failure.

Optimise to respond to failure rather than avoid it

As organisations get larger fear of risk often increases, when in reality larger organisations are better able to weather failure. Given that, it was certainly news to me that there are over 600 staff in government working to agile methodology. Jennifer Allum, Lead Product Manager for GOV.UK, shared some of their approach.

Classic linear projects allow time for errors in assumptions to snowball from procurement to delivery. The GDS's use of agile means they are constantly iterating, responding to feedback and correcting course. Agile evaluations start with a principle of no blame, assuming everyone did their best with the resources and knowledge available at the time. This approach takes into account the psychological context of failure and helps people engage with evaluations more fully by providing a safe environment.

It was liberating and refreshing to think and talk about failure. It's a genuinely difficult topic and as individuals and organisations we have a lot to gain by being willing to turn towards failure and face up to it.

We're really excited about the work that we've been doing with the TUC around developing new models to revitalise the union offer for Britain's young core workers.

Below is a copy of a blog originally posted here by Antonia Bance, TUC Head of Campaigns & Comms

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"You can't change anything" — but we're going to try anyway

Yesterday, Lindsay's boss asked her to work a double shift — again. Her tutor rang to find out why she'd missed her NVQ class — again. And a client, let down by the agency and left unwashed and hungry, rang in tears — again.

Sitting in Lindsay's car, disturbed by the constant texts from her boss guilting her, I felt the pressure and the lack of control of her life. And I felt angry — for the elderly people she's passionate about, who deserve more than a 15 minute care call, and for Lindsay herself — proud of the job she does but worn down by its demands.

That same afternoon, I also met Paul, in debt, doomed to miss every one of his girlfriend's antenatal appointments because the rota at the warehouse where he works varies so wildly. And I met Laura, reduced to tears by unreasonable cafe customers, desperate to avoid late pickup fees at the nursery, but forced into unpaid overtime.

Pleading with Lindsay's boss, chopping vegetables with Laura and picking boxes with Paul was instructive. I felt the pressure to work a double shift and to stay late at the cafe — and bridled at the favoritism when Paul's warehouse boss singled me out for special treatment while shouting at Paul to move faster.

Lindsay, Paul and Laura aren't real. They are skillful composites brought to life by actors— but based on the real experiences of 100s of Britain's young core workers. And I finished the day talking to some real young workers over pizza and beer — once they'd got off their shifts.

What was I doing in a cafe, a warehouse and a car in east London? I was on a dry-run of an immersion afternoon for trade union general secretaries and other senior leaders. Trade union leaders know well the lives of their members — but more than 90% of under-30s working in hospitality, retail and private social care aren't in unions.
And if we want the union movement to still be here, changing lives for the better in 30 years' time, we need to bring a new generation of workers into unions. And that means unions have to change.

So I'm going to take union leaders to east London, to meet Laura, Lindsay and Paul, and live their lives for an afternoon. We still have spaces for early May — so if you are a regional secretary, national officer, A/DGS or GS of a TUC union, sign yourself up. 

The immersion afternoon for union leaders is part of the TUC's major programme to revitalise the union offer for Britain's young core workers.

Two of our colleagues John and Kate get involved in a post-it forest...

For the past 5 months the TUC and our partners Good Innovation have been researching the lives of Britain's young core workers. We did a huge review of all the stats out there and published it in Living for the Weekend. We asked 41 young workers in a range of low-paid jobs to keep WhatsApp diaries for a couple of weeks. And we did more than 100 face-to-face interviews.

Low pay, unpredictable hours and a stories of bosses treating workers in the same workplace differently really came through. Time and again we heard stories of the laws being ignored — most often when managers made people stay longer without pay or work their breaks. The high street retailer who makes all staff turn up 15 mins early and leave 15 mins after closing for "briefings", unpaid , every day — we're onto you.

Lots of our young core workers thirst for progression — but have a hard time getting training and promotion. Working parents struggle — and put up with a lot if their job can be flexible around their family commitments. Everyone is ground down by rude customers and clients, and bosses who make arbitrary decisions. And — most striking of all for trade unionists — most don't trust their colleagues, and would do anything to avoid an "atmosphere" at work.

That's just a quick summary, but it's all written up in I feel like I can't change anything — our latest report about Britain's young core workers, published last weekend.

From research to insight to action

We had to find a way to turn all of this info into something actionable to design better unions for Britain's young core workers. Regardless of age, demographics or sector, Britain's young core workers posed different challenges for unions depending on how important their current job is to them, and whether they focus on right now or have their eyes on the future.

So that gives us 4 groups of Britain's young core workers — with 4 different mindsets.

The mindsets...

Desperate mindset — "Dan"
The "desperate" group are in the most precarious jobs. They can't focus on the future because keeping their wage coming in is the most important thing. Dan might say:

"Losing my job makes me anxious about speaking out, I'm lucky to have a job there's plenty of people who don't and are ready to take your place"
"Who would listen to someone like me if I did raise something?"
"My life is completely out of my control, I have no stability in life, no security. I'm only 26 — is this it? Is it going to get worse?"

Progression mindset — "Paula"
The "progression" group are focused on getting on in life — in the sector they are already working in. Paula might say:

"I'm really passionate about my work, I love helping people"
"I can see how things could be run better at work but they just don't listen to me"
"I do just as much work as my boss but get paid way less"

Too comfortable mindset — "Tamara"
Young workers in the "too comfortable" group see their job as a means to an end which fits around other commitments in their lives, like their kids. Tamara might say:

"I feel lucky I can swap shifts so it seems ungrateful to complain about my pay or holiday pay"
"Unless it gets really bad it's easy to stay and put up with things, it's just convenient"
"I don't really think or speak about work when I'm not there"

Stopgap mindset — "Steve"
Workers like Steve never intended to be doing what they do now — and though they want to get on, it won't be in their current job or sector. Steve might say:

"This is just a short-term job, it's not my career"
"There's no point in trying to change things, I won't be here much longer"
"I want to work on things that will benefit me in my future career"

So: what next?
So, now we know far more about Stopgap Steve, Progression Paula, Too comfortable Tamara and Desperate Dan. They could all benefit from the support of a trade union — though Tamara might be harder to reach.

This research — particularly the mindsets — gives us insights into how we should approach young workers and what might appeal to them.

What came through loud and clear in the research is that the current offer of trade unionism is totally alien to these young people. They're not in a union. They know no-one in a union. There's no union at their work. The type of moral pressure favoured by union activists ("but trade unions gave you the weekend!") washes past them. They're really wary of standing up for themselves — and their workplaces push colleagues into distrust of one another. If pushed, they can just about associate unions with helping with problems at work — but that's not universal (and in a generation that folk memory will be gone).

So it is urgent to find a flavour of trade unionism that could work for them. But it has to be a path towards collectivism. Collective bargaining is what brings all the benefits of trade unionism — and we have to deliver those benefits for young workers. That's what it's all about.

Over the past few weeks we've worked through 100s of ideas generated by trade unionists and by young workers themselves — testing them out, taking them to our online panel of young core workers for their opinions, refining them, knocking them down.

Next week we'll pick a final shortlist of up to three. By June we'll have thrown up what the digis call a "minimum viable product" — and a handful of real young workers will be using it everyday.

Bloody hell, I hope it works.

We are excited to be working with the TUC, along with the UK's biggest private sector unions, to find new ways for young workers to get the benefit of collective power. We are using design thinking to improve the working conditions of these young people, many of who feel helpless, hopeless and exploited. Read more on this blog from Antonia Bance, TUC Head of Campaign and Comms.

https://medium.com/@abance/more-than-twitter-new-union-models-for-a-new-workforce-38efa521e3e5#.a4t7w3e71

As charities move to involve their supporters and beneficiaries more in shaping their strategy and activities, co-creation can help them truly put the supporter and beneficiary at the heart of what they do. However, it comes with its challenges, which is why co-creation was a popular choice as the topic for October's Innovation Huddle.

So, what is co-creation / production? After some discussion, the group decided that co-creation is the process of designing products or services with the people who'll use them from beginning to end.

Lots of benefits of co-creation surfaced, such as making the product or service better and more useful and so reducing the risk of failure. There was also a lot of discussion about how co-creation can help you avoid making assumptions about an audience. In fact, one person went so far as to say that the less you know about the audience you are going to co-create with the better.
Our speakers then shared their experiences of using co-creation and their tips and recommendations. We invited Government and Public Policy specialist Suzannah Kinsella; Jo Wolfe, Assistant Director of Digital at Breast Cancer Care, and Dr Karl Marlowe, Clinical Director of North London NHS Foundation Trust to share their experiences of using co-creation in their work.
Suzannah Kinsella spoke about two projects she'd led using co-creation, one developing a national policy for organ donation and another to promote healthy pregnancies. Jo Wolfe shared how Breast Cancer Care developed BECCA, a new app co-created with women who've undergone treatment for breast cancer. And finally, Dr Karl Marlowe shared his experience of using co-creation to help improve safety on a psychiatric ward.

Each brought a different perspective and together there was lots of food for thought. So it was tough, but we've distilled everything we heard into five of the most important tips for doing co-creation well:

1. Make sure you have a clear question or problem everyone understands and agrees is important.
2. Start with a blank sheet of paper. At Breast Cancer Care, they started with the broad question of how best to help women with breast cancer. It was through co-creation that they identified the period after treatment as the right area of focus.
3. You should give it time and make it fun. Rushed or laborious co-creation can feel like coercion rather than co-creation!
4. Listening to what users want isn't always valid - you must get under the skin of what they need.
5. Include as wide a group of users as possible. It's important to get as many perspectives as you can to challenge our instinct to rely on heuristic, or quick, thinking.

Guest blog by Charlotte Guiver, Director of Fundraising at Arthritis Research UK

Arthritis Research UK has an amazing ambition to reach many more people with arthritis and massively increase our impact. A year ago we launched a transformational strategy to move from a traditional research organisation to an outcomes based charity that also provides information and support to the 10m people in the UK who need us. We are still on the journey and in order to fund our ambition we need to significantly increase our income. Yet the changes we've seen in the external fundraising environment over the past year make that more challenging than ever.

There's more we can do to improve funding from voluntary sources, but that alone isn't going to plug the gap between our projected income and the scale of our ambition. We need to diversify income away from purely voluntary sources – and as quickly as possible...

So we decided to actively explore the assets and capabilities we own to spot and develop any with commercial potential. It's been a fantastic journey, complete with rigorous commercial analysis and an extensive portfolio evaluation, which has uncovered a whole host of opportunities that were previously hidden amongst the work we do and the skills we take for granted.

We learnt a lot along the way, but for me some of the key lessons are:

1. Get the whole organisation involved. Those at the coal face are using capabilities and creating assets that they probably don't realise could be commercialised. Opportunities probably exist right across your charity so engage widely.
2. Get senior sponsorship and involve the executive team. Pursuing commercial opportunities will require some tough decisions. For instance, like most charities, Arthritis Research UK is used to giving away the knowledge we create because it helps us deliver our mission. So any decision to commercialise that knowledge would need senior support.
3. Be prepared to invest. And have an appetite for risk. Of course you can mitigate the risk using great insight, proposition development and market assessment, but delivering commercial income will involve some risk and investment.
4. Having an external assessment really helps. If you're anything like Arthritis Research UK, then you've probably got assets and capabilities you could commercialise but you just haven't realised it yet. Working with Good Innovation brought an objective external commercial perspective that helped us uncover them
5. Focus on mission and money. By exploring our existing assets and capabilities we've surfaced some really exciting commercial opportunities which will directly benefit people with arthritis and will also enable us to fund even more projects to increase our impact for people with arthritis. It's a fantastic 'win-win' - to be able to raise funds in a way that also helps us reach our strategic ambitions.

Developing funding beyond voluntary fundraising is a journey that we're still travelling. It involves risk and it requires investment, but the rewards could be substantial and hold the potential to circumvent the vagaries of 'giving' as a sustainable model of funding. To help deliver Arthritis Research UK's ambitions for people with arthritis, it's a journey we're pursuing with passion.

In July (on one of the warmest days of the year!) we packed 25 of the charity sector's top innovators into a room above a pub to address the topic of 'How to innovate your supporters experience to create lasting engagement'.

Over the course of the afternoon we heard from Henry Rowling, Dir. of Fundraising Strategy and Innovation at The Children's Society as well as, Lauren Currie, Head of Service Design at The Good Lab, Tom Wynne-Morgan, an expert in user experience design and Ra Goel an insight, innovation and strategy consultant, who shared some of their thoughts including some top tips for people working in this area.

Some top tips for creating lasting supporter engagement:

1. Build supporter experiences, not 'journeys' – focus first on the needs of your supporters, not where you want to take their relationship

2. Genchi Gunbutsu . A Japanese phrase meaning "go and see for yourself". In order to truly understand a situation, you need to go to the place where the work is done. In this instance, everyone in your organization should go out and meet supporters.

3. Building a truly supporter-focused fundraising approach is new and relatively unexplored territory for most charities - be clear about your direction of travel, develop a philosophy that'll guide you, and stick to it. Don't waiver. Be true to your leaps of faith.

4. Invest time in bringing people on the supporter experience adventure with you. When you're trying to shift your strategy don't forget that you will have the best understanding of this new way – share it and inspire evangelists.

5. Think about the experience you're creating consciously. Actively design the experiences you want your supporters to enjoy.

6. Start small, test and optimize and work in an agile way. Make sure that whatever new approach you're designing works by testing small and optimizing the approach.

7. Always consider the before and the after. Think about the supporter experience from end-to-end – before, during and after their interaction with you.

8. Don't spread yourselves too thinly. Ensure you have the right capability and capacity in the team to develop and deliver great supporter experiences.

9. Make creating exceptional supporter experiences part of your DNA. Embed it in the culture of your organization so that it becomes just what you do.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about designing great supporter experiences to drive lasting engagement: kevin@goodinnovation.co.uk

Last week saw the first Innovation Huddle of 2016 and it was the biggest yet – over 30 innovators from across the sector gathered to discuss the opportunities arising from disruption. Given the threat of regulation hanging over the fundraising sector at the moment, there was a heavy slant towards the disruption arising from regulation. It was a great session, fuelled by insights into the world of innovation from within and outside the sector.

As markets mature and new ones emerge, regulation continues to adapt with them and is an essential consideration when planning growth from innovation. Tim Evans, ex Group Marketing and Brand Director at BT during a period of heavy change and regulation, shared his hints and tips on navigating the issues regulation can pose for successful innovation:

1. Approach regulation from the regulators perspective, understand their targets, what will make them successful and what their needs are.
2. Equally, have a highly refined vision for your business, what is your core purpose, what are your main assets?
3. Envisage the relationship you want with the regulator and always endeavour to set the agenda to achieve this.
4. Have an open door approach, invite the regulator in to your business and show them what you do and what you are aiming to achieve.
5. The relationship needs to be led from the top of the organisation, it is essential to invest in the right talent to lead the team.
6. Pick your battles, don't waste precious resources.
7. Understand the economics of your business incredibly well, it will prove itself to be a major asset for you, and the regulator will invest heavily to develop their understanding of it.
8. Set the metrics very carefully and ensure that you meet them.
9. Communication is key, keep your whole team in the loop with clear, concise and regular messages.
10. Use your customer base to drive the regulatory agenda, show in real terms how any action will or will not be beneficial to customers.
11. Do not allow regulation to induce paralysis in your organisation, focus on what you can do and navigate your way around what you can't.
12. Take a strategic approach to proposition design and development, setting the direction is simpler than incremental change.

He wisely counselled that internal risk managers are often more risk averse than external regulators, so it's worth building a direct relationship if you're able to.

Wise words!

ggggg

Last week over 25 innovation professionals from across the sector attended our second Innovation Huddle of the year. Guest speaker Andrew Harper, Head of Energy Propositions at British Gas, shared his thoughts on the key ingredients needed to launch a new product or service at scale.

1. It is essential to secure buy-in from the top and the bottom. Ask the board for the support and resources you need - you need to know you will have access to the best people with the correct skills and expertise. Secondly, run workshops from an early stage with the staff who interact with your user base, this is a huge help in securing hearts and minds.

2. Design and build the consumer experience at a very early stage and determine what you're not willing to compromise on. Pressure test this experience through multiple scenarios, this will save time in the long run.

3. Build the right team of experts around the common goal. Minimise your contact time with people who criticise and focus on the people who help you build and progress.

4. There needs to be strong leadership around what to do as the launch date approaches. Minimise ambiguity at every stage to ensure everyone knows their role and that no time is wasted.

5. Be very clear on your launch strategy and execute it well. Just as important, is making sure that you have the right team in place to support the new product or service after launch, first impressions count so make sure everything is perfect for the user.

It's all very well coming up with hundreds and hundreds of new ideas, but unless you thoroughly test them with target audiences how are you meant to know which one to take forward?

As the famous quote from Margaret Mead says -  "what people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things" - so how do you get decent feedback?

In this article we will look at different methods of prototyping, some more suitable than others for different stages of the innovation process, but all valuable tools none the less.

1. Minimum Viable Product

This process involves purposely launching a new product or service ethat it deliberately imperfect or incomplete. The idea is to find the fastest, most cost-effective way to build a viable product that delivers on your basic idea and induces a reaction from prospective buyers. Even if many don't buy, this approach generates specific feedback on individual features and shows the true market appetite for that product or service, providing a blueprint for the ultimate design.

Starbucks used this process to great effect when launching their instant coffee brand Via. Many people questioned the product at launch, little did they know it had been tested and improved on over a series of months in a small selection of stores. Via is now a $180million brand!

2. Battle Testing

Battle Testing Prototyping is a useful way of testing and refining launch strategies to help ensure that new product and service offerings get the most traction in the market, an organisation will form several internal teams, one team will simulate a product launch of which the other teams have no knowledge. By simulating the thoughts, plans, and actions of competitors, these organisations are improving their products and services, while gaining a deeper understanding of how their innovation assets compare with those of rivals—insights that help them better identify, shape, and seize opportunities.

It aims to ask the following questions of the product or service in question:
• What ideas could put our product or service out of business in the next one to three years?
• Can we create value and continued appeal with our service given the possible responses of competitors, our responses to them, and their responses to our responses, over a defined period of time?
• What next versions and extensions are required to keep our idea in play, sustainable and scalable, and how do we start building them now?

3. Fake Door

A prototyping method perfect for narrowing down a large number of initial concepts and measuring the desirability of a new product or service. It can cut short certain projects which are headed nowhere, or gift you with enough information to make the tweaks needed to make the product or service desirable.

The idea is to create a fake "entry" for a product or service that doesn't exist yet and see what the response is before continuing to develop that particular idea. For example create a website advertising flights to space and measure responses when shown to target audience. This type of prototyping is a extremely quick and cost effective way of cutting down initial concepts.

4. High Hurdle

A prototyping method where you make the product or service you are testing harder to use or gain access to on purpose. This method is great for gauging the level of interest and how keen people are to use your product.

For example: Design a sign-up process with multiple, difficult to answer questions, which adds friction and time to the sign-up process. This way you only capture the most passionate customers for your early testing. Over time, you can reduce the friction in order to improve your pool.

I presdented recently at a charity's fundraising conference on 10 innovation tips and I thought I'd share. In this blog post we're going to give you a quick run-down through 10 steps on how to innovate successfully, it is by no means a definitive list as every project is different, but it should give you an idea of the process.

The first three tips are based on how you structure and manage innovation:

1. Firstly, you need to know what your problem is. Why are you looking to innovate? What does success look like? Start anything off by asking yourself the following questions:

• Why is innovation important to the oprganisation?
• What does your innovation need to deliver? How much? By when?
• What is your ambition vs appetite for risk?

2. Then you're going to need to work out how you'll manage and structure innovation. Ask yourself some more questions:

• What are you looking for? Lots of little ideas or a few big bets? Does this match your appetitie for risk?
• How will you fund this? Short or long term funding? Ringfenced or biddable?
• What is the best way to link skills to need?
• How will you make decisions and manage risk?

3. Once you've got all the above figured out, where will you start...? We hear many different reasons - new funding, audience gaps, declining existing products to name a few.

• Will you improve existing products or address portfolio gaps?
• What are the big challenges that you want your innovation to solve?
• What will your brief be?

4. Key to any successful project is stakeholder managemenbt. Manage your stakeholders, create engagement, win hearts and minds. Discover who your cheerleaders are, and more importantly who your nemesis' are, and manage them accordingly.

5. Understand your audience. We believe the key to successful innovation and service design is developing a deep understanding of people and what their needs, wants and motivations are.Organising and conducting interviews is the simple part, true audience research is hard because it forces you to consider the true behaviour of people that are nothing like you.

• Consider how you get insight. Focus groups don't really cut it. Consider more ethnographic forms of research such as diaries and shadowing
• Experience the insight first hand. Don't hide behind an agency and their massive powerpoint decks
• Make sure you can differentiate between an observation and an insight

6. Do creative sessions, well. Use a wide range of creative tools and understand when to use the more radical tools to break away from the 'usual' ideas.

7. Involve the audience, lots. Co-creation is key. Work with the audience to judge ideas, explore how they could work and how to make them better.

8. Build better business models. Think about them from three angles:

• Is it desirable, is there a need for it to be done?
• Is it feasible, should it be done?
• Is it viable, can it be done?

9. Prototype and then deliver well. Test your product or service, find out its strengths and weaknesses. Listen to the feedback you receive and act on it

10. Do all of the above, with speed, and repeat.

How does all of that sound? Hopefully not too daunting... Like we mentioned earlier, no project is the same - all you need is a desire to change something or do something – you don't even need to be sure of what. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you think we might be able to help you through this process in any way.

Andrew

This is the consumer insight upon which one of the most successful companies of the past decade has thrived. This is the insight that propelled Google to dominate the online search space. And it is an outstanding insight. In one easy-to-understand sentence it captures a truth about what people searching on the Internet want – and, yes, it is completely obvious. Yet it focused Google on what their customers really wanted from a search engine – accuracy, speed and convenience – and that enabled Google to achieve huge commercial success.

And insights are as relevant in the charity sector as they are to commercial organisations. So what is a supporter insight? It's a simple question that deserves a simple answer and consequently I shan't get into the debate about what insight really is (and believe me there is a lot of debate). Instead I'll give you a definition that I like: an insight is 'a penetrating discovery about supporter motivations that will unlock fundraising growth'. A good insight expresses a supporter's want, need, feeling, or belief. It is an accurate reflection of reality, i.e. it states a truth. It offers a fresh perspective, even if it's obvious. It's simple and can be understood by all; and, importantly, it will fuel hundreds of new ideas.

The social investment market in the UK has grown hugely in the past decade and we've seen some recent initiatives in the charity sector that has created some buzz. Yet investment activities are against the grain of traditional fundraising methods. When the motive of raising funds is not only to meet the objective of a charitable goal, but also to offer a return on an investment, it throws up a lot of questions about the best way for charities to respond.

And it makes me think about where this could all be going and what potential this holds for the future of fundraising. Will it start to change the way we all view fundraising if raising funds and making a profit for good becomes the norm?

Recommendations from the Government's review of the Charities Act are opening up opportunities for charities to get involved in social investment. This market has grown from almost nothing in 2000 to making £165 million of social investments in 2010[1] in the UK, but many consider it to be still far below its potential scale.
There have been a few trailblazers showing some success, yet it is still viewed as a largely emerging and experimental market. And it still holds many unknowns for a charity considering this path; with many watching and waiting to understand the value or 'return' it could bring, along with the risks.

I do believe this area has got potential, but ask: why hasn't there been much uptake in the charity sector? What are the barriers?

The Charity Commission has undertaken research carried out by IVAR to understand the barriers to social investment in charity and social business. Their findings cite the difficulty in creating products for investments, pricing levels of risks and returns, low demand from organisations, lack of investment readiness and no established ways to measure social impact; you can get the full report via here.

I think the great unknown, a risk averse culture and lack of clear understanding within the sector is also part of it. And it will take more innovators from within to work with external experts to create change.
Trustees have considerable overall responsibility for the investment of a charity's funds. There are recent guidelines from the charity commission, which seek to offer charities and their Trustees guidance and support so they can make the best decisions. But better, more transparent information and greater choice of products for charities will certainly help them make decisions.
So who is active in social investment already?

Allia, who are a social profit society and create opportunities to invest money for positive social impact, has so far raised over £20 million of investments in charitable bonds, with charities like Centepoint and Scope taking part.

To sustain funding, Scope partnered with Investing for Good to launch the £20 million bond program and used Allia's charitable bond to enable them to create longer term, higher value donations, compared to a traditional major gift. Scope has reported success with this so far and the investment has paid off; it was far more efficient to borrow than spend reserves, the charity got a better ROI and investors a return, albeit lower than a non-charity bond.

Social investment has also proven to be a good vehicle for causes that would find it difficult to get traditional funding by 'pulling on heartstrings', such as a program to get past offenders back into work. Pilots such as the Peterborough Social Impact Bond are truly innovative, but their social impact is still too early to tell. There are some initial reports now available that aim to offer early lessons for those wanting to undertake similar initiatives.

The UK has proven itself to be a trailblazer in social investment, including a new bank, Big Society Capital, and along with Government support, an Allia social impact bond has been launched to help vulnerable teenagers and the homeless in Essex. This is the first local authority to commission a social impact bond in children's services and although it's had some challenges, it shows how these kinds of investments can be used to help tackle social problems. It's a way to potentially pay for government schemes that aim to fix problems, and the investors will get a return only if certain criteria is met, such as a target to divert 100 teenagers away from care.

Over in the US too, 'impact investing' is emerging as a popular new trend for wealthy individuals to make a social impact whilst making money. In a recent article by the National Journal, the Rockefeller University's President discusses how Government can use this type of investment to produce great social results, but there are still barriers to overcome to enable more of this activity through policy and better data to satisfy investors.

So can long established UK charities begin to adopt investment vehicles more widely? It certainly could offer more choice for donors. These products do not offer as high a return as for profit products, but the idea of getting their investment back, which still offers their charity of choice a donation, could encourage new types of donors, savvy to investment. And in times of austerity, could this be a new message with which to approach those who are still keen to help but who are also worried about their own futures?
One thing is for sure, any donor still needs an affinity to the cause; there is still a strong philanthropic motivation attached to this way of giving, because the returns are not as high as other investment choices. This means traditional fundraising skills, such as the need to tell a great story and inspire, is still essential to make it work.
So how will the charity sector respond? They will certainly need to fully understand the market and grow their expertise. They will also need to take some brave steps and innovate within their current culture and structures. This area is not for the fainthearted; resource and focus is essential to get products off the ground.
And how will charities manage their traditional donor base and their overall reputation? It's important not to alienate committed supporters. The need to clearly communicate the value of this activity to all audiences, and do it well, is essential. Staying authentic to their cause and what they stand for, whilst losing the fear of making a profit for good, could open up a whole new world of possibility in income and support across the sector.

Kevin Waudby

Good Innovation

@kevin_goodinnov

At the second in a series of breakfast briefings exploring what fundraising products and approaches might be important in the future, Good Innovation recently hosted presentations and discussion around the topic of Mass Participation.

Paul Farthing, Fundraising Director at Age UK revealed why Age Concern's 'The Great Sunday Lunch' didn't work, and Mark Bishop, Director of Fundraising at Prostate Cancer UK, talked about why Movember drives mass participation. The event revealed a great deal about why mass participation fails and also what drives success:

Poor audience insight was picked out as one of the most common mistakes that organisations can make when developing an event. Limited, unverified or out of date audience insight can lead to bad event ideas. As Paul Farthing pointed out, The Great Sunday Lunch was "based on a view of family life that may have existed 20 years ago" - families rarely sit down to Sunday lunch any longer so it was doomed to fail.

Scaling events is also difficult and can be expensive. Good, insight-rich ideas coupled with innovative routes to market, e.g. partnering, can reduce your cost, risk and timescales. As Mark Bishop stated: "The bigger the marketing budget the weaker the idea." Events that are difficult to take part in or overly challenging – such as cooking a Sunday lunch (The Great Sunday Lunch) or setting up a music festival (Oxjam) - also reduce the number of people who are willing to take part and are less likely to achieve 'mass participation'.

A number of lessons came out what are key to ensuring the success of a fundraising event.

Understand what your mass participation event needs to deliver - How many people do you want to take part (what does 'mass' mean?), what level of engagement do you want them to have with your cause (what does 'participation' mean?) and what do you want them to do (what does 'event' mean?). Having answers to these simple questions will help shape your mass participation approach.
Keep it simple - Making events easy to take part in – like growing a moustache for Movember – will make it more like to successfully achieve 'mass'.

Link it to your brand - The most successful events 'make sense' for your cause and align to it (so, Movember promotes men's health and partners with Prostate Cancer UK - it just makes sense).
Mass Participation has a key role to play in fundraising and the evidence suggests that it will continue to do so in the future. Broad societal trends such as belonging and the search for experiences point to a healthy future, but the competition is fierce. If you want to talk further about our experience, please get in touch!

Over 70 delegates from across the sector gathered for the first in a series of events hosted by Good Innovation on the future of fundraising. Crowdfunding was the first topic on the agenda.
There is an increasing amount of noise around this thing called 'crowdfunding' with new offers and platforms promising significant returns, but what is the reality and how have other fundraisers made it work - or not?

With more charities wanting to understand the potential crowdfunding holds for their organisation, the first event brought together three speakers who have been players in the field for a number of years already:

Dom Valley - Founder of See the Difference

Andy Harris – Fundraising Director at Action For Children presenting My Action for Children

Ryan Bromley – Online Manager at Cancer Research UK presenting MyProjects

As Kevin Waudby and Andrew Bathgate from Good Innovation explained in the opening session, crowdfunding as a concept started to generate real excitement in the charity sector 2-3 years ago, around the same time each speaker began on their crowdfunding journey.

The initial buzz around crowdfunding was undeniable. It was something that everyone wanted to do but no one knew exactly how or where to start. 'Build it and they will come' was the consensus at the time but the reality was very different for each speaker. They each tried to establish crowdfunding as a new way of raising money but had to change their approach (and in some cases start from scratch) to make it work for their organisation.

The audience heard in detail about the failures and lessons learnt by these early pioneers, invaluable for anyone thinking about implementing a crowdfunding strategy in their own organisation. Although it did not create the overnight success that it first promised, organisations like Cancer Research UK and Action for Children are now reaping the rewards and using crowdfunding as a tool to attract new supporters and add value to their existing supporter base.

Sceptics might say crowdfunding won't be talked about in years to come, but these successes would suggest otherwise. With sponsorship fatigue becoming more prevalent across the sector, we are already beginning to see crowdfunding filling the void. Sites like Kiva and Kickstarter offer a new, more dynamic way of engaging donors and new sites are appearing all the time. Add to that successes such as websites like The Oatmeal crowd funding almost $1.4m (at it's peak the campaign was raising $27,000 per hour with donations from 102 different countries) for a museum. The challenge for charities is to understand the potential and more importantly how to realise it, because to ignore it is to risk falling behind others in the sector.

The next Future of Fundraising event will be held on 29th November with a focus on mass participation events and will once again feature speakers with a variety of experience on the subject. If you're interested in attending please give us a shout!

The world of digital innovation is a big topic, not just within the charity sector. Some might say online fundraising is one of the big untapped opportunity areas for charities and some might say it's a bit of a wild west out there with a whole lot of hype and promise. The question is how do you move from potential to income?

We at Good Innovation have been working with a number of charities on innovating their digital fundraising, and there's been a particular interest in using online channels to form community groups. How can we use online to create the next version of community fundraising? How can we form and maintain groups that only meet virtually? How can we use the range of media available to shift a charity's communications from being all about broadcasting to having genuine two way conversations?

One of the first hurdles we encounter is articulating the opportunity and the challenges. This is not about using twitter to send a few brand aligned tweets, we're not just talking about designing creatively brilliant facebook apps to get as many likes as possible. Facebook friends are one thing –strong supporter relationships that can also generate long term, sustainable income are another.
We're passionate about making sure that the opportunity is properly assessed, understood and articulated. Big digital innovations can cut across the whole charity – from IT and finance to data and analysis teams to service delivery and campaigning teams to the fundraisers themselves. The various stakeholders in the organisation need to buy in and own their own aspects of the project before you get going; you need to break down the silos that usually exist.

One debate that needs to happen is the potential disconnect between generating income and the provision of the charity's services – which can range from campaigning to information provision to providing a more diverse service offering. We've seen that there can be conflict between fundraising and the service delivery side of a charity, but these don't have to be mutually exclusive. We would argue that online provides a huge opportunity to showcase all of a charity in a way that's much more difficult offline. Use blogs, use videos, use twitter and share what you do and the difference you make to both service users and potential supporters. If more people understand the impact of your services, more will use them, raise awareness of them for you and consider donating.

One thing we've encountered is the understandable debate between building your own technology platform and buying one off the shelf. Building your own digital platform is tempting as it's a sexy thing to do, it means you own the IP and you can create something differentiated, but in our experience this is not the best route. Charities, no matter how good the internal capabilities, can never compete with technology companies in producing something special, and don't have a hope of keeping the momentum to improve going after the initial launch and the project team have gone back to their day jobs.

But even if you've got the best technology platform and the best content, there's still no guarantee of success. How the platform fits within the organisation and – most importantly – who's going to be responsible for managing it is vital to success. We've seen innovative digital platforms struggle as the organisation figures out how it works and who is responsible. Is it Individual Giving, is it Campaigning or is it Community Fundraising? Like any new innovation, you have to plan resource properly and be prepared to stick with it whilst it gathers the initial momentum.

But, saying this, the rewards are more than worth it. Building something new is one thing, but building something highly visible that does more than reach a new audience demographic – it actively engages with them on their terms – is a holy grail that is within our reach.

How should smaller charities grow?

We had the pleasure of being interviewed for the BBC yesterday around the question of what should smaller charities do in order to grow their income. In advance of the interview, it got us thinking about what our top tips would be, and actually if these would be any different from larger charities.

Our top tips were:

Know your supporter. Don't just look at a database, take the time to go out and talk to people that support you. Understand why and what engages them. Also, find out who doesn't support you and know why they don't - this can be extremely valuable when trying to engage with new potential supporters or to help you focus your efforts to areas with the highest potential

Demonstrate your impact and the difference that you make. In charities (regardless of size) the fundraising and service delivery arms are often separate and don't work together enough. Bringing these together can help fundraising create powerful stories, and stories are an effective way of talking to potential supporters. On top of this, clearly articulating what you do helps potential supporters understand what difference their donation can make, and this in turn increases their likelihood of donating

Exploit your local advantage. One of the advantages that a small charity can have it that it is often a core part of the local community, and this is something that the bigger, national charities can sometimes struggle with. Become a key part of the local community - and use this coupled with your supporter knowledge and your stories - to engage with people, schools, churches, community groups, local companies...

Innovate around how you fundraise. Once you understand your audience you can work out how to fundraise from them. Are they likely to be interested in events? If so, what? Can you get community groups to fundraise for you? Don't be afraid to try new things out, but do it in a risk managed and controlled manner - use volunteers and gifts-in-kind from local companies to help for example.

Innovate around how you do what you do. Instead of raising additional funds, can you grow by reducing your cost base? This doesn't mean less people, but instead can you be innovative about how you operate? Can you, for example, club together with other local organisations or charities to bulk buy what you need? Going further, can you merge some of your administrative functions with other charities to save costs?

Invest in fundraising. We've blogged about this before (http://www.goodinnovation.co.uk/news/industry-news/investing-in-raising-funds) but we believe that investing in fundraising makes strong commercial sense. In smaller charities, fund raising is often under resourced with few people spread very thinly. A good fundraiser can generate income multiple times what they cost in salary, making it (in our view) a no-brainer!

Let us know if you agree or not!