Sharing the learning from the Digital Fund — monthly sense-making around a theme

Phoebe Tickell discusses the challenges, sense-making, learning and insights around thematic areas we’ve gained from the 29 Digital Fund grantholders.

There was such high demand for The National Lottery Community Fund’s Digital Fund, with 1200 applications, that we want to find as many ways as possible to share anything that is useful with the wider sector.

The Fund was established to support charities using digital tools to examine and transform the way they operate, or scale-up digital services.

So far, the feedback from grantholders about this approach to grantmaking has been promising. One grantholder has said:

“The Digital Fund was a totally unique opportunity for our organisation and has been the thing that gave us the confidence to continue. It is the only fund who was talking about agile and using iteration and experimentation — and allowed us to take financial responsibility around how to spend our funds.”

We want to share what we’re learning at the Digital Fund about the grants we’ve made and zooming out from that, show some of the wider thinking we’re doing that we hope will be particularly useful to other funders.”

The dates and topics are listed below. If you’d like to come, please do sign up. Each event will include speakers from the cohort talking about their first hand experiences.

May 25th — On Roles and Hiring

Changing an entire organisation often requires changing roles and skills in an organisation. This event will explore what the most common new roles and skills that the Digital Fund grantee’s have needed to bring in as they undertake change in their organisations. We’ll also explore what you can learn internally and what needs buying in.

June 29th — On Challenges

A common theme of any change work is its challenges. Just look at all of the responses to Tom Loosemoore’s tweet here for some of the many ways that internet-era ways of working can be challenging. And that’s not including other aspects of the work, like the wider context, messy and understandable human emotions, and so forth. We’ll hear from the Digital Fund grantees about some of their common and also unexpected challenges since undertaking this work.

July 27th — On New Ways of Working

Linked to the previous event, we will get more specific about what some of the new ways of working are. Are they even new, or do they just have different names! Either way, they are definitely different ways of working to the dominant culture that exists in most large organisations. We’ll be finding out from Digital Fund grantees how they’ve been cultivating different cultures and practices throughout their organisations.

September 28th — Working in Ecosystems

This is our month on Ecosystems, and this is a real obsession of ours. How do civil society organisations better align their roles with one another so that they operate more effectively as an ecosystem? And more importantly, how do those with more power and resources ensure they’re creating value for the wider ecosystem in which they are a part. The latter is something we’re really holding out Strand 1 grantees to account for, and each month we are gathering data about this ecosystem awareness. We’ll write a longer blog post about this soon.

October 26th — On Stopping Doing Things

We’re saving perhaps the hardest until last. Whilst the sector talks about collaboration and change and working more effectively together in defined roles, something that is very rarely talked about is the implications this have for some things need to end. Some individuals, or teams, or services, or organisations will inevitably need to stop doing things in order for change to run its course. We’ll hear from the Digital Fund grantees what they’ve needed to stop doing, and what they’ve learnt about that.

The world many of these charities were set up in was a completely different world to the one we’re in today. Therefore, the path many of them are taking forward with our funding is large-scale, complex organisational change.

To get some more context, read more about the Digital Fund and the way we are approaching funding in Introducing the Digital Fund — and a different way of funding digital.