Building digital resilience in the domestic abuse and sexual violence sector
Dot Project worked with the Comic Relief Ministry of Justice Specialist Fund to support ‘by and for’ specialist organisations that work with survivors/victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, with their digital capacity and core organisational infrastructure.
Summary
Putting tech and teams into action
At Dot Project, supporting charities with their organisational infrastructure through the lens of tech and teams is an integral aspect of our work. We believe that, in order to support communities, technology transformation should be rooted in people. We help organisations to embody a digital mindset – building teams with confidence, culture and skills to work digitally. Our work was strongly aligned with the core ethos of the Fund, as both partners recognised ‘digital’ to be as much about the culture and practice of digital as it is about digital technologies and hardware.
Our work on this project was two-fold:
We supported organisations by mentoring them to design a robust digital approach. Our mentoring covered a range of topics including requirements gathering, system and partner selection (for CRMs, websites, hardware and software), digital strategy, cyber security, data management, and team coaching. The focus of mentoring was to build organisational capability to initially scope and then implement their technical projects in the context of being digital.
We also supported Comic Relief to provide expert technical advice during the application review stage, to refine and improve grant management processes for digital funding, and ongoing support to resolve any emerging issues or challenges during the implementation period for grantees.
What we learned
We started by acknowledging the deep knowledge that organisations have of how their services operate and what their service users need. But, we were also considerate of the challenges that many organisations have faced due to funding and an increase in demand for services during and after the pandemic, particularly in the domestic abuse and sexual violence sector.
Digital transformation is best undertaken as a team, and the funding allowed organisations to recruit skills in-house/increase the time of existing staff to support this process. To support organisations, Dot Project played a supportive and guiding role through a breadth of mentoring expertise to build the organisation’s digital resilience and internal capabilities, ensuring that the impact of the project was felt across the organisations even after the end of the funding period.
Our tech and teams approach was well aligned with the needs of funded partners who “appreciated the time Dot Project took to understand their organisation. [and] they valued an approach to support which allowed them to lead and to find their own solutions, which they found empowering, alongside appropriate scrutiny and challenge where needed. The coaching and learning input helped funded partners to think and see digital capability building, as well as often their own organisational infrastructure, in new ways.’