The opportunities which arise when we work in partnership

In this blog from Dot Project we share insights on the opportunities which arise when we work in partnership. We highlight the urgent need to attract more skills and therefore more organisations and individuals to work in this sector. We share more about our role in building digital resilience within social impact organisations and the skills and expertise that is needed to achieve this.

THE NEED FOR DIGITAL PARTNERSHIPS

The pandemic escalated the adoption of technology across the charity sector, somewhat enforcing a pivot to digital. According to the 2022 Charity Digital Skills Report, the vast majority of charities ‘now see digital as a much greater priority’ and as they developed their digital confidence and skills during lockdown, we saw both challenges and opportunities arise in the social sector.

Charities have been enabled through remote working; they have new ways of staying connected to service users helping them to fundraise, to communicate and to share their impact. But a shift to digital is not an easy journey, it’s one that requires direction, time and skill and your team must be ready to embrace change.

Digital partners played a critical role in the digital transformations taking place through the pandemic. Freelancers and organisations rallied to plug the skills gaps and provide outsourced expertise to support social organisations with limited time or capacity.

It was not just the technical knowledge and skills that were so deeply needed. It also needed deep expertise in how to build collective confidence, collaboration and governance practices to underpin how the team could sustainably embrace digital for the longer-term.

This fundamental recognition that digital change can be all encompassing and requires many specialist skills, is what encourages us to collaborate with digital partners when building digital resilience in the charity sector.

“Collaboration allows us to know more than we are capable of knowing ourselves” — Paul Solarz

Having come together ourselves from different backgrounds and sectors, we’ve always had a vision of cross-pollinating learnings between the charity and the commercial sector. How might we enable more partners to bring their skills and experience to charities? How might we enable the commercial sector to recognise the need for purpose and impact more deeply? How might the commercial sector learn from the inventive mindset and flexibleness we so often see within organisations working on society’s deepest issues?

A SPOTLIGHT ON OUR OWN

Our partnerships have evolved through serendipity, curiosity and even cold outreach where we have admired from afar. We learnt early on that there was a lack of support to charities who wished to strengthen their use of technology and build their digital capacity and resilience as opposed to “building new”. Digital agencies in particular were increasing their portfolios with a (token) “number of charity clients”, but it was hard to find those willing and able to really support the nuts and bolts of digital transformation.

Navigating this has been about building trust and relationships, empathy, warmth and understanding. We have found the skills and personalities that are willing to give it a go, taking their deep expertise and distilling it in a way that could deeply impact the confidence and competence of small charities. We are committed to giving the time and learnings to those who are newer to the sector, ensuring they feel safely held and supported when collaborating on our projects. Our alignment practices help to provide the dedicated space and time to create the shared learning, understanding, clarity and direction that is essential for a strong partnership.

Over the past 7 years we have developed a network of partners across over 75 different disciplines, including those mapped below:

Here’s a spotlight on some of our partnerships which have broadened the opportunities available to charities:

RED GOAT CYBER

After hearing a keynote from Lisa Forte, we persuaded her to think about ways she could help support our charity clients to demystify cyber-security. Our partnership evolved from specialist mentoring support to Red Goat Cyber creating a series of self-led training modules accompanied by practical training and a simulation exercise tailored to specific sectors in which charities are working.

THE DATA PLACE

This deep collaboration with The Data Place began when Annie Legge attended the Introduction to Data Ethics course from the ODI led by the awesome Lucy Knight. We knew that Lucy’s skill in training and explaining key concepts would be transformative in our programmes and in strengthening the confidence of teams.

CAST

CAST had been on our “tech for good” radar from the early days of coming together as Dot Project. With our one-page business plan and the offer of coffee and cake in London, we came together with their co-founder Annika Small to garner interest in Dot Project and our proposition to support the charity sector. At the time we could see an emerging need to boost the development of tech in the charity sector, but there was less about internal governance and organisational strengthening. Annika and many others who gave us their insight in those early days guided our direction, and continue to do so.

Each collaboration feeds and invigorates the next, both with learnings, ways of working but importantly new connections. It didn’t take us long to weave together an ecosystem of amazing partners who were ready to bring their wisdom and collaborate on our work.

Our relationship with CAST evolved in a way we could never have anticipated from that first meeting. We have collaborated on many projects, including the instrumental evolution of Catalyst, a growing network of funders and digital skills supporting civil society. Through those early months of 2020 and the unfolding pandemic, organisations across the sector came together to strengthen support to civil society and those working on the frontline.

Incubated by CAST, Catalyst became a hub for activity, helping to build the digital knowledge, skills and services of the charity sector. Here, we had an opportunity to increase visibility of a wide pool of expertise and we spent several months building our existing ecosystem to map the wider digital, data and design community. On behalf of Catalyst, we identified individuals and organisations with the skills and experience desperately needed to help charities respond to the pandemic and the legacy of this work of course is Agencies for Good — a community and repository of digital expertise.

PRACTITIONERS

Alongside organisations, there are a great number of individuals that weave in and out of our projects given their capacity and unique skills. Our network of Technology Practitioners are skilled in IT strategy and infrastructure through to data management and governance. We also have a network of Facilitators, Learning Designers, UX Designers, Service Designers and a whole host of others, enabling us to offer more holistic support to our clients. The steady hand of amazing individuals including Erica Neve, Pedram Perasmand, Chloe Parker, Helen Stevenson, Matt Hardy, Chris Charlton, Ivan Teage, Pete Burden, Cazz Ward and Danny Hearn have profoundly shaped our impact. Over time we have even seen a number of these freelancers become members of our cooperative, deepening their commitment to impact work as part of their ongoing portfolio.

Through Agencies for Good, charities can now engage with an ecosystem of practitioners working in the tech for good space and we have formed some great connections through the platform’s virtual community spaces and events. Alongside this, articles, newsletters and reports have proven to be a great way to demonstrate our thought leadership and to find others to engage with our work. LinkedIn has been a key enabling tool for more specific skills and experience searches and over time the power of our network has just amplified.

THE OPPORTUNITIES THAT ARISE

We have been deeply guided by our partners in growing our impact with charities and funders. Through Dot Insights we have made sense of what exists, mapping existing networks of people, organisations and initiatives. From this, we’ve identified where gaps and opportunities lie — building an ecosystem of amazing humans and teams who can build digital resilience in social sector organisations.

This work is complex and the system in which we work is complicated, but by default this attracts some incredible thinkers and system changers. Each and every person we have brought onto our projects has come with their own mission and purpose to make a difference in the world. It has been an absolute honour to work alongside partners who challenge their own ways of working to best grow the confidence and competence of social sector organisations. We are deeply hopeful that given recent global events we have a society that is more aware of their responsibility and social consciousness.

Do you regularly work in partnership? Let us know what opportunities have emerged as a result of doing so and if you’re interested in working in partnership with us in the future, we’d love to hear from you.