The Designers Guide to Working with Charities

This ones from our fab new recruit, Vala Petursdottir, Product & Service Designer, and first appeared on Its Nice ThatHave you ever been in the position where you love your job and what you do but youve sometimes wished that the project you were working on had more meaning? Well, I certainly have.Then when we finally get the chance to work on a project for a charity for example, we find ourself in a position where the agency and charity are not operating on the same rhythm.

And even though the charities are amazing they often have a very old-school internal structure, and it just doesnt seem to blend very smoothly with your agile agency working environment. So it seems that from the start were not really speaking the same language. This can happen with any client but it seems particularly apparent when working with a nonprofit organisation.

Charities are addressing real problems that we would all love to help them with, but the collaboration is far from easy. But surely there is a solution?Remember the moment when you learned about user centred design?

Being able to use our skills to make services and experiences better for the people using them I mean where do I sign up?Most services in the private sector have known this for sometime now. And some charities also know this and are doing it well, but what about the rest?

There are thousands of overworked people in the charity sector closing their eyes to digital because they feel they dont need yet another thing on their already endless to-do list. Theyre missing out on small things that can be achieved. They need to become responsive organisations but its not always simple to balance user needs with the social needs theyve been set up to address.

We cant just go up to charities and say that we will help and build some complicated digital product, hand it over and feel good about ourselves. We know that it takes a whole company to take care of a good digital product and a charity often doesnt have the resources, time, or understanding of whats needed. We need to ask questions before we start working if we want to create a viable and sustainable solution for them.

How about sharing what we know by teaching our ways of working, so that they understand why we do and make decisions the way we do? Imagine the charities using design methods in reaching out to their service users. I mean is that not 10 times more valuable than some app that will be floating around in the black hole of the App Store in few months time?

Ive recently joined a charity called CAST, which is transforming the nonprofit sectors approach to digital service delivery by embedding these design methods into charities. Through working hands-on with hundreds of charities over the last three years, CAST has found that while they have excellent understanding of the complex issues theyre trying to solve, charities generally dont have the test and learn culture of speaking to users directly, observing them in context, or making quick, cheap prototypes to test things out with them. We designers havent always been working in this way either but we know its hell of a lot nicer than being micro-managed by some random client, because when we start making decisions based on real data and feedback we know were on the right track and not just shooting an arrow in the dark.

Together with charities and funders, weve been working on a set of design principles to help them build better digital services that improve the lives of their service users. Yesterday we hosted the launch of the first version, which you can check out at BetterDigital.Services.

They include things like Start with user needs and keep them involved, build digital services now websites, build for sustainability and build the right team. (That last principle, by the way, includes how charities work with designers and tech partners, and CAST has crowdsourced a handy Conversation Menu to help these relationships be more productive. )This is nothing new weve all seen all sorts of principles before, but these are designed specifically for UK charities needs, language and practice.

Its a starting point for them so it doesnt all seem so daunting.They are a work in progress and well be refining them over the coming months, so if you have any feedback or opinions please be in touch. Wed also love to hear stories of the design community using these principles in their work with charities, so if you have any, please send them to rg.

uk.I hope this has been helpful for any of you that are looking into working more in this space together Im pretty sure we can make it better RELATED QUESTION Furniture: What's the best chair for designers? There is nothing standardised about a particular chair being best for designers.

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