Agile working methods, user research, and FREE digital tools can help grow your impact as a small charity, without the big budgets...
Regularly listening to your community and trying new things can help ensure you create the biggest impact possible for your beneficiaries.
Below you will find a few tools and practices that can help you create more impact, faster, without the big teams, time, and budgets that larger charities have.
Creating an agile mindset
An agile mindset includes being open to change, listening to your beneficiaries and teams, and focusing on delivering value. It can be easier to do this as a small charity. With less people and bureaucracy, change can happen quicker.
Ultimately, you want to respond to change more rapidly, listening to your beneficiaries’ needs at regular intervals and testing new ideas and ways of working.
Here are a few ways you can use agile methods and user research to learn fast.
Kanban boards
A kanban board is a way of managing your workload and projects. Usually work is done in short sprints of two to four weeks, so you can regularly test and change plans accordingly.
A kanban board consists of five columns:
Your board would also have a "backlog" where you add work that is likely to be added to future sprints. The board could be a physical board on a wall with Post-its or you can use a digital tools like Trello or Monday.
Regular reviews and retros
Once you have your kanban boards in place and have started working in sprints, it is important you add in regular reviews and retrospectives.
A retrospective is a chance to discuss how you are working as a team, looking at what has worked, areas for improvement, and any issues with the process, workload, or communications.
A short retrospective should be done at the end of each sprint, giving the team a chance to constantly improve and share any problems. Agile working is all about openness and trust, and with the right things in place you will help the team work together in the best way possible.
A review is a chance to share what you have worked on in that sprint, with the team and wider stakeholders. This might include funders, people from other teams, or key partners.
This continues the theme of openness and gives others a chance to feed in and comment on progress throughout the project.
Putting the customer first
To really create the best impact as a charity you need to ensure you are listening to your customer. Regular user research can feel like a big and scary task, but it doesn’t need to be.
Short, regular user research and testing can be far more beneficial than big occasional research projects.
Do more qualitative research, rather than quantitative, with short in depth interviews, rather than surveys. Return on Investment can drop like a stone after five interviews. Research by Nielson Norman Group showed that 85% of the problems are observed in the first five people.
When doing user research make sure you synthesise and share the results as you go, using them to help influence the next stage of what you do.
Fail fast, learn fast
All these agile working practices will help you fail fast and learn fast. Rather than having big scary project plans and huge research projects, try just starting.
Start small and learn as you go. You will soon realise if something is not resonating with your audience and needs changing.
These ways of working will help you create the right impact faster. It is okay to fail. Every failure brings new learning to make the next stage of something better.
Whether it is a digital project, an event, or a new service, try working in sprints, testing as you go, and doing regular reviews and retrospectives to create the change you and your customers want.
Useful software for digital hacks
Here are a few different free software tools you can use to help you create big impact with your projects and services, without big budgets:
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