Why your deadline will destroy your metrics (but only if you let it)

It’s a situation that everyone working in digital has experienced. After many workshops and much thinking, your team had agreed some beautifully user-centric, value-driven measurements for the work you’re  going to deliver. You talked about Lean Analytics, and discounted any vanity metric that wouldn’t provide an actionable insight. 

Everything was going great… until the Terrible Deadline approaches, and your team gets bombarded by requests for exactly those same vanity metrics you’d decided to ignore. Then, before you know it, you’re scrambling to put together reports for your stakeholders, using measurements you know won’t reflect the real value of the work you’re doing. 

The Terrible Deadline has managed to destroy your beautiful lean metrics - again! Sound familiar? 

If this is happening to you, what can you do to stop it? Unfortunately, I haven’t found the perfect silver bullet. However, there are some things worth trying, which could help put you back on the right path (and eventually take your metrics out of harm’s way).

1. Notice it’s happening

Having the self-awareness to notice that you’re moving away from the narrow path of value-driven, lean metrics and into the wilderness of vanity ones is half the battle. If you can pick up on this as a team, and if you can do so as soon as possible, you can fix things and stop the Terrible Deadline before it does too much damage. Of course, to notice things, you need the time and space for self-reflection. Which brings me to...

2. Meet as a team and talk about it

Team retrospectives, which come from the agile framework, are simply regular meetings that offer your team a safe space to reflect on how you’re working together (you can read more about retros here). Unfortunately, when deadlines approach and time seems tight, retros tend to be one of the first things to get sacrificed, in favour of emails and PowerPoints for the stakeholders. 

So now you’re in a vicious circle: your team is under pressure and not working well, and you don’t have the chance to talk about how to fix it. What to do? Very simply: make sure your retros stay in the diary, re-schedule them if someone can’t attend, or go ahead with a smaller group and share the outcomes later. But  don’t  let your team’s balance get sacrificed to the Terrible Deadline.

3. Show the problem to your stakeholders

Once you’ve met as a team and understood the impact of the Terrible Deadline on your metrics and on your ability to stay focused, bring these insights to your stakeholders. After all, they may have no idea of what’s happening in your group! Instead of simply pushing back on a certain metric or trying to justify why you’re not using it, explain how it’s disrupting and distracting your team. 

Make sure to bring specific examples of what this means in practice, so you can show rather than tell. And if you haven’t had this conversation before, be clear on what else you want to use to measure your work’s value, and why.

4. If you fail, try again, and fail better.

Perhaps once you’ve done this, the Terrible Deadline and its vanity metrics will go away - success! Perhaps they’ll become a bit quieter, but not disappear. Or perhaps you won’t be able to escape them. 

If that’s the case, don’t let this affect your commitment to being value-driven: instead, use this as a learning opportunity. What could you do differently next time to avoid being in the same situation? What conversations could you have had before the Terrible Deadline got in sight that would have helped you later down the line? Don’t forget to have an honest, post-delivery retrospective as a team and to capture these lessons somewhere visible for both yourselves and your stakeholders. Next time, you can all use these learnings as starting point for a team charter.

These are just some ideas of things to try out - we don’t have all the answers, but at Cancer Research UK, we’ve been trying to slay the Terrible Deadline monster and to empower teams to choose, and most importantly stick to, the metrics that help them deliver value, rather than the ones that make for nice PowerPoints. If you’ve ever faced similar battles, we would love to hear your thoughts!

Giulia Merlo
Lead Proposition Manager

BIMA Digital Day ’18

Aged 14, I think we can both honestly say that it’d never crossed our minds that one day we’d grow up to work in a digital role. The internet was still in its dial-up phase. And our knowledge of what jobs were out there was limited to the traditional roles we’d seen around us in our day to day lives or on TV. Jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher.

BIMA Digital Day is all about inspiring the next generation by giving them an insight into the work and careers that are available in the digital sector.

It’s a great chance to make students aware of how much technology already impacts them. And provides an opportunity to show them how they can be a part of it. By creating their own digital solutions, it breaks down the barriers they may see in getting involved in the sector.

So, when BIMA got in touch asking for volunteers to get involved in the community and help mentor pupils at a local school, our colleagues from across the technology team jumped at the chance.

Our team of 7 mentors was formed from a wide range of representatives from different disciplines within digital and technology:

• Christina Hirst – Senior Content Strategist
• Catherine Malpass – User Experience (UX) Designer
• Becca Sharplin-Hughes – Associate Product Manager
• Leanne Griffin – Service Designer
• Katie Foster – Digital Producer
• Simeron Taak – Developer
• Caroline Kavanagh – Digital Production Intern

We were lucky enough to be paired with Rooks Heath College, Harrow and 60 of their year 9 students, who're currently studying either ICT or Computer Science.

Across the day, education and inspiration was shared both ways. We came away feeling we’d learnt just as much from the young adults we met, about their perceptions of technology and from their ideas, as they learnt from us.

Here’s a breakdown of the day:

Digital surrounds younger generations now more than ever

To get started, first we wanted to know what the students understanding of ‘digital’ really was.

It was crucial to get students in the mindset of how much they use technology fluently every day. It really set the groundwork for later in the day, empowering them with the confidence to complete their challenges. (And even to help them consider it as a career option later in life.)

From the offset it was clear that the students were very aware of how much digital surrounded and impacted their everyday lives.

The students told us about their interactions with digital, with things like:

• Oyster cards to tap on the bus
• watching YouTube videos (plus the ads)
• morning alarms on their phones
• playing games
• their profiles on various social media sites

– all things they interact with before even getting to school in the morning!

We also learnt about the student’s perception of certain digital features (it turns out they hate YouTube ads just as much as us). And their perception of us as a charity. Reassuringly, they’d mostly heard of Stand Up to Cancer and Race for Life, and were quite excited by what we had to show them!

Students already have an interest in what career opportunities are available to them

The rest of the morning involved us explaining who we were, what we did and what it means to work in digital. After talking to the students, it was time to hand over to them and give them the chance to ask us the questions they wanted answers to.

Handing over the reins to a room of 60 14-year-olds we feared may elicit some less than admissible responses.

But the questions we received were insightful. The most common questions we were asked were:

• How did you get into your careers?
• How old were you when you got your job?
•  Do you enjoy your job?
•  What made you want to work at Cancer Research UK?
• What subjects did you study at GCSE?
• How much can I earn working in digital?
• What grades did you get at GCSE
• What’s fun about your job?
• Do you get to work from home?
• Is your job stressful?

It was uplifting to see the students so focused on areas like wellbeing in work and their determination to enter a career that they were passionate about, for a cause that they could care about.

Answering the questions honestly, our team were transparent about our career paths. It soon became clear that most of us had no idea what we wanted to be when we were younger. When we asked the room if they knew what they wanted to be when they were older, it became clear that the majority of them didn’t either.

Hopefully we’ve given them a message of reassurance for when they get a bit older and feel the pressure that comes with deciding what GCSE’s to study, whether to go to university and what career path to go down.

Taking on some challenging briefs with some inspirational outcomes

Next, the students got into groups and decided which of the 3 inspiring challenges, set by this year’s sponsors, they were going to take on.

Working through materials provided by BIMA, we provided the students with a framework to approach their challenges:

The 4 D’s:

·         Discovery - to gather research for their tasks

·         Decide – to choose an idea

·         Design – to elaborate on this idea

·         Deliver - present it to us and their classmates

All 10 teams pitched their ideas Dragon Den style to us, the panel, and we were left to pick our winners.

It was a tough deliberation but the results were inspiring.

BBC Studios challenge

Promote a new digital-only programme, getting people to tune in every week by developing a new marketing idea

With this challenge, it wasn’t just the marketing ideas that stood out, but their knowledge of social media platforms.

The students carefully considered which social media platforms they were going to target, with Snapchat filters to reach the younger target audience of the programme, to Facebook ads to target parents.

Teams even discussed the advantages that would come with tapping into the popular gaming market by previewing snippets of the show each week on the latest gaming releases (such as Fortnight) with an understanding that the reach would be phenomenal.

Winning idea: Promoting the new show with preview snippets via major gaming releases  

Our winner because: they really thought about their target audience, and what channels would best reach them. In-game advertising via a console isn’t something that is widely known about, and we felt it was an innovative solution to their problem. 

Vodaphone challenge

Broaden the appeal of the UK high street to change the way we shop, using either AR or VR technology

This challenge saw the students really think outside the box.

Ideas varied from helping elderly and disabled people to shop using VR headsets (which had extra  room so you could keep your glasses on) from the comfort of their own home, to mirrors that allowed you to see yourself wearing an item of clothing before buying it.

Teams also considered the problems the UK high street currently faces, solving the problem of closing stores. One team created a design that allowed recently closed high street shops to continue to sell their goods via AR technology. The tech would allow customers to see the items they’re buying in front of them, as if they were in a real shop

Winning idea: A VR headset to help elderly people access the high street from their homes

Our winner because: they really thought about the brief and their target market. They also ensured they were combating accessibility issues in our high street stores by bringing the retail experience to people in their homes.

The Football Association challenge

Increase the number of people following the England Women’s Football team during next year’s FIFA World Cup and encourage girls aged 8-16 to give football a try through using digital

The Football Association challenge saw some truly innovate ideas. Students pitched ideas such as an app, that features videos to teach different football skills. Where other teams thought about celebrity endorsements and giving away tickets to people who tuned into World Cup matches

Winning idea: an app that teaches young girls football skills via video. Users are encouraged to try the skills for themselves, videoing their progress and sharing on their social networks to earn points for the chance to reach the leaderboard.  

Our winner because: we really felt this idea got to the heart of the issue – that girls may be under-confident or discouraged to play football. Incentivising playing and making it collaborative would help young girls to overcome these barriers and inspire them to play football.

It was great to see the challenges bring so much confidence to the students and see how much faith they had in their ideas.

The winning teams were delighted, and some team members couldn’t quite believe they’d won!

The winners from each challenge have now been entered as part of a nationwide competition. 

Winning schools will receive cash prizes, with winning team members getting inspirational prizes from the sponsors.

An inspirational day for everyone 

BIMA Digital Day ‘18 was hopefully a day that inspired the children we met to pursue a career in digital. But crucially, it was an inspiring day for all of us who work in digital. We all certainly learnt a lot as well.

The students we met came up with some truly impressive and outstanding ideas. These students are the potential digital champions of the future. Days like this allow us to inspire, inform and connect with a new generation who might never have considered a future career in digital until now.

It got us thinking. Just imagine if in the future, any of the students we meet decide to work at Cancer Research UK. Well, if that ever does happen, we’ll be more than lucky to have them.

Christina Hirst & Catherine Malpass

3 things I learnt from working in a more digital way

Just over a year ago my team and I were set the challenge of cracking cold acquisition for mid value supporters. We were asked to figure out how to get in front of people who had never interacted with Cancer Research UK and persuade them to give to us at £25 a month or above.

Most people start giving to charity at the lower end of the scale, around £2 or £5 a month, and traditional methods of acquisition (telemarketing, door to door) are in decline. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

However, in our team we’ve always championed an entrepreneurial spirit and have aligned ourselves with the words of Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

So, we decided to try a different approach.

There are many benefits to working at Cancer Research UK, with one being our infrastructure and support network. I started speaking to colleagues about the problem we were trying to solve and was quickly put in touch with various people in our Technology directorate. I was grateful for the help, but I must admit, at first this direction confused me. I didn’t know if what I needed was a technical or digital solution. But working with these teams soon opened my eyes to a new way of working, a culture and confidence to explore problems that don’t always find their answer in the shape of an app or a website.

Our approach came in the form of a spoke. A spoke is a dedicated project team made up of experts from a range of tech teams, here to upskill me and my team to help us move forwards and fix the problem ourselves. The old ‘give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime’ adage.

There were highs and lows, and many bumps in the road. However, we were in it together and when times got tough there was humour, the pub and Beyoncé...

Here are the 3 main things I learnt working in this way:

1.       Words matter

Our team are now well versed in agile language and have embraced Slack, Trello, demos and retros. However, it has left some of our colleagues a little bewildered to say the least.

Our project relies on collaborating with a number of teams, gaining their buy in and ensuring they’re as excited as we are about what we’re trying to deliver. This is dependant on communication. Since working in the spoke we’ve tried to reach a balance of intrigue with our language as well as clarity. It’s easy to get sucked into the agile world and wax lyrical about ideation, stretching and building, Kanban and scrum, retros and demos. But if people don’t understand you they won’t back you. They won’t be able to get excited about something that doesn’t have meaning to them.

We now have a Kanban board which allows us to work in the open – giving our colleagues a visual representation of our work that goes beyond the jargon.

Think about how you tell your story and look outside of your own team. Ask how you can phrase what you’re doing in a way that others will understand – and get excited about.

 2.       It’s hard. But that’s ok.

The innovation/design/new product development, or whatever you want to call it, process is hard. Things don’t happen in a nice straight linear way. You go over stuff again, and again. People disagree on how to do stuff, when to do it, and why we should do it. But this is all part of the process and if it was easy then we wouldn’t be being as creative as possible. The boundaries wouldn’t have been pushed, and we’d end up with what we’ve always got.

My top tips for when things feel hard is be honest with each other. Use retros constructively to openly and bravely voice your frustrations in a way that will better the group, not harm it. In one retro we used pictures of Beyoncé showing different emotions to illustrate how we’d felt over the past 2 weeks. This softened us giving difficult feedback to others and made it more comfortable to share.

         

Use team members where they are needed. We didn’t all have to be in the room all the time. Carefully selecting who was needed for what allowed us to be leaner and get things done quicker.

As a team manager, be there for your team, let them know that it’s ok if it feels slow, difficult or frustrating. Let them know that we will get there. But look after yourself. Make sure that you have a support network, so you can lead when it gets tough.

3. Talk to others who have been through it and share your story – pass it on.

One thing that I found super helpful was being put in touch with someone who had already been through the process. She could let me know honestly how much of my time would be taken up, where and when I would be needed for decision making, and the challenges to expect. As well as the advantages I, and my team, would gain by being a part of the process.

I now feel a duty to pass this on to others and will happily do so. Since I know how important and helpful it is.

We’ve been on a journey with this spoke and it’s transformed our team culture. We now have the skills and confidence to pursue our work in a lean way, testing and iterating our ideas and continually putting the supporter at the centre of what we do.

Spokes have a bright future but listening to people that have been on one will be key to ensuring they’re useful for others, both within and outside the spoke. And making sure they bring as much value as possible to Cancer Research UK and the incredible life-saving work we do.

Alice Larden
Senior Fundraising Manager (Mid Value)

It’s time to throw out your ‘digital’ strategy

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed that we’ve recently changed its title to the CRUK Technology Team Blog. We’re no longer called the Digital team which is a pretty big deal for us.

In 2017, Cancer Research UK brought together the Digital team with the IT function. For the first time, the organisation hired a CIO with a seat at the board table, recognising how important technology had become in achieving our organisational goals and mission to beat cancer sooner. We now have one Technology team, and have just published our new strategy – but more about that in another post.

Becoming ‘Digital Masters’

So let’s rewind a bit. In 2014, we established our digital strategy, which was about becoming ‘Digital Masters’. What did we mean by that?

For us, this was about adopting a digital mindset across the organisation. We wanted to integrate digital across everything we do at Cancer Research UK. And we specifically set ourselves a goal of digital no longer being a job title, but part of everyone’s job.

We’ve made an enormous amount of progress, and the creation of one Technology team presented the perfect opportunity to live our goal and drop the digital label from our own jobs.

But digital isn’t dead

This doesn’t mean that we’re done. (Is digital transformation ever done?) Or that digital is dead at Cancer Research UK. We’ve still got lots of work to do and will continue to embed digital skills across the organisation and improve the experience for our supporters, patients and other audiences.

Helping the charity see the benefits of user-centric, agile and lean ways of working is absolutely core to our mission. We’ve just made the conscious decision to not call these ways of working ‘digital’ anymore, as that often implies they’re only suitable for projects that have something to do with the internet, when in fact they are useful for all kinds of work. We’re also working to make our Technology strategy a key part of our organisational strategy, rather than a strategy for just the Technology team.

Helping CRUK become an adaptive organisation

I’ll write a separate post on our new strategy and how we got there, but in short we spoke to lots of colleagues across Cancer Research UK, and in our team, and came up with a new vision:

We will make Cancer Research UK the most adaptive, resilient and innovative organisation it can be.
We’ll help Cancer Research UK transform its technology, embrace new ways of working and maximise its impact, accelerating our progress towards 3 in 4.

We see ourselves as driving this change, in partnership with other teams across the charity. And we’ve consciously not used the word ‘digital’ in our vision or strategy.

Some things we learnt along the way

 

1. Don’t talk about digital (transformation)

Image credit: 20th Century Fox

‘Digital’ means different things to different people and different organisations, and that’s okay. You could spend time looking for a single definition for your organisation, which a lot of people recommend, but I’m not sure it’s possible, especially if you work in a complex business which serves lots of different users in different ways. Have the conversation, spend the time to listen to the different points of view, but don’t get hung up about finding a single truth about what digital, or digital transformation, means to your organisation. There are lots of truths!

And in my opinion, digital transformation as a term is just a bit ‘meh’. If you said that word to the average user of your website, would they get it without a lengthy explanation from you? Probably not.

2. Be clear on your purpose

We spent a lot of time thinking about our purpose as a team, and how we help the charity. This feels slow and maybe not a good use of time if you could be getting on with improving services, fixing stuff, and building things. But it was really important for us to redefine our role and give people a chance to reflect on why we exist as a department.

Think about your organisation, what it’s there to do, and how you need to position yourself in that. That should be the core of your strategy. Not doing digital, or technology, for technology’s sake.

3. Everything is awesome … or not

Image credit: LEGO^®

When we started thinking about our new vision, we wanted to create something that everyone in our large Technology team of over 300 people can get behind, but that also doesn’t feel too broad, diluted and vague.

We were acutely aware we needed something to really inspire the team. But, bringing two very different parts of an organisation together is really hard and sometimes everything is not awesome. People had very different backgrounds and experiences, skills, ways of working, and ideas of what good feels like in terms of culture.

While reforming as a new team and living through some of the day-to-day tensions, other teams in the charity were looking for us to get on with the work and do everything, faster, better, and cheaper all the time. And although we want to do more and support Cancer Research UK better, it felt like we were being stretched ever thinner, which was hard on everyone and affected our resilience.

My learning has been that it’s okay to acknowledge this, and in fact people probably want to hear it. We’re hearing from colleagues that they want us to be open and honest about the things we’ve not done so well in the past, what we’re learning from that and what we’re going to do about it.

It’s okay to be vulnerable, people will most often open up and ask you how they can help you out.

4. Structure drives behaviour

Image credit: The Minimum Viable Organisation, Agileshpere

I certainly don’t believe that structure is the answer to everything, but it can be a barrier to collaboration.

Think about how the hierarchies and rituals you have in place accelerate or slow down progress, and make it harder for people to get behind your purpose.

Sometimes structures can enforce some undesired behaviours, so think about what you can do to get around that. Maybe it’s building virtual teams that are made up from people from across your organisation, creating communities of practice, or doing things outside of work to bring people together.

It may not be within your control to change structure, but think about how you can help your people out by unblocking some of the things that your structure is putting in their way.

“Having a digital strategy will soon be ridiculous”

Image credit: The New Reality report

I’ll leave you with this quote, which is from 2015. In her report “The New Reality”, Julie Dodd interviewed a bunch of leaders from inside and outside the non-profit sector about the social impact of digital. Kay Boycott, CEO Asthma UK said at the time: “Having a digital strategy will soon look as ridiculous as having an electricity strategy.”

This was 3 years ago and I’d say we’ve reached that point now. I’m pretty chuffed about coming true on our promise and ditching our digital strategy. I’d love to hear where other organisations are on this journey, and how you’re positioning digital in your organisation.

Do you have a separate strategy or are you able to infuse your organisational strategy with digital thinking? Let us know in the comments or connect on Twitter or LinkedIn. 

Anne Bienia
Senior Strategy Manager

What does digital fundraising really mean?

This is a Victorian book called ‘Enquire Within Upon Everything’ - a book full of all sorts of useful advice about everything. This book was the inspiration for the web.

The dream of the web was for a common space in which we can communicate by sharing information. And that’s what the web is today - a tool for communication between people, where the technology is largely an invisible part of the infrastructure. When Tim Berners Lee created the web, he built a place where any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.

But it wasn’t just the technology that created the web, it was a mindset of openness, inclusivity, collaboration and trust that Tim and his contributors upheld. These became the guiding principles and vision of the web. These principles are constantly being challenged by people trying to monopolise the web and interfere with the information flow - intermediaries trying to get in the way.

I believe the best digital strategies are when organisations stay true to the principles of the web and they make the technology and the teams responsible for it - an invisible friend. Ultimately they try to get out of the way and let the humans figure out the best way to communicate with each other. 

How does this apply to Fundraising? And is this what digital fundraising is all about?

In 2010 I was recruited as a Digital Fundraising Manager at Alzheimer’s Society. My role was quite digital marketing heavy at first, and fundraising teams expected me to do all the ‘digital stuff’ for them. But I soon realised that this wasn’t a very good use of my time and, actually, it would be a lot more effective for me to get out of the fundraising teams' way and show them how to use the web for themselves.

So my job became about helping fundraising teams learn about the principles of the web (and it’s pretty much been the same ever since). It was about showing them how to use the web to better understand the people we want to give us money.

To my surprise, at the time not many other digital fundraising people had a role like mine and, most of the time, they were doing the ‘digital stuff’ for fundraising teams and not teaching them how to use the web. I've found that a really good test for understanding the digital maturity of a fundraising team would be to ask them what their definition of digital fundraising is. If their answer is more about supporting fundraising teams to learn about their supporters, I believe it shows that these fundraising teams are more digitally mature.

Recently, when someone asked on the (awesome) ‘Fundraising chat’ facebook group what the definition of digital fundraising was, the response was a really interesting mix of people saying that digital fundraising is either 'doing digital stuff for fundraising' or 'helping fundraisers to learn about their supporters'. So things have definitely moved on - but we still have some way to go as a sector.

My definition of digital fundraising

Digital fundraising is about helping fundraising teams use the web to learn what supporters want to get out of their fundraising experience, understanding what their emotions and needs are, and working out what we can do as a charity to help meet those needs (what products or services we should offer). Then it’s about helping them to figure out if there’s a viable business model that generates profit from us offering these products or services.
 
Digital fundraising is also about changing fundraisers and the environment they operate in, and change is bloody hard! We need to help fundraisers talk about stuff that hasn’t worked in an open way (the ability to fail fast). We need to empower fundraisers to learn and not just deliver an Ops plan. We need to give fundraisers the time to understand their audience and become closer to what motivates them.

It’s about changing the way we approach fundraising so that it is more aligned with the principles of the web.

Maybe we should stop calling it digital fundraising?

We don’t call ourselves ‘Digital Fundraising’ at Cancer Research UK as we’re trying to drop the word ‘digital’ from team as well as role names because well, it doesn't really mean anything. We are the ‘Supporter Insight & Testing team’ and are responsible for helping people to:

• know what the supporter's needs are
• use a 'test and learn' approach
• get access to the right data as simple as possible
• work together better from across the charity (not just in our silos), and use everyone’s skills and experience
• use plain language - UX, Lean, Content Strategy, Agile, Scrum Wizards…..it all gets a bit Hogwartsy so we try and steer away from it.

Our vision is to help fundraising teams use testing and insight to make decisions about what has the most value for our supporters and Cancer Research UK. 

I dream of a day when fundraising teams are getting out of the way and making themselves invisible. When we are building closer relationships between the supporter and beneficiary (bring on Blockchain!)
 
At Cancer Research UK we have a long way to go to achieve all of this, but the fact that we are even starting to think about fundraising in this way is a good start. And it means that we are in a great place to better react to what our supporters' needs really are.
 
If there is one tiny thing you do next, read this article and it will help you understand where best to start.

But this is just my opinion, please challenge me in the comments!

Rob Green

Design Sprints at Cancer Research UK

Finding new, faster and more user-centric ways of working to help us beat cancer sooner is a core purpose of our team here at Cancer Research UK. For a while now, but more intensely so in the last few months, one of the tools we’ve been using to achieve that are Design Sprints.

So what are Design Sprints, and how can you use them in your organisation?

Design sprints come from Google, where design partner Jake Knapp started running them in 2010 with teams like Chrome, Google Search and Google X. Then in 2012 he brought them to Google Ventures – an important note, as Google Ventures doesn’t just deal with software companies, but with a variety of organisations. Here is Jake’s definition of a design sprint:

“The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. It’s a “greatest-hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more - packed into a step-by-step process that any team can use.*”

Sounds brilliant, right? But in practical terms… what does it mean?

In a nutshell: during a Design Sprint, a group of people from your organisation come together for 5 days, in a room, to try and solve a problem or answer a question. By the end of those 5 days, they will have come up with a potential solution, sketched it, built it – and what’s best, they will have tested it with real users.

Any team can try out a Design Sprint, and no challenge is too big to answer. To get started, here’s what you’ll need…

A team

Design Sprint best practice says that your team should be made up of 7 people or fewer. You can stretch this a bit, but we did find that smaller teams were more effective.

One of these people will be your Decider – someone who can move things along by making an executive decision when the group can’t. This role should be played by your problem or idea’s stakeholder. This ensures that whatever solution you end up building, they’re confidently bought into it.

Another person will be your Facilitator. This role requires a lot of energy, to keep the team motivated and on track throughout the week. If you have someone in your team who has some experience of Agile ways of working, this role might suit them well since they’ll be familiar with some of the activities that will happen in the Sprint – but it’s not essential.

As for the other team members, who you need depends partly on the problem you are trying to solve. In our Sprints, we try to always have a UXer, a ‘technical’ expert (for example, someone who knows your CMS, if you’re working on a website-based idea), someone with content and message strengths, and someone who brings a marketing/commercial point of view. At Cancer Research UK, we mostly self-organise our Sprints: it’s a brilliant opportunity to let teams organise around the work!

Remember: the strength of the Design Sprint comes from having a varied group of people working together for a short but intensive period of time. The wider the range of points of view you can bring in, the better! You might not all agree at the start of the Sprint, but you will have reached a consensus by the end of it (you will – I promise!).

Time and space

A Design Sprint takes 5 consecutive days. This may feel like a big commitment, but if you consider how much you will get done in those 5 days (and how long it might otherwise take to get there), it’s hugely productive. And after all, if your team can’t dedicate 5 days to this idea, is it really an idea you believe in?

Once you get more familiar with the structure of Design Sprint, you might find you want to shorten the process to 4 or even 3 days – but if it’s your first try, we found it better to stick to the 5 days.

You’ll also need a room, with lots of whiteboards, post-its, and sharpies. Try to use the same room each day if you can.

A challenge

What type of question can you try to answer in a Design Sprint? According to Jake Knapp, the bigger the challenge, the better the Sprint.

For example, we’ve used Design Sprints to:

• find out the viability of a new product
• review the roadmap of an existing one
• kick-off a new marketing campaign
• bring a fresh perspective on a problem when we were stuck

Design Sprints can be used for all of these questions – and more!

How do you start?

If you want to get started with doing Design Sprints, my advice would be to simply start! Many of us here at Cancer Research UK didn’t have any experience of facilitating a Design Sprint: we read the Sprint book (see footnote below), talked about it as a team, and then we just went for it. It might seem a bit daunting to dedicate a week to something you’ve never tried before, but what you will learn from designing, prototyping and testing an idea with real users in a week is so valuable, that it will be worth the initial discomfort.

And if you do decide to give Design Sprints a try, or if you already use them in your charity – we’d love to hear how you use them!

Giulia Merlo
Lead Proposition Manager

*Jake Knapp with John Zeratski & Braden Kowitz, Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days, Bantam Press, 2016.

How can you learn if you don’t test?

Even in my few years of working in fundraising and marketing here I’ve noticed a real shift in mind-set from the very top. We’ve stopped thinking we know everything! Instead of thinking we’re right without question, we’ve adopted an approach where our decisions are increasingly based on insights. We’re listening to our supporters more than ever and they inform the direction in which we move.

Stop being so vague and give us an example

Ok, ok. I’ll cut to the chase. I joined a Digital Spoke in 2016 to help design and develop a personal account for our supporters to use. Without going into the exact details of the product, it changed our team’s way of working beyond just this project. We worked in synergy with the Digital team and learned so much about adopting an agile approach to tasks while also gaining a huge amount of experience of different digital tools!

But I don’t want to talk to you about all of that. As exciting as it was, I think the way our team worked independently post-Spoke is the most impressive part of the project.

What’s so great then? Spit it out already!

The first thing we did was to maintain our daily stand ups which helped keep everyone focused. Each morning we huddled around a screen which showed all of the bitesize cards on our Trello board and we’d assess their progress. Reviewing this frequently really helped to keep things front of mind while also holding people accountable for completing tasks.

Both before and during our series of recruitment communications we held testing plan meetings where we could vote for which ideas we wanted to test using an effort vs. impact matrix. Where possible we’d go for what we felt were low effort, high impact tests! By holding these meetings in between each recruitment drive they also acted as an evaluation of the previous tests which was very useful context for planning.

What about when people signed up?

During the Spoke we gained a lot of experience at creating and manipulating dashboards and custom reports on Google Analytics. This allowed us to understand in real time how users were interacting with the product, what was working well and where we should be focusing our attention. Of course we sought expert advice for more difficult queries, but for the most part we were self-sufficient which was very encouraging.

Some of the trends we spotted through analytics caused us to implement real time optimisation tests. For example, when we spotted a dip in the conversion rate on the registration form we A/B tested different wording and infographics using Optimizely in an attempt to bring this up again.

How did people know what you were doing?

One of the key principles of agile working is to share progress and learnings with stakeholders and the wider organisation. Although we did this regularly with key stakeholders, we wanted to improve how we communicated to the wider organisation. It required an adjustment to how we approached the project but it definitely helped improve our skills and confidence at presenting. We’d give engaging updates every two weeks or so where anyone could show up and listen. The best thing about them was the questions we’d get asked which provoked thoughts and ideas we hadn’t previously considered.

To make this more accessible, we’d record the presentations and upload them to our Wiki page which increased our reach. This also allowed us to re-watch each one retrospectively to hone and improve our public speaking skills.

So what’s happening next?

This is a really exciting time to be working for Cancer Research UK. The direction we’re moving in as a charity is becoming inevitably more digital and we’re facing this challenge head on by devolving skills, knowledge and expertise into the product and marketing teams. This success of this Spoke is simply one example. The way we’ve carried these skills on post-Spoke and continued this way of working has really helped to take this project from strength to strength – but this is a process that is becoming more prevalent in all areas of the charity.

Graham Goodings
Digital Producer

Writing for the Web at Cancer Research UK

A few weeks ago at Cancer Research UK we had the 200th person attend our ‘Writing for the Web’ course. After celebrating with a ticker-tape parade and a commemorative Twix, it got me reflecting on the course, and why we started running it in the first place.

We’ve written a bunch of stuff about our digital devolution model, and how we aim to make digital a core part of everyone’s job at the charity. And a key part of this is how we communicate our brand online.

So my team started a 2 hour workshop for anyone who publishes content on our website. And, because we have the skills to deliver this internally, it means we can be flexible and run the course as often as needed - without spending money on external training providers.

So what’s covered?

Write the way your users read

Most people get that print and digital content are different. We understand that reading this blog on an iPhone is a fundamentally different experience than reading an article on copywriting in a magazine. 

But, what we sometimes don’t recognise is that as readers, we have fundamentally different attitudes to how we approach content in print and digital. 

Someone much smarter than me called Jakob Nielsen did a bunch of research using eye tracking software to record how people read content online.

He found that, whereas with traditional print content we (in European languages at least) read left to right and top to bottom, in digital we tend to scan around the page in more of an ‘F’ shape.

As users we go to websites with a specific problem, and we’re scanning the page to get the ‘gist’ of how well the page we’re on will solve that problem for us.

So our content needs to make it clear to users how we’re meeting their needs at a glance. They won’t take the time to wade through irrelevant or hard to understand information to get what they’re looking for. If they aren’t convinced our content will help them they’ll just leave.

Which is why we need to make it clear how our content will benefit our users.  

Write for your users, not for you

There’s an old saying in copywriting, “features tell, but benefits sell”. The idea is that just explaining what your product or service is won’t engage your users. Instead you need to explain how it will make your users’ lives better.

This is the most important thing about writing for digital. If you can relentlessly focus on how your content is going to help your users, rather than how your content is going to help your organisation, it’s the quickest way to improve its performance.

So what does this look like?

Well, imagine for a second you’re a humble pie maker, who wants to promote a competition on your website, www.piespiespies.com. 

You might use this as your opening line:

To celebrate 10 years in business, we’re running a competition to win free pie for a year.

Here, the focus is very much on your business. It’s a statement of fact, and it’s written from the perspective of your business. It’s feature-led.

Now imagine an alternative opening line:

Win free pie for a year with our anniversary competition.

Here the focus is on what the competition will do for your user. Does your user care that your business has been around for 10 years? Probably not. Do they care about free pie? Well, who doesn’t? So this sentence is more benefit-led.

Ok, great - but why is this important?

Well, think about it in context of scan reading. If a user’s quickly skimming your page, you’ll want to draw their attention to relevant content as quickly as possible. And they’re much more likely to engage if they can see, at a glance, what’s in it for them. 

Then, once we’ve got their attention, the next thing we need to do is make sure we express ourselves in a way that’s easy to understand. Which is where Plain English comes in. 

Write the way you talk 

Back when I started my career, I used to worry about how seriously people would take my writing. I used to think that to sound credible I needed to use lots of long, complicated words. After all, that would help me come across as smart and authoritative, right?

Well, actually, the opposite was true. By loading my writing with complicated phrases I wasn’t coming across as smart. I was coming across as confusing and difficult to understand.

Sarah Richards is another person much smarter than me, and she makes the point that writing in Plain English isn’t dumbing down content, it’s opening it up. Because if we know our users scan information online, and we know they react better to clear, benefit-led sentences, then why wouldn’t we try and make our writing as clear and concise as possible? 

At Cancer Research UK, our guidance on Plain English is pretty straightforward:

• Keep your sentences short (20 words max) 
• Use a maximum of 3 sentences per paragraph
• Only discuss 1 thing per paragraph (it’s easier to scan that way)
• If you have the choice between a long word, and a short word that means the same thing, then always pick the short word

If in doubt, a good rule of thumb is ‘write the way you speak’. This doesn’t mean talking the same way you would to your friends at Friday night drinks. Instead, think about how you’d explain your content to your users over a coffee and a Twix. What words would you use? How would you speak? 

I imagine you’d be friendly, straightforward and to the point. I also imagine you wouldn’t use phrases like ‘for further information please direct any inquiries to our helpline’. I mean, you might, but you’d come across as slightly robotic if you did.

A great tool you can use to check how clear your writing is, is Hemingway App. It’s a free, online word processor, so you can type straight into your browser window. And, as you type, Hemingway grades how easy your writing is to understand and suggests improvements. The lower the score the better, and if you aim for a score between 6 and 8 you’ll find your content is doing pretty well.

Write better by writing more often

This is just a snapshot of the content training we offer at Cancer Research UK, and as far as content strategy goes it’s one piece of the wider puzzle.

Before you sit down and create your content you’ll need to make sure it answers a clear user and business need. You’ll need to make sure it has appropriate governance so it doesn’t all fall apart once it’s been published. And you’ll need to make sure you regularly test it so you know it’s still doing the job it should.

However, what this training does give teams is a solid grounding in the skills they need for writing for the web. Will they create world class digital content straight away? Well, probably not – it’s kind of hard to after a 2 hour introduction course. 

But writing something that’s a solid base is a great first step. Then based on users’ feedback you can always improve, iterate and optimise your content over time. Plus, bear in mind the only way you’ll become a better writer is by writing. And if your content is in plain, straightforward English that speaks to your users’ needs, it’ll already be better than a lot of content online. 

Chris Flood
Content Strategy Lead

Digital innovations to beat cancer sooner

It’s been 3 months since I started my internship with the Digital Innovation team at Cancer Research UK. Before this I had no experience in digital so it’s been a steep learning curve.

I didn’t realise before I started what a forward thinking and exciting environment I was entering into. The value of what digital transformation can and has added at Cancer Research UK is amazing. From learning about the innovations going on in the directorate to leading on my own project with the Digital Innovation team, it’s been a fantastic experience.

Everyday innovation at Cancer Research UK

In my time at Cancer Research UK I wrote a bi-weekly newsletter about technology innovation. A part of this was the Innovator of the Week section. This gave me the opportunity to speak to people across the charity about the innovations they’re working on. For example, the analytics and reporting team are developing text analysis programmes to analyse survey responses, so that top level conclusions can be drawn and acted on faster. And the clinical partnerships team are investigating partnering with organisations to research how artificial intelligence can be used to beat cancer sooner.

There are claims that AI could help to identify cancer from scans up to 50,000 times faster, which could make a massive difference to how quickly diagnoses can be made.

As well as these exciting ongoing innovations, there was also the chance to learn about innovation success stories. Our pulmonary nodules app helps clinicians calculate the risk of a pulmonary nodule being cancerous or benign. Helping them to make faster decisions and get the right people the right tests. It was also great to see that although this is a finished product used by clinicians, the team is improving the user experience and making it available for more devices.

Voice technology

As an intern in the digital innovation team I got the chance to look at Voice technology. Voice devices are voice controlled speakers, so you can ask them to carry out tasks and communicate with them by talking to them like you would a person. Amazon Alexa devices will activate when you start the command with ‘Alexa…?’. So you can do anything from ordering takeaway, to controlling your heating, to making a to-do list all by asking Alexa.

While only 9% of households currently have an Alexa compatible device, Radiocentre estimate that 40% of households may have a voice device in 2018 and that soon there will be 33 million devices in circulation. This could be a new and exciting way for supporters to engage with Cancer Research UK, and for us to communicate with them.

My team has produced two Amazon Alexa skills; the Cancer Research UK Science Blog skill and the My Alcohol Tracker skill. Amazon Alexa skills and Amazon devices work in the same ways as apps do with smartphones. Apps are downloaded from an app store and then used on a smartphone. Similarly, Amazon Alexa skills can be enabled on the Alexa app and then used on your Alexa device.

My main project was promoting the skills my team had made. This promotion was aimed at external audiences but also internal audiences. It’s important to promote internally, so people know what the team is up to and also so teams who have a use case for Voice know who to come to.

Science blog flash briefing skill

The Cancer Research UK science blog skill works on the Alexa flash briefing. You add your chosen news sources and then ask “Alexa, what's my flash briefing” and Alexa will read out the headlines from the sources you've chosen.

This skill means you can now have the headlines from our science blog featured on your flash briefing. I had the opportunity to write a post for our science blog, which was a great way for me to get to grips with Voice and why we’re looking at it. And after we published the post we found an increase in the amount of people using the skill.

My alcohol tracker

I was lucky to also work on launching the ‘My Alcohol Tracker’ voice skill. You can read more about this skill here. This skill lets you keep track of how much alcohol you’re drinking and aims to raise the awareness of the link between alcohol and cancer. This particular skill was made in partnership with three different teams across the charity, which was a great opportunity for me to meet people in different areas of the business.

I also got involved with the PR team to help launch the skill and they suggested that to increase the chance of the press release getting media attention we could produce a promotional video. We filmed in our Stevenage Superstore with our customers’ reactions. You can view the result here.

The video helped us to launch the skill successfully and a number of media outlets picked it up, most notably The Huffington Post and Vice. It was also watched on CRUK’s Facebook page over 27,000 times.

To sum it up

Working with so many people across these projects was a great opportunity to learn about innovation. You don’t need to have innovation in your job title to innovate and Cancer Research UK has a fantastic progressive attitude that allows innovation to thrive. I look forward to applying what I’ve learnt about innovation in my next role and I am excited to see what the Digital Innovation Team will produce in the coming months.

There are 3 internship cohorts a year and the applications for the summer intake open in March and April. And there's more information on our website if you're interested.

Amelia Hammond

Digital Innovation Intern