S1: #5 - Key milestones — service design phase one and post-lock-down hairdresser appointment

Yvonne Campbell
6 min readJul 9, 2020

Sorry for the recent silence — we have reached quite a critical point in our design phase which has taken up most of my time the last few weeks, hence rolling two weeks’ worth of week notes into one. I am currently using my hairdresser’s appointment (yay!) to write this. However, this could be an example of multi-tasking going wrong… I might have inadvertently agreed to ‘go pink’ by mistake — I was too busy reflecting on the Theory of Change when I was asked about what I wanted.

What’s been going on?

  • I’ve been to the hairdressers obviously! But on a more serious note….
  • The Theory of Change continues to evolve (see below) and the ideation of the funding schemes has continued — so lots of thinking time and co-ordinating feedback with various people.
  • Branding work is underway. Red Stone are working with a group of people that took part in the co-design workshops, starting to consider a name for the funding programme and tone of voice.
  • Hyphen8 has been scoping out how we could use Salesforce Community — the online social platform from Salesforce that enables organisations to connect customers, partners, and employees with each other.
  • Business as usual stuff: admin, planning, finance, project team and project board meetings etc.
  • I also attended my first BSA Council meeting. I am always fascinated to see how governance works in different organisations, especially as a Trustee of two charities myself. As expected, a lot of time was focused on finances and the impact of COVID but it was also really interesting to hear the different views of Council members about the direction of travel for the BSA’s next strategy.
  • But what I am most excited about is that this week Valia Giannakaki (Festival Operations Manager) has started working with me for three days a week for the remaining development phase of the project. Valia is an experienced project manager who usually works on the logistics of the BSA’s events — so I am looking forward to her helping me operationalise the funding schemes once we have them designed. Valia’s background is in civil engineering but she is an Astronomy geek at heart.

Reflections/ learnings over the last few weeks

This week, I want to focus on my reflections on some of the key insights from the literature review and where we are at with Theory of Change.

Literature Review

  • One of the things that I was most struck by at the beginning of this development period was the evidence base around who exactly is underserved when it comes to public engagement with health research. I was convinced that there must be a science to it and someone just hadn’t let me into the secret yet, but the literature review also reflected this.
  • The limited research pointed to a few groups that were not unexpected: minority ethnic communities, individuals with long term conditions and those from lower-socio economic backgrounds. We therefore used this as the starting point for our co-design workshops.
  • The lack of an evidence base around who exactly is underserved in health research continues to bug me though so I have started having productive conversations with Wellcome and others who have also come up against this in their work and how to address this. It may not be in time for the launch of this funding programme but could help us further down the line if we decide to fund in multiple rounds.
  • There was a clear and simple message that people are motivated to participate in things that they see have a clear relevance to them and their interests. Therefore, how do we ensure that the ideas that come though this funding programme will be of interest to the target audience
  • This funding programme aims to connect communities and the research ecosystem, some of which may be brand new, others building on and evolving through trying new collective approaches. If this was easy, people would be doing it already and we wouldn’t need to be investing in it. Therefore, we need to allow space, time and resource for convening, collaboration and partnerships.
  • Simple transparent process — YES, YES, YES! This was one my priorities in the UK Portfolio at The National Lottery Community. Even if we have some more complicated internal stuff that goes on in the background in order to assess and administer grants, it is vital that this is as easy as possible for grant holders to navigate and understand where they are at within that process and how decisions will be made.

Reflections on Theory of Change

  • Following an initial draft of the Theory of Change for a workshop with BSA and Wellcome at the beginning of the month, TSIP presented a further iteration. We had a productive Project Board meeting where we once again pushed ourselves hard to consider if we have got it quite right.
  • Our main observation was that we had started to focus on a specific area of health research — community members conducting health research. Whilst this is something we would absolutely love to see as part of the funding programme, we felt it was too narrow of a focus. We wanted to leave space for a whole range of other public engagement activities in health research, but all of which should closely involve the community.
  • Whilst thinking we need to broaden what we want to fund to increase public engagement in health research, we also wondered whether we were defining the scope and purpose enough.
  • We were also questioning if we all had the same understanding of various definitions being used in the Theory of Change.
  • An outstanding question remains: should we only accept applications that are led by the community or are we happy to accept applications where they are not the lead but have significant involvement in the application. Either way, we are proposing that this fund is not applicable for any proposal that does not have community involvement. However, we need to ensure the outcomes in the Theory of Change reflects all of those involved in the funding programme.
  • I think this next iteration of the Theory of Change has thrown up further questions for us to debate and challenge ourselves and each other.
  • My main takeaway is how HARD this is to get right. This must be a significant barrier if organisations are expected to have nailed outcomes and the Theory of Change before a funding application is submitted without support to help think it through; especially when looking for new and diverse voices who may not have been exposed to thinking in this way before.

Achievements

On Thursday, we received the phase two deliverables from TSIP which included a further iteration of the Theory of Change (following the feedback I outlined above), along with the draft prototypes from the funding schemes. How far we have come in such a short space of time is certainly an achievement that deserves to be celebrated! TSIP have been easy to work with, taking our varied feedback onboard and turning things around in a matter of days. No doubt there will be further feedback and iterations of the phase one deliverables, as I think naturally, more questions get raised than answered — all part of the development process I would say. But it is definitely time to stop and recognise this significant milestone.

Next week, you can expect a further update on the next iteration of the Theory of Change as well as the current thinking on what the funding programme might look like based on the co-design workshops, literature review and stakeholder interviews.

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