So, this week the rollercoaster has come to an end, as we have completed the 10-week Definition project and handed in our homework.
Actually, all though we have been sharing our ups and downs here – we have finished on a high.
Collage Arts committed more staff to be part of this developmental process than any of our peer organisations. We did this intentionally because we wanted to build ownership across the organisations which would help us to fast track the next stages.
We started exploring the idea of how we could curate our slate of digital media. We are producing around 10 titles a month. We struggled to curate this content in You Tube in a way that supports the users to view get more information and make connections and links in the community. Our next project is working with the Home Office to help people to apply to the Windrush Compensation Scheme. This is a case in point – being able to link easily to other sources of information would have made this dissemination easier.
As we thought about the needs of our service users - we made a clear distinction between content creators (around 500-800 people a year who attend our workshops) and content users – the 15,000 plus viewings we get for the work they create.
At this point we were encouraged to work with one of our user groups (we have around 5 different groups of content producers) and we selected young people. We then thought more holistically about the communications with the content producers. Since 2019 there has been a significant shift in our work, which has moved away from short-term project work, in favour of longer-term relationships with content producers who may work with us over many years.
This created some real tensions in the team. Some team members wanted to drop the curation of digital content and focus purely on improving the communications platform. Others had been through the Discovery Process and knew we had robust evidence that we could move towards better content curation. This would speak to our core values of giving people who do not usually get a platform to share their thoughts with as wide an audience as possible.
This was the low point, but because we addressed this at this point, we build a consensus in the organisation about what we should do.
We have talked about the process of surveys and testing our prototype. And this made us more confident that we were right to pursue the dual approach.
It was at the very end of the prototype review that we had an "aha" moment and realised that we needed to think of our content management as if it were any other social media. Why is it that simplicity in design is always so hard?
So, we know what we need to move towards prototypes that will bolt on to our Wordpress website. We have finished on a high – but we are a little up in the air.
There are elements we know we can work on in-house and others that will need the support of an agency. But, we have also moved away from our initial aspiration which was to develop tools that the sector could use. We were required to work with a network of 10 like - organisations and think about how our learning could influence our sectors. This hasn’t figured in any of the support we have had over the past 10-weeks. The programme we have been on has been pragmatical and has encouraged us to think about our own approaches and solutions – not how we meet the wider brief of creating improvements for our sector. When we report back to our network of 10, I fear we will not be the only ones who think we are left in the air.
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