How Shelter overcame a key digital challenge

The UK is not just facing a housing shortage. It’s facing a housing crisis. And Shelter knows that to achieve their mission of ending homelessness and bad housing, they need to do digital well – exceptionally well.

 

Shelter realised they needed to be able to use digital culture, approaches, and applications successfully, and importantly, at scale. And they knew that couldn’t be achieved by one centralised team of experts or consultants.

According to Caspar Below, Head of Digital, they needed to “align multiple digital teams across the organisation yet give those teams more autonomy to do what they are good at”.

 

They chose what Caspar calls a “lean approach” that gives more power to each team. “It also meant that an increasing roll-out of digital tools and ways of working wouldn’t automatically create more bottlenecks through greater centralisation.”

 

 

How did Shelter develop their framework?

 

In 2018, Shelter commissioned a digital maturity audit to benchmark their work. Throughout the following year, they ran a series of workshops with in-house teams to get a greater understanding of ways of working, practices, goals and governance.

 

The findings of these workshops evolved to form the basis of Shelter’s Digital Framework. Its principles, practices, and guidelines create a universally agreed set of tools that enable Shelter to deliver high-quality and impactful products and services.

 

The framework is being released in phases, with the next scheduled for May 2022. This section will focus on inclusive design and language, anti-racist practice and ethics, user research, and tools to support work with external partners.

 

Developing the digital framework was, and is, an iterative process, with new versions and improvements being released on a regular basis. In fact, every page of the framework signs off asking for comments and feedback.

 

 

What underpins the framework?

 

The framework has four key themes. All step away from centralised control and describe a way of working which is more inclusive, agile, and effective.

• Devolved publishing, means that those teams closest to Shelter’s audiences are responsible for delivering any regular digital work
• Principles, guidelines, and standards have helped to normalise digital into their working culture, meaning they can focus more clearly on users’ needs
• Aligning teams through Communities of Practice means that digital can be scaled more efficiently and effectively
• And finally, an agile approach means that business models are consistently adapted to deliver products and services that work for their users

The outcome? An adaptive and agile organisation that can respond to opportunities efficiently and effectively. 

 

 

What’s in the framework?

 

The robust framework itself outlines Shelter’s digital culture including how digital teams work and collaborate. It also has a wealth of guides for all things digital, including how to write online content, Shelter’s house style, content SEO best practice and video production guides.

 

And to make sure Shelter’s communications are as accessible as possible, the framework includes a comprehensive section explaining how to write accessible content and how to make social media accessible.

 

 

Communities of Practice

 

Communities of Practice underpin the framework and have helped to bring about greater collaboration. These non-hierarchical groups bring together professionals of the same discipline from across the organisation, and currently focus around content producers, web development, UX, insight, product, service managers, email champions, best practice advocates, and digital champions.

 

The Communities of Practice meet regularly to share experience, and to write and review guidance – for example, on how to create accessible user journeys. According to Nate Sheach, former Senior Content Owner, Shelter Scotland, they’re a great success: “Shelter’s UX Community of Practice is a thriving space of insight that leads to innovation. It’s where a blank canvas of a practitioner scratching their head becomes proficient in everything from facilitation skills to complex process and service visualisation.”

 

 

How’s the framework been received by internal stakeholders?

 

“Obviously releasing anything like this always generates a buzz”, says Caspar. “But there were about two years between the internal decision to take this general approach and the public release last summer.

 

We filled that time with experiments and working out which approaches suited our strategic challenge best. The need constantly changes, so our response has to grow and develop to stay current.

 

“Organisationally it’s been a steep learning curve. Most legacy organisations struggle to move from a project mindset to a product and service mindset, but Shelter knows what’s at stake and there has been a positive organisational commitment to use digital and tech to scale our impact.”

 

 

Working in the open

 

The framework is being shared under a Creative Commons License. This gives other organisations the opportunity to learn from all that Shelter has developed, and adapt the framework for their own causes – without needing to start from scratch.

 

According to Caspar: “Externally, we received a lot of positive and constructive feedback, especially from the wider tech sector and other charities that face similar issues, but also smaller charities that may not have the infrastructure to develop something like this in-house who were happy that we shared our workings.

 

“The content from Shelter’s digital framework is open source and some charities have taken advantage of that and iterated some of the content further for their own purposes, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach for digital transformation.”

 

 

What would they have done differently?

 

Most of the digital framework was developed and written by in-house staff on top of their day job. “We didn’t want to pause ongoing work as that’s where we drew our insight from,” says Caspar.

 

“It’s possible that investing more time or budget into dedicated capacity would have helped us to realise the value of the framework sooner, but there have been benefits to going at a very deliberate pace and developing and testing the concepts in-house, which really helped the internal adoption.”

 

 

Finding the golden thread

 

And Caspar has advice for charities thinking of following suit: “If other charities did only one thing, then I’d recommend to work out how to make the golden thread from their organisational goals to the day-to-day opportunity selection and decision making in digital teams more visible. That way digital teams are empowered to work in a goal-driven way.

 

“It will make the best of their existing digital capacity, before considering structural changes or further investment.”