How charities are benefitting from J.P. Morgan volunteers

In 2022, more than four in five charities see digitisation as either a much greater, or more of a priority, as a result of the pandemic. Demand for digital services continues to rise, with 48% of charities seeing this, and 53% offering new online services accordingly.

Being able to offer such services, however, depends on the digital skills in the workforce. According to the 2022 Charity Digital Skills report, upskilling staff and volunteers was identified as the second most important challenge, faced by 38% of charities. More than one in five charities say they are recruiting for new digital roles, or changing roles to include these responsibilities, while 16% are outsourcing more work to freelancers and agencies.

Indeed, upskilling does not necessarily mean new hires – it can be done with education, training, keeping up-to-date with digital trends, and importantly, looking outside of the charity sector for help.

Tech-for-good programmes, such as J.P. Morgan’s Force for Good, offer charities vital skills that can help them accelerate their mission and meet their digital challenges. To date, Force for Good has helped nearly 900 charities in their digital transformation since 2013, including the International Rescue Committee, disaster relief charity RE:ACT, and many more.

Below, we look at how J.P. Morgan’s developers helped health and wellbeing charity, Brook, continue to build momentum after a boom in users during COVID-19.

How Brook overcame its digital challenges

Brook is a health and wellbeing charity that offers young people help and advice on everything from physical to mental health. The charity provides outreach, education services and training for professionals across the UK.

During COVID-19, Brook experienced a surge in online users of their Brook Learn e-learning platform. The platform launched in 2016 and has since grown to more than 27,000 registered users in 2022.

But with such a large boost in beneficiaries accessing support online, the charity’s existing technology needed to stretch to accommodate it. Helen Anderson, Digital Manager at Brook, notes that their platform had “started to creak” under the weight of their new momentum. A solution was needed, but the question for Brook was “Do we make improvements to the tech we have, or is it more sustainable to move to a new platform?”

Brook did not need to have all the answers itself. Having learned about J.P. Morgan’s Force for Good programme, Brook applied and was matched with a team of developers and project leads to find a solution to its most pressing digital challenges.

“We had an idea of what we wanted to do,” says Helen. “Next it was just really getting into the nitty gritty of how to reach our ultimate goals.”

With the J.P. Morgan team, Brook looked at the viability of a range of options focused on sticking with its existing platform or migrating to another. These took into account a range of factors including the team’s technical ability, costs, ease of implementation, and ongoing support afterwards.

“Some teams would build complex solutions, but we knew from the early stages we needed to make sure the system was sustainable,” explains Naser, one of J.P. Morgan’s developers who worked on the project. “Simpler is always better.”

Indeed, as Chibuzor, another developer, points out, migration is a complex process that cannot be done quickly – moving to another platform risked leaving Brook stranded while they moved to a new solution.

Ultimately, Brook and the Force for Good team decided that Brook’s current platform still had life left in it. Being able to adapt their existing solution meant that Brook didn’t have to move to a new solution, which meant the impact of the project could be felt sooner.

The project was wide-ranging in its scope. Brook wanted to redesign its landing pages, improving registration and payment process for users. The team had to look at what the different routes to registration could be, accounting for the ways that people do their purchasing. For example, if purchasing a course on behalf of a school, they had to explore options for people to be able to enroll others.

The charity also wanted to improve the way it analysed data. Data from 27,000 users had so much potential to inform the way that Brook operates and communicates with them in the future, but before Force for Good, that data was “just sitting there.”. To be able to understand its users, Brook needed to be able to have a more comprehensive overview of who was registering and interacting on their platform, and what was driving them to engage.

J.P. Morgan’s volunteers helped create a live dashboard with key metrics for looking at analytics, making it easier for Brook to make informed decisions, as well as demonstrate the impact of its work and progress to commissions and local authorities. The dashboard provides instant visualisation of how many people have registered, how they are rating their courses, and how they are interacting with the charity.

Since the project concluded, Brook has already seen improvement in the proportion of those registered going on to complete their courses and advance their knowledge and confidence. The charity was also able to group their courses into ‘learner journeys’ designed to encourage people to further their wellbeing education by highlighting further additional resources.

“We’ve maintained the momentum built during COVID-19,” Helen says. “We have been able to double what we were before COVID-19, maintain regular mailings, and improve the return rates.”

How Force for Good provided a boost

The skills and expertise of J.P. Morgan’s Force for Good volunteers was invaluable on the project, but so too was the time and money saved in finding a solution to Brook’s digital transformation challenges.

Funding and resource challenges means that charities don’t often have the time or money to explore technological solutions to their challenges and it can be difficult to match problems with answers.

“Scoping probes aren’t funded. Time to fix what’s there sometimes gets a bit lost,” Helen states. “It was great knowing we had a group of people who had the answers and the possibility to find them.”

She also notes that it was helpful being able to talk to familiar faces on the project, meeting regularly to discuss progress and direct outcomes. For a team of four in-house digital employees, it was not an overwhelming process for Brook in terms of time and resources.

Indeed, that’s where the real value of the Force for Good programme lies. Helen points out that “with tight budgets and funding challenges many charities may risk overlooking the value of ‘in-kind’ support. At Brook we had to make the case to senior leaders that the additional expertise and resources brought by the project would justify the team time invested in participating.

That meant clearly aligning our project vision to Brook’s strategic objectives, and demonstrating how the project would make a positive impact even without any income attached. Ultimately that approach paid off and our senior leadership team were really impressed with the outcome.”

Force for Good saved Brook “significant” time – if J.P Morgan were invested in identifying the solution from the beginning, Brook did not need to lay out time with developers later down the line.

“Force for Good is definitely worth looking into if you have challenges and don’t have the answers,” says Helen. “It’s a great opportunity to say, “This is where we’re struggling, what do you think will help?”

“Be brave. In my experience, charities sometimes have a tendency to only go out when they have fully understood the problem. We didn’t give J.P. Morgan instructions but goals and challenges. Force for Good helped unpick the main problems we needed to address.”

Force for Good today

J.P. Morgan’s Force for Good program is not open for entry until later this year but charities can find out more about the initiative here.

Charities experiencing digital challenges, but that are perhaps unsure of the right skills or solutions needed, can email questions to the Force for Good team at force.for.good@jpmorgan.com.

Charities that are interested in applying can also download a list of application questions to circulate with their colleagues in preparation for the next cohort.