If you’re looking for funding for a digital service, these principles can help you write an effective bid. The funders involved in this work all recognised the value of these principles in delivering effective digital services.
Four principles in particular are helpful when pulling a bid together. Use them as a checklist of things that show your funder you have completed the right research and have the right approach to deliver a successful digital project.
Start with user needs and keep them involved. All funders have more applications than funds, so they need to know that your proposal is really meeting a service user’s need. Can you articulate the evidence from user research that identifies a need among your service users?
Understand what’s out there already. Funders need to make the best use of their money, so they need to know what they are funding is really needed, and isn’t duplicating what’s out there already.
Build the right team. You need to give the funder confidence that you will be able to deliver the project through having built the right team of technical, subject and user expertise.
Build for sustainability. Do you have a clear and realistic understanding of the costs of your proposal – taking into account now just the costs to launch the project but ongoing costs?
Your checklist
Start with user needs, and keep them involved
I have researched directly with my user group to understand their needs from their perspective. This means understanding their behaviours, attitudes and needs. For example, I’ve conducted semi-structured interviews with users or undertaken or contextual research
I have a plan to continue to engage with my intended service users over time, such as conducting usability studies
Things you might have:
User needs based on user research
Personas
Jobs to be done
A research plan for ongoing usability testing
Tools you can use:
User needs – the Government Digital Service has great guidance on identifying and writing up user needs
Personas – there’s lot of guidance on the web, this is a helpful overview on Personas
Jobs-to-be-done – this Harvard Business Review article a is useful introductory article, more practitioner-focused information can be found on these dedicated sites jtbd.info and jobstobedone.org
Usability testing – Nielsen Norman group have many good resources like this introduction, Steve Krugg has published two very helpful introductory books
Contextual inquiry, or shadowing – there’s a good introduction here
Form software such as Typeform or Google Forms can be helpful for signing up users for research and gathering short bits of information
I have looked both inside and outside of my sector, in the UK and abroad, to identify services that offer something similar to what I’m trying to do and achieve a similar social outcomes
I have looked both inside and outside of my sector, in the UK and abroad, to identify services that are using a similar process or technology
Things you might have:
Market scan, competitor analysis or map of other services out there already doing something similar
A business canvas showing how your product or service differs from what’s out there
Tools you can use:
Alidade can help you create a plan for finding technology tools that suit your social change project
Charity Catalogue helps nonprofits easily and quickly discover the best online tools and resources
Nesta’s DIY Toolkit has been designed for development practitioners to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results
I have mapped out the likely ongoing cost of the service depending on its growth. That includes future technical development, marketing and staff support costs
I have considered the lifecycle of the service, and when the service might need to change, or be retired. For example by considering it against the GDS stages of an agile project
Things you might have:
An Agile roadmap and a rough budget based on required people and resource
An ethical revenue generation model, so you have the money to evolve the product
Tools you can use:
Agile roadmap. There’s some guidance here and here
Market research document, if you’re using an off-the-shelf tool, check to see if they offer a charity discount. Some of these are listed on the tt-exchange
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!