As user-centred practitioners, we are familiar with the challenge of creating impactful services that meet the needs of the people who use them, while also aligning with business need and policy outcomes. While many of the tools in our kit aim to achieve this, having a method to create services that are not only well designed but also have a measurable impact on the lives of service users, is very appealing.

To test our hypothesis, we built out an in-depth, interactive workshop which we ran with some talented people from our own teams and across government. Before we share the insight, let’s first look at how we brought the participants on a journey to understand impact mapping and its value.

What do we mean when we speak about impact?

As a starting point for the workshops, we asked our participants the following:

What does ‘having an impact’ look and feel like to you?

We received a variety of interesting responses, including:

• motivating
• scary
• empowering
• it can feel demoralising
• daunting
• it can give meaning
• it’s all relativ

For us as a design team, ‘impact’ is the sustained change that you aim to see within people or environments who directly or indirectly engage with your work.

We break ‘impact’ down into three key elements:

• Impact is the sustained effect of what we deliver, over the long-term
• Impact is something important and meaningful to our users, not just to the service or the organisation
• Impact happens at different scales and with different perspectives – individual, organisational, community, policy, society, planet

How do we articulate ‘impact’ in practice?

To articulate ‘impact’ in practice, we use ‘impact statements’. These statements summarise the impact you want to achieve with your work. They might actually look similar to your project’s or organisation’s vision statements.

For example, an impact statement may be:

• ‘Higher levels of safety across communities in the UK’ ​
• ‘More collaboration and respect between teams’​
• ‘A reduced carbon footprint by 2025’

To ensure that impact statements are person-centred and relevant, it’s best to use research and community engagement to inform them. We would also encourage you to keep them succinct – one or two sentences is ideal.

Impact statements form a fundamental part of the overall impact mapping process, and in our workshops, we asked participants to come armed with impact statements that were relevant to their current work.

We made sure the impact statements were the right ‘scale’ by assessing whether they lived at a societal, organisational or individual impact level. Focusing on individual or organisational impact can be helpful if you are looking to achieve impact on things like team dynamics, project outputs, culture within an organisation, or growth. However, for this particular mapping exercise, we wanted to focus on societal impact – this leads to outcomes like equality, diversity, inclusion, justice, wellbeing and resilience.

What is impact mapping?

Impact mapping is a strategic process. It’s a tool for setting clear intent around the positive impact we want to achieve, and mapping the journey for getting there​.​

It’s a method for gathering team consensus on our longer-term objectives and challenging our assumptions around how we think positive change occurs. ​​

The collaborative and inclusive process is as important as the output. Ensuring a range of perspectives are represented is critical to a good output. It’s also helpful if the process is facilitated by an external party to help hold the space for those contributing. ​​

Impact mapping forms the foundations for what we measure, enabling us to learn whether what we’re doing is having a positive effect​. It helps us contextualise our service, helping us to see the bigger picture of we contribute to long-term change.​​

Impact mapping can take a variety of forms, and a range of frameworks – including the ‘5 dimensions of impact’, logic models, outcomes stars and the theory of change. Which framework you choose, and the way it looks, matters less than 1) who is in the room and 2) the discourse it generates.​​

How does impact mapping help us?

Impact mapping is a useful way of ensuring we have a shared understanding of what we’re aiming for in our work. It helps us to:​

• Think more long-term​: It encourages us to place what we’re doing in the context of our longer-term goals​
• Challenge assumptions: We can challenge our assumptions and develop hypotheses about if and how positive change is likely to happen in our work​​
• Establish a process​: Impact mapping establishes a process for setting impact targets that go beyond our day-to-day, and a roadmap for getting there​​
• Focus on small steps whilst working towards the long-term​: We focus on the journey of change and the short-term steps laddering up to long-term impact​
• Measure what works:​ It provides the foundations for what to measure, enabling us to understand what works, and how we’ll go about it​

What we learned

We’ve taken some time to digest our findings from the various workshops. Here we explore some of the key themes and takeaways:

1. Impact mapping needs a coordinator and requires a level of practice.
2. Scale and scope should be both real and achievable, as well as holistic and ambitious.
3. Identifying the distinction between outputs/delivery and outcomes can be difficult
4. There is a great opportunity for impact mapping to be a co-design activity, with co-production to reach shared definitions.
5. Use research and community engagement to ensure you know the problem you’re trying to solve is something that matters to those you serve.
6. Bringing different perspectives into the room is vital – from policy leads to software engineers. The diverse perspectives and context will make the impact map all the richer.
7. Impact mapping success can be dependent on the personalities in the room – be mindful of introverts and extroverts, and make sure everyone’s voices are heard.
8. It can be easier to focus on the short-term than on the medium and long-term
9. Iteration is key. Use your impact map as a living document.
10. The benefits come from the discourse that a map encourages, not just the map itself. This is why we typically say that impact mapping is both a process and a tool.
11. Be willing to challenge and be challenged. There’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when exploring an impact map.

In summary

We started with a hypothesis. Can impact mapping be used as part of the designer’s process to create even better services?

We’ve explored impact mapping during a series of in-depth interactive workshops, carefully analysing the discussions and their outputs. What we discovered was that yes, impact mapping is a great opportunity for organisations to create better services. But it needs to be used as part of a wider kit bag of tools.

Next steps

It’s clear from our sessions that impact mapping can be a powerful tool that not only helps us but also helps our teams and our service users. It can help us gain a better understanding of the various factors that influence the success of a service, and break down silos, particularly in larger programmes of work.

Fully understanding the scope of impact mapping and its limitations is a good place to start. Following our suggested next steps will help ensure that your impact mapping process is useful, inclusive and in itself, impactful.

Here are some key steps to take to introduce impact mapping into your team today:

1. Prioritise – Impact mapping can feel overwhelming, because so many potential outcomes are generated in a short period of time. Prioritise your map – which programmes or outcomes you might want to focus on first? What aligns most to current strategy? What is high impact/low effort (shortest circuit through the map)?
2. Further Research – If conversations in your impact mapping session felt like they were rooted in a lot of assumptions, conduct research to learn more about the problem you’re solving, and the best ways to go about it.
3. Operationalise – Take your outcomes and plan how to implement them in practice. What changes in services, teams, ways of working, ways of measuring, might there need to be?
4. Conflict Resolution – Impact maps can cause conflict in opinions and approaches. You may need to facilitate a session where these conflicts are managed and worked through.
5. Write a narrative – The more confident you become with your map, the more you can build out a narrative around it. To learn more about narratives, read more on their role in Theory of Change.
6. Share your maps – Look at the language and accessibility of your work and get it ready to share with a wider set of stakeholders. Be sure to set expectations on what stage/fidelity the map is at.
7. Revisit your measurement plans – What new insights and metrics might you need to capture to build confidence in what works?

Impact mapping is a key enabler of collaboration – supporting teams in gathering around a common goal and breaking it down into achievable steps. It is also a strong motivator – often in our work, we don’t always get to see the outcome of longer-term initiatives immediately. Knowing exactly how our work contributes to a longer-term goal helps teams stay motivated and reminds them of their role in the bigger picture.

Read More Skills & Talent

The post Is impact mapping a service designer’s secret weapon? appeared first on Digital Leaders.

First, ‘stuff government is doing’.  Paul Scully MP, Minister of State for Digital, opened by detailing some of the current government initiatives aimed at supporting digital innovation: these include the creation of a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; a government science and technology framework; a Government Office for Technology Transfer; and £20bn in R&D investment. There are certainly some heartening things going on: later in the day, Megan Lee Devlin, COO at CDDO, outlined some sensible activities Cabinet Office is undertaking the reinvigorate government’s ‘transformation’ programme, including the roadmap, and a skills programme; on the same panel, Dr Shruti Kohli, Head of Data Science (Innovation) at DWP, offered a fascinating insight into how an innovation group in a major government department is actually run on the ground.

And – that ‘on the ground’ thing: throughout the day, we heard fascinating examples of actual use of every single one of the above emerging technologies ‘on the ground’ to innovate – from use of AR/VR to engage more citizens in their local planning processes, to advanced analytics to triage hospital A&E data to identify potential instances of domestic violence. There’s no doubt at all that lots of innovation using emerging tech is actually happening ‘out there’.

But – and this is significant – we have some major ethical questions to think through.  Particularly fascinating on ethics was Neil Lawrence, Professor of Machine Learning at University of Cambridge, who drew a sharp distinction between, for example, the ability of large language AI like ChatGPT to interpolate based on existing data/human behaviour, rather than to extrapolate (predict with validity).  This is because such AI “cannot predict where we have never been”. Neil went on to develop ‘the great AI fallacy’, namely a tendency to expect the same things from AI as from humans.  Human-machine behaviour is much less predictable than machine behaviour, and the trust (also mentioned by Ctrl-Shift’s Liz Brandt and others) needed for the digital economy to work relies on continuing involvement, and accountability, from humans; therefore, any vision of come centralised AI, and supporting processes, would never be trusted by people because it would have no obligation –  (paraphrasing Onora O’Neill) since trust and obligation form two sides of the same coin. In this sense, it seems to me that AI cannot, by definition, be ethical in and of itself: we need to include humans at every stage in the process. Perhaps such thinking might help to address Elizabeth Vega’s question to delegates about ‘what it will take for people to trust and use innovative new services’?

Continuing in the ethical vein, Alex Davies Jones MP, Shadow Minister for Technology and the Digital Economy, underlined the need to avoid consolidation of market power around ‘big tech’, and to address the significant current disparity in access to digital infrastructure around the UK. Such concerns were strongly articulated in our final panel on inclusivity, chaired by Leigh Smyth, Chair of the DPA Community Board, which named digital inclusion as a human right; called for increased investment in ‘welfare tech’; and in which Leigh cited the startling, and disturbing, statistic that of the 1 in 5 adults with a disability, ¼ have never used the internet at all.

Linked to this ethical theme was the usual theme about skills and culture.  However, rather than just bemoaning the lack of digital skills available to government (this is significant: I note that the recent NAO report cites a has been a 20% reduction in digital, data and technology apprenticeships from 800 in October 2021, down to 637 in December 2022; and a 7% increase in government digital, data and technology vacancies – from 3,900 in April 2022, to 4,100 in October 2022), there was a fascinating discussion about government’s mandate to innovate in the first place.  Jon McGinty, MD Gloucester City Council and Chair of Local Government Digital, stated that his residents simply would not grant his council the mandate to experiment with scarce public money ahead of much-needed services – and this concern about where it’s ‘OK to innovate’ and where not, resonated through many of the subsequent discussions; it became clear that there is more funding, and space, for innovation in central government, for example.

Relatedly on local services, our afternoon keynote, Theo Blackwell, CDO for London, underscored the need to ‘fix the plumbing’ before getting too ‘boosterish’ about the possibilities of emerging tech.  He’s in good company: I note that the majority of the emerging technologies listed on Gartner’s Impact Radar 2023 are about building the advanced infrastructure that will be needed to run advanced user layers such as AR/VR, for example.  Accordingly, he detailed a number of initiatives London is undertaking to ‘address the copper legacy’.  However, Theo also pointed to the effort that goes into just getting councils to collaborate in driving through some of these cross-London infrastructural projects that must surely benefit all of their residents.

And this brings me onto the last theme of the day: that the basic twentieth-century, siloed operating model of government is essentially broken.  As well as in Theo’s comment, this was very apparent in AWS’ Mike Beaven’s panel, bringing together digital and adult social care specialists from Redbridge and Hackney Councils, where Hackney’s Emma McGowan identified a lack of collaboration as the ‘biggest barrier to success’.  It was felt that boroughs should not be duplicating their digital design teams since in general, ‘one size usually fits all’ in local government – but that unfortunately there was little provision for sharing innovation across local public services (although in another panel Katy Armstrong Deputy Director for Digital Service at DLUC had detailed a few helpful initiatives, it was clear that given the national scale of the problem, these were small and underfunded).  Finally, it was in Leigh’s panel on inclusivity that it became clear that myriad, largely uncoordinated innovations at local level will never be enough without wholesale change to the collective operating model of local services.  We Are Digital’s Matt Adam spoke with passion about the huge social impact of government’s inability to overcome the fissiparous and outdated barriers of organisational demarcation that plague those trying to make a real difference in today’s local services.

And there we ended our innovation conference: an unusually full day of high-quality reflections, and discussions, about initiatives, ethics, culture, infrastructure, and collaboration (or barriers preventing collaboration).  I was left convinced that society will have a pressing need for many more fora as good as Digital Leader’s in the future, to address these critical problems if our public institutions, and civil society itself, is to survive the unprecedented and current demographic, fiscal, and environmental pressures that our public servants must tackle each and every day.

Read More Innovation

The post Public Sector Innovation Conference – Chair’s Summary appeared first on Digital Leaders.

I know this is embarrassing to admit, but I don’t really understand the cloud. Sure, I can describe what it does. I can even tell you all about the underlying technologies that make it work and how they fit together. With a fair wind, I might be able to walk you through the set up of a large cloud data centre and its operation. But, I’m not sure that really gets to the heart of the opportunities and challenges presented by the cloud.

The post A cloudy outlook for your digital transformation? appeared first on Digital Leaders.

Impact is currently measured in the humanitarian and development sector through proxy indicators and outputs. How many PPR kits were delivered, or was a shelter constructed? As I have learnt over 25 years, just because a house is built does not mean that the family has been positively impacted. Has that process forced the family into debt meaning they couldn’t afford to pay for health care for their unwell infant? Or have they been relocated away from employment opportunities, so they can’t live in it anyway?

In the corporate and public sectors, impact is measured through proxy indicators and checklists, with greenwashing and box ticking being used to protect brands from consumer flight, and politicians from a scandal. Anyone involved with an audit will be aware of the processes involved to ensure that the locations chosen are the top performing and cleaned up in advance of the visit, and that the choice of people spoken to is controlled and, in some cases, tracked. Media scandals about greenwashing abound.

Impact in technology programs, Web3, blockchain and Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) is currently being measured through scraping the internet for data, drones and artificial intelligence. While the data here is more timely and larger in scale, the issues with biased algorithms are evident, whilst the most marginalised have no trace on the internet so remain hidden.

With a growing sense of urgency and responsibility around the climate crisis and its social and environmental impact, it is increasingly essential that funds are spent on real impact. The knowledge and ability to measure that impact is becoming increasingly important as it is driving where both the consumers and investors (private and public) funds are being invested.

The normal corporate drivers however, across all sectors, encourage measurements of impact to be grey and adaptable by engineering in costly and complex self-reporting systems. My sense is that with the impending crisis looming, and with growing consumer awareness and education driving a stronger market incentive to deliver impact, it is critical to ensure that the measurement of that impact is transparent, equitable, simple and scalable. 

Is it not time simply to ask the affected person their opinion of the impact: to ask for their feedback through a safe and independent mechanism? This would give agency to those affected, not to mention enhancing their sense of dignity through having their voice heard. It would also uncover the complexity of the situation and reveal how to adapt to ensure impact more efficiently. Most importantly, as has been evidenced so far by Talk To Loop, seeking feedback using a safe and independent mechanism keeps people safe.

25 years ago, when I started working in humanitarian action, speaking at scale to local people was not possible. I was only able to speak with HQ and my family once a month on a Thuraya satellite phone. But now the technology exists to connect us all, directly, at scale and on an ongoing basis. 

Institutions who embed people’s direct feedback into their business model have been able to deliver trust and significant growth.

AirBnB for example, has made sharing a part of your home with a complete stranger off the internet, commonplace. Trust has been designed into the core of their service model. Feedback from hosts and guests is transparently available to all sides. For almost a decade now, this kind of direct exchange and transparency is being baked into similar business models using the same technology.

Those with less power have always felt disenfranchised and abandoned; from the bonded factory labourer to the trafficked teenager; from the poor cocoa farmer to the family whose home has just been flooded. If we ask the owner of a new house or the hospital that received the PPE kits, or the staff working in a garment factory, about the impact they are experiencing, then we can flip that sense of disenfranchisement on its head. These people can report dumping of waste in their waterways, slave labour, and good employment practices. They can be given agency to inform where impact funds go, even if they are not the all-powerful consumer. 

Today’s technology, as never before, enables people to report to independent actors anonymously. Data can be aggregated but people can be supported directly. That sounds like a more effective currency of impact to me. Transparent, equitable, simple and scalable.

More thought leadership

The post The currency of impact appeared first on Digital Leaders.

Reaching net zero will be enormously challenging, and at the same time, it is everyone’s responsibility. The reception was about highlighting the best practice on delivering Net Zero initiatives already happening in the UK.

Some of those attending, including Dr. Mattie Yeta from CGI (pictured above), had just arrived back from COP27 in Egypt and they told us how inspiring it was to return to meet a UK-wide group of Net Zero leaders. It did feel like the room was full of the vanguard of those delivering the important mission of reaching Net Zero, and there was a real buzz.

If you take a look at the makeup of the list, it is made up of 60% SMEs and public sector initiatives, with charities and individuals making up the rest. It was great to see that all the UK’s countries and regions are represented in this first year’s list.

Talking to those in attendance it was clear that the list is seen as showcasing the work already underway, the individuals, initiatives, products and services cross-sector and across the UK helping to drive forward the net-zero transition. Most importantly the list offers others with  tangible solutions and inspiration for their own net zero strategies in order to transform our world into a sustainable one.

If I was to pick out some highlights from the list I would definitely include some of the SMEs. They include a company placing solar panels on the roof of car parks to deliver electricity to car charging ports, making electric cars even more sustainable; a company that reduces the carbon dioxide content of cement by 85%; a business that is using an innovative new way to recycle high value metals from discarded computer circuit boards; and a new satellite technology that allows the measurement of the thermal emissions of any structure on the planet from space. 

The public sector list members include: a project helping local and central government reduce carbon emissions through greener public procurement; a local authority tackling bad landlords by using digital tools to identify and improve the worst energy efficient private rented homes; an arms length government agency set up to provide funding to the public sector to improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions and lower energy bills; and a UK wide schools initiative that brings together networks of students to connect and collaborate that represented schools from across the UK at COP26 in Glasgow.

To add an element of competition, we held a vote across the Digital Leaders community ahead of the reception to choose a ‘People’s Choice’ from the list. With over 5,600 votes overall, the ultimate winners were the UK Schools Sustainability Network. 

I do urge you to take a look to find your own inspiration. The whole Net Zero 50 list can be seen here.

Read More Net Zero

The post 50 reasons to be positive about reaching Net Zero in the UK appeared first on Digital Leaders.

This year, Director Sue Keogh, Digital Strategist Clark Chapman, and Head of Creative Marisa Crimlis-Brown got to the heart of what helps content cut through the noise across social media, allowing us to hone in on critical data to make better campaign decisions.

Watch the talk to hear our insights from three recent Sookio campaigns across healthcare, arts and culture, and the public sector.

We break down our rationale, from content ideation and messaging, to advertising strategies and data analysis.

Here’s a quick overview of the insights and campaigns we shared:

Define your audience and goals

Case study: NHS 111 campaign

This campaign was for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

The goal was to help reduce strain on A&E during the winter months when Covid cases were rising. Much of their audience was unfamiliar with 111 and the wealth of services provided, so would instead lean on 999, which put significant pressure on over-stretched hospital services.

The challenge was getting to those hard-to-reach audiences in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which included parents of young children, communities where English wasn’t the audience’s first language, and those living in rural locations.

Running on Facebook and Instagram, the campaign got nearly 700k views using a mix of organic and paid activity.

Campaign takeaways:

• Learn from your audience. Start broad and narrow with time

• Don’t set too many variables

• Don’t rely on platforms as your sole sour of data

Which platforms and content?

Case study: University of Cambridge Museums

Come On In was a campaign that ran from summer to Christmas 2021, as all these cultural venues were opening up again as we moved out of the lockdown period!

Funded by the Cultural Recovery Fund, the goal was to encourage footfall in museums and other cultural venues in Cambridge. There was a genuine need to make sure this campaign worked effectively, particularly after this sector had been hit so hard by Covid and enforced closures.

The goal wasn’t just to get audiences back in museums, it was to get local residents to visit for the first time. As we’ll explain, the activity was largely based on Instagram Reels, coupled with paid activity on Facebook, video content and an ident.

It got pretty impressive results!

• 800k impressions across Cambridgeshire

• Nearly 6k clicks to the website

• 19k video views

…and all for a pretty modest ad budget.

Campaign takeaways:

• Be realistic in order to do the best job within the budget and resources available

• Don’t get hung up on perfection

• Don’t be afraid to make changes (but don’t change everything at once)

Test and refine, test and refine

Case study: HDC #ThinkLocal

Now we’re going to look at the #ThinkLocal campaign that we ran with Huntingdonshire District Council during the pandemic period. The goal here was to support the local high streets in four market towns.

As with the University of Cambridge Museums, we wanted footfall, and also to get people buying from their brilliant local businesses. Again, we found Facebook to be a particularly effective platform for highly targeted paid activity, along with Instagram and Twitter for regular updates.

We were continually testing and refining, learning from each campaign and applying it to the next.

In just one campaign alone:

• we reached 220k people across Huntingdonshire and the surrounding areas

• our campaigns were featured nearly 800k times on Facebook and Instagram feeds

• we honed in on the humans behind the businesses, using video and photography to tell their stories.

Campaign takeaways:

• Give campaigns time to run, to gather useful data

• Be willing to change your creative vision

• Stay on top of the data with your web team

More thought leadership

The post Finetune your digital marketing to (really) spread your message appeared first on Digital Leaders.

Hosted by technology journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, over 300 gathered to hear who, from the DL100 list 2021, are the 10 category winners and overall Digital Leader of the year. 

The evening was the conclusion of a five month process that saw 700 nominations, 20 judges, 23,000 votes and 100 finalists leading up to last night’s announcement of the top digital individuals and organisations from across the whole of the UK.

The Big prize of the night, Overall Winner of the DL100 and first place went to this year’s Young Digital Leader of the Year, Polly Morgan from the IDEA Foundation. 

The other big individual prize, Digital Leader of the Year went to another Polly, but this time, Polly Cook, CTO at Parkinson’s UK.

It was a big night for winners from across Government, with over half of the categories being won by public sector organisations. They included:

• HM Land Registry for Geospatial Innovation of the Year 
• Ordnance Survey for AI Innovation of the Year
• Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) from Northern Ireland for Big Data Innovation of the Year
• Salford City Council for Pandemic Digital Innovation of the Year
• DEFRA and DfT and their Joint Air Quality Unit (JAQU) won the COP26 Award; and  
• Greater Manchester Combined Authority won for Digital Public Service Innovation; 

This year included a special £5,000 prize in memory of Craig Macdonald. The inaugural Craig MacDonald Memorial Prize was awarded to Knowledge Pool from Yorkshire.

There was also a Founders Award this year given to Paul Finnis, for his work setting up the Digital Poverty Alliance. The DPA is an Alliance of organisations tackling digital inequality across the UK are committed to living in a world which enables everyone to access the life changing benefits that digital brings. The DPA’s ambitious mission is to end digital poverty once and for all by 2030. 

This year’s list had a 50/50 gender split, recognising the diversity in digital transformation roles and the leading women across the industry. A figure not seen commonly on many industry lists. 

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were once again well represented in the list this year’s list reflecting the national reach of the Digital Leaders Community. 

Robin Knowles, CEO of Digital Leaders, commented: “It is really pleasing to see government teams and organisations winning some of the more innovative categories like AI, Big Data and Geospatial Innovation of the Year. We are also once again proud to see female role models in the DL100 with once again winning the top two individual categories.

Digital Leaders Director, Lucy Wakeford said ”As our first awards post covid we wanted to change up the traditional seated dinner and black-tie format so we reinvented it. Choosing a more dynamic cocktails and bowl food format with a temporary theatre space created for the awards and a venue, Aqua Shard, with its amazing night time views and atmosphere helped us to recreate the awards format into a whole new level of dynamic networking and celebration”

Paul Struthers, MD Sage UK&I and this year’s headline sponsors said: “The Digital Leaders 100 list 2021 once again highlights the progress of UK Plc in digitally transforming. This community of Digital Leaders have shone a light on the many hidden heroes, quietly getting on with the nation’s digital transformation. It is rewarding for Sage to see such a strong list from outside London this year and from organisations reflecting our own inclusive national programmes and the growing importance of digital transformation on companies irrespective of size or sector.

Find out more visit http://digileaders100.com or follow #DL100 or #digileaders on Twitter

The full DL100 winners list by category is:

Special category winners:

More thought leadership

The post Digital Leaders 100 winners celebrate high above London appeared first on Digital Leaders.