Foundation North is a community trust that provides grant funding for community organisations and charities. Our challenge was to identify frictions and barriers in the funding application journey, with a particular focus on the issues influencing the Foundation’s priority communities and how we could increase their likelihood of success.
Approach
We started with a series of collaborative sessions with Foundation North to identify all the potential key moments and influences across the lifecycle of an application experience. This enabled us to zoom out and take a broad view, identifying moments in the journey that may have been previously overlooked.
Based on this, we built an approach with five parallel arms, with each arm targeting a different issue/moment in the journey (e.g. Screen recording sessions to explore web-portal UX, in depth interviews conducted in the community to explore the journey more holistically).
As a result, we developed a detailed picture of the applicant journey, supported by an intuitive journey infographic for cross organisation communication. Our report provided clear, practical recommendations on the steps that could be taken to evolve the application process to better support the Foundation’s priority communities. We supplemented our report with a large workshop to bring together the Foundation North team to identify specific actions they could take forward.
We worked with Foundation North through a series of follow-on working sessions to support the development of project plans, ensuring the insights were translated into an actionable plan.