Open Funding Pilot

16-20 October 2023

As a reminder, we are a team from Sport England and FF Studio working together on the Open Funding Pilot.

It will help Sport England try new ways of working and new funding models to enable them to get more people in underserved communities active. It will also show the wider Sport England organisation what delivery looks like if we shorten feedback cycles.

Weeknotes are a quick recap of the important things a team has done each week, what we’ve learned, and what’s the plan for next week. They also help us work in the open.

This week:

• After useful feedback from Sian and others, we made prototype 2 with a different platform, Typeform.
• We reviewed several form platforms: Google Forms, Typeform, Paperform, Jotform and SurveyMonkey. Our professional experience makes us feel these systems would create a poor user experience and would generate more calls to the helpline. Typeform currently leads the pack because it lets us design well, provide useful contextual information to the applicant, has solid usability, has question branching and save-and-resume, and is GDPR compliant. We’re going to be looking at PowerApps and Microsoft Forms next week.
• We met with Steve to give him an update on our first 3 weeks and shared our current prototype as a prompt for discussion and questions
• Cassie met with Greg and Jo from the RFI team to talk about their timelines so we can align our comms
• Comments from Steve and some research from the First Service Team prompted us to start exploring other formats of information submission, like audio and video
• Research: we want to test our prototype with people and have booked some sessions for the week 30 Oct. We are talking to two groups, people from sports organisations and some other funders.
• Retrospective: we met to discuss how the work is going. It’s exhilarating working in a small, collaborative team with a bias to action and outcomes, but we’re keeping a close eye on timescales. We’re trying to get a lot built quickly, primarily to meet a deadline in December. So we know we need to keep moving quickly. One of our biggest risks is learning something very important very late in the project, so we will start communicating more widely soon.

Prototype screenshots:

Next week:

Share more widely: We’d like to meet more people and share what we’ve been doing more widely, so we’re planning on a show and tell for colleagues working on the Responsive Framework and Open Funding.

Iterate the prototype with what we’ve learned: We’re going to prepare for our research sessions the week of the 30th by being clear on what we want to learn (our research hypotheses) and writing discussion guides.

Previous week notes are here