Open Funding Pilot

20 - 24 November 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 is the end of week 8.

1. The service

Big news first: we’ve named the fund. “Open Funding Pilot” isn’t a very good name for what’s ultimately a closed pilot. So we explored some new names (see below) and came to a quick decision yesterday afternoon. 2024 Pilot Fund, welcome to the world.

A screenshot of a Miro board showing a 2x2 grid and the prioritisation criteria as well as a list of 'Things the name needs to do' A 2x2 grid showing options for naming the fund - making decisions on whether it’s more relevant for Today or Tomorrow, and whether it should be more Temporary or Permanent.

In other news, we’ve done one more iteration of the form based on feedback from IMT. We’re happy with it. It’s looking good, and IMT’s feedback has helped us to dial in on some of the more technical details that we were missing. Thank you Sian for your constant, ongoing support and hard work, and thank you James and Claire for your helpful critique and advice.

As we’re getting closer to our launch date in December, we’ve been writing the emails that will go to applicants. Theory and ideas about how to run things really come into clear focus when you want to email your users. The final snags - does everyone agree? - are rearing their head as we get the emails written.

(In some ways it’s like week 2 when we made a prototype form so that our “what about…” questions were more real.) Are we sure we are sure that the limit is £250k? Because it becomes real once it is emailed.

A screenshot of an email in draft in the Gmail interface, showing the content we have written to send to potential organisations' The email we propose sending to potential applicants

2. The assessment

So we spent dedicated time this week getting the assessment design into its final (ish) shape. We will be doing rolling assessments from when we open. We will assess the applications against a set of criteria and principles rather than against each other which was the assumed model if we were to do them all in one go.

We decided this in hand with RFI as it felt like a better collective experience to do it this way.

The ways of working

After a couple of weeks where scope has shifted more times than we expected our watch words this week have been clarity and focus.

Our kanban board (a fancy agile term for todo list - sorry everyone 😀) was starting to get a bit messy: some items covered too much information, and others with not enough. This is all very usual for this stage in a 12 week agile project. Finding the correct fidelity for a todo is always a bit of an art form.

Anyway, having a small focused team meant we all knew what we were doing every day, but we weren’t able to track the work as well as we could have. So we’ve labelled the board, deleted the items that didn’t help us, made sure all the others were the right size. Serenity returns. And it makes it much easier to communicate to people who are less involved day to day. In this kind of work, the north star is a healthy team rapidly creating genuine value for users and the organisation. Everything else - the board, the tasks, the documentation, the meetings - are there to serve that north star, so we are comfortable making changes when we need to.

Next week