sheer profundity of the change required. People struggle to believe that ‘to make the website good’ they might have to actually restructure a bureaucracy in quite profound ways, plus, upskill, refresh the values, lead and manage differently. It seems incredible that such a small thing as ‘make the website good’ might demand such disruptive change. But it turns out the website of a significant funder isn’t a ‘small thing’. It is ‘the thing’ – by volume it’s most of the customer experience, even for a conversational, human business like funding.
“So funders have to reform to do great digital service design and delivery, just like businesses and public bodies every- where. And it’s tough. But to add to the challenge, they then have a second major digital challenge, one that most institu- tions don’t have to worry about. “Funders also need to make great, impactful grants into a society that is now pervasively digital. In the case of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have to make grants into a country in which 90 per cent of people spend many hours a day online, and in which digital has upturned the definition of ‘normal’. Doing this is a completely different skill-set from developing a brilliant, high quality online and offline service.
“That means that funding organisations need to develop the kind of digital skills found in a modern consumer-friendly business, like Amazon, but they also need to develop digital investment skills, of the sort found in a technology-focused ven- ture capital business like Index Ventures. Just one of these transformations would be tough, two at the same time is extremely challenging.”
Service design
Tom is critical of the overall approach to customer service and service design in the funding universe, and has dedicated a lot
April-May 2019 Tom Steinberg
of his time to trying to shift attitudes both in his employers and elsewhere. “Funders don’t generally tend to think of themselves as services with a significant responsibility to ensure that they give their users an experience that is clear, friendly and welcoming. Instead they tend to think of themselves as trusted, respon- sible adults deploying money to make the biggest difference it can, with customer service very much a secondary thought. “But any funder who accepts grant applications is actually a kind of service provider, albeit an unusual one. If we’ve learned anything in the last few years of user research and social science more gener- ally, we’ve learned that difficult, confusing services in any walk of life are a barrier to broad participation. Difficult and confusing processes make it more likely that the people who get grant money will be highly educated, relatively wealthy, and well-connected. Now, there might be some funders out there for whom such lucky folks are their key target, but I don’t think that’s a widely shared priority!” Things, however, are looking up. “In some big funders including those where
I’ve been lucky enough to work, the culture around customer service is changing, and changing fast. What’s exciting about working in such a funder now is watching them embrace the user-centred, data and evidence driven wave that’s been transforming services around the world for over a decade now. We’re not necessarily inventing a whole lot of new stuff, but sometimes implementing what already works can make the most massive difference.”
Great grant-making
However a funder with great quality digital service design has only solved half its digital challenges.
“Any funding organisation that’s older than 10-15 years was founded in a world that was not pervasively digi- tal. So the funding policies that were set and the staff who were hired were not shaped or chosen to cope with the reality of grant-making in a world that has just undergone a huge change. I know it can be easy to feel that life now isn’t really that different to a couple of decades ago, but if you look at time use
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 21
Interview Steinberg
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