Deadline for responses: Monday 26 April 2021
Delivery time of research: May-October 2021
Budget: £20k-£30k
Trust for London is an independent endowed foundation dating back to 1891. We aim to help create a fairer London by funding work that tackles poverty and inequality and their root causes. We award circa £11 million in grants annually. Our current 2018–2023 strategy commits nearly £40 million to addressing London’s social problems, in particular to fund work that provides insights into the causes of these problems, how they can be overcome, and work to influence policy and practice. A core plank of our strategy is strengthening the voice of people with lived experience of poverty and inequality.
We want to reassess our approach to grant-making, helping us become a more relational funder by ensuring that our approach incorporates principles of human centred design. We want to ensure that the way we fund is empathetic to the needs of grant seekers and grantees, from start to finish.
To do this, we want to work with an organisation with expertise in this area. The organisation will help us to start from first principles, mapping out our theory of change and then working with us to establish some ‘design principles’ that should underpin our approach to grant-making.
They will then work with us to map the journey of applicants, identifying key touchpoints and advising on ways in which we can improve their experience, whilst ensuring we make good funding decisions.
We expect that this process will also help us accelerate our digital transformation, making the best use of software to improve the user experience. We also want to ensure we achieve the highest standards of accessibility, so all users gain the same, positive experience.
At the end of this service design process, we will want to have a series of options for redesigning our grant-making process, from which we can work with our trustees to decide how to proceed.
We would like this work to begin in May and we would like the work to have been completed by October 2021 at the latest, so we can make a decision on how to proceed.
We want to work with an organisation that has a track record of helping organisations in the charity sector redesign their services around user needs. Working with funders would be a bonus but not essential. You should have good knowledge of the ways in which digital technology can improve the user experience, as well as a strong understanding of creating accessible services that are open to all.
We expect that it will be somewhere in the region of £20k to £30k. We already have lots of information on our users, including a recently conducted grantee perception survey, and user research from a website redesign. We hope this will help reduce the amount of research that is needed in the discovery phase.
Please respond to this brief by submitting a maximum of 4 sides of A4 outlining:
- Information about your organisation, including key people who would work on this project
- Your approach to service design
- Your experience of working with similar organisations
- Your approximate budget or day rates, alongside an expected timeline.
Please submit your responses by email to manny@trustforlondon.org.uk by Monday 26th April 2021. If you have any questions about this brief, please email Manny Hothi, Director of Policy, at the email above.
13 April 2021