A free six-week online training programme teaching innovative techniques from the digital world to enhance work and problem-solving abilities.
What is a Design Hop?
The Design Hop is a unique, hands-on programme that helps charities and social organisations explore and develop new digital ideas, no matter their level of experience with digital technology.
Offered by CAST, this interactive course takes you through essential steps to think differently about the challenges that your service users, volunteers or colleagues might be facing, and to start small but impactful digital projects.
Bring along a real-life challenge that you wish to address in your role, and we will guide you through the fundamental skills and processes you'll need to come up with a simple solution.
Course structure
- 3 live group Zoom sessions over 6 weeks
- Total of 10-15 hours of coursework in your own time: videos, reading and exercises. You'll be recruiting users and running user research interviews, coming up with ideas, gathering knowledge from within your organisation, and more!
- Weekly emails with top tips
- Access to an expert throughout for questions and support
What you'll learn
You'll learn to apply straightforward, practical methods that can bring fresh perspectives and ways of working to your organisation.
It's a chance to explore how digital solutions might help you reach more people, streamline your work, or develop new ways of supporting your audiences.
You will gain:
- Increased confidence with digital problem-solving processes - regardless of whether you are working on digital or non-digital projects or challenges
- Improved understanding of the challenges faced by your service users, volunteers or your colleagues
- A small solution or action plan to take away
- Resources and next steps to continue learning about digital ways of working
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn new skills that will benefit you, your organisation and most importantly, your service users.
Dates
The next Design Hop will begin in January 2025.
Course dates:
- Wednesday 29th January 10:30am-12:00pm
- Wednesday 5th February 10:30am-12:00pm
- Wednesday 12th March 10:30am-12:00pm
Attendees must be able to attend all three sessions and commit to the 10-15 hours of 'homework' in their own time.
Spaces on the Design Hop will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. We'll be holding a third of spaces for organisations that are supporting marginalised communities.
If these dates don't work for you sign up to our waiting list to be the first to hear about new dates.
How does it work?
The course is broken into three key phases. As part of those phases you will:
Discover
- Choose and investigate the social and organisational challenge that you want to work through
- Understand the real needs of your service users, colleagues or volunteers
Define
- Be inspired by examples of free and simple digital solutions
- Generate your own ideas
- Explore how they fit in your wider services and lives of your users
Develop
- Develop the quickest, easiest way to test your chosen idea with your users.
Who is it for?
The Design Hop is perfect for staff and core volunteers of UK nonprofits of all sizes who are eager to explore digital options but unsure where to start. It's designed for anyone in the organisation – tech-savvy or not.
Ideally we’re looking for decision-makers who will be able to put the methods learnt directly into practice and are in a position to further develop ideas, for example by allocating internal resource or making grant-funding applications. You should have a good understanding of your charity’s existing services and challenges.
Unfortunately this course is not suitable for organisations whose primary beneficiaries are based outside the UK.
What kind of challenge can I bring?
You can bring a real-life challenge to explore, and it can be internal or external-facing.
As an example, a previous Design Hop attendee brought the challenge that their service users were frequently missing their English classes. After speaking to both the service users and the course teachers, they discovered that people were simply forgetting the classes. They experimented with an affordable online SMS tool and started sending text reminders to all attendees. This helped to reduce the number of missed classes, and they're now using SMS reminders across their other programmes. A small, but impactful solution!
Dr Caroline Hughes, Health Improvement and Evaluation Manager at Action Cancer, participated in Design Hops as a result of an unsuccessful funding application for an Online Learning Hub. She said of her Design Hop experience: “It was really useful. It was very practical, and it did go through a lot of information. It was just a really simple way of changing my thought process around ‘digital’...through the training, I realised the importance of starting with the smaller product."
Some other examples of challenges brought to Design Hops are:
- My colleagues don’t know when the next fundraising events are taking place so aren’t able to signpost volunteers or service users to sign up
- My service users frequently miss their appointments
- Volunteers don’t know how to submit their travel expenses
- Service users aren’t engaging with a particular programme or channel
What happens after the course?
We'll set you up to continue your digital momentum inside your organisation, or with new peers and digital experts met through the course.