Discovering the needs of an organisation
Helping the charity Stay Up Late find more Gig Buddies
Having worked with the charity Stay Up Late for many years I have a good relationship with them. And so they asked if I could help them out on the next stage of their incredible Gig Buddies project. The project has grown over the last 6 years from the initial idea of helping the mission of Stay Up Late to become an international project enabling people with learning disabilities to get out and enjoy gigs of all types.
To take Gig Buddies into the next stage, a one-day workshop was held with the staff of Stay Up Late in their Brighton office. A discussion on needs using the Needs Work cards developed by Max St John helped set the direction of the workshop and helped create a vision for the project.
Working from this point a blend of game storming and design thinking helped to discover the issues with the current approach. These included managing the project, communicating the project goals to the users and aligning that with the satellite projects that run as far afield as in Sydney Australia.
Techniques used:
- Needs work focussed discussion
- A short version of the 7Ps framework was used to uncover the individual staff members ideas and concerns with regards to what had been discussed in the Needs work. This was needed to make sure we were hearing from everyone at the table
- CrazyLove game to discover what works and what doesn’t currently
- New game LoveSexy was developed in the session to take the things that work and investigate how they might be improved upon
- User archetypes were discussed and we settled on a number of archetypes
- An empathy map was created for each user type
This work will be used further to develop a more useful hub platform for the communication and management of the Gig Buddies project.
This is what the clients said...
Martin Gordon has helped us over the years at Stay Up Late and on the Gig Buddies campaign to align the work we are doing and the presentation of it online with our needs. His workshops allow us all to get creative and collaborate well on getting the most ideas out into the room.