We’re making for good with the British Red Cross

We were overwhelmed with the uptake and heard from a range of organisations, each with its own unique and inspiring mission and message. Rob, Co-Founder of &us, spoke to each and every one in depth, learning more about their challenges, needs, pain points and goals.

We decided to start by partnering with the British Red Cross. They have been tasked with recruiting and onboarding thousands of volunteers to support the rollout of Covid19 vaccinations, and it felt we could do most good by being part of the effort to help get the country back on its feet, enabling organisations and individuals recover from the crippling effects of the pandemic.

Where do we think we can help?

We love making, and we love doing it quickly; learning, iterating and evolving plans as we go. We want to leverage these skills to design a best in class volunteer journey for the Red Cross. Volunteer onboarding and training is difficult at the best of times, and Covid brings a whole host of additional hurdles that we’re looking forward to tackling.

Let the Making for Good begin!

Our team is lean. Felicity (Strategist), Oscar (Designer) and Rob (Co-Founder) will be leading the work, with support from Lisa, who’ll be providing her coaching expertise throughout.

This project will stretch us, we’ll be working at pace while simultaneously delivering work of a very high quality. To help us keep focused, we developed 4 principles to guide our thinking:

1. Speed of delivery — Time is of the essence — we want to make waves, and quickly. We’ll create good-to-go processes that we build and improve throughout the engagement.
2. Learning through making — We’ll seek feedback at every stage, ensuring that we’re making data-driven decisions to inform our designs.
3. Teaming through the work — We will take a human approach to the work, creating an environment for everyone to bring their best to the table.
4. Letting the plan evolve — We’ll stay flexible, moving fast and leveraging learnings, making time for long-term planning and vision setting whilst also taking each week as it comes and prioritising outcomes.

We’ve set up our internal rhythm and communication channels, diarising stand-ups, filling our Trello backlog and sharing our thoughts and learnings on Slack throughout the day.

In true &us fashion, we’ve started by starting. Oscar and Felicity jumped straight into Miro, researching best practices for volunteer projects, looking at other charities’ experiences, and chatting to our colleagues and peers about their own experiences of volunteering.

We’ve taken inspiration from the coaches’ Firestarter sessions, planning our first touch points with the whole Red Cross team and looking forward to the best course of action for our first making sessions.

What next with the British Red Cross..?

We plan to work in public, where possible, and share our learnings at every step, so stay tuned and follow along with our journey by following us on social media. We can’t wait for the project to unfold and see results.

You can read our Making for Good with the British Red Cross series which covers why we wrote a case study for work we haven’t started, how to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, and how we helped the BRC accelerate their volunteer journey.