Rapidly generating product ideas for an innovative charity

Action for Children illustration showing three cards on a post-it

The project

The charity sector has a pressing issue. Long-term survival means finding new audiences to engage with while offline methods of fundraising that previously worked well may have a limited lifespan in a digital age.

Many of the UK’s biggest charities have been moving to adopt a greater digital focus in the past years. Action For Children are among those looking to push their organisation forward by developing new digital products.

Capture and evaluation

A key issue for Action for Children was finding a way to gather and evaluate ideas internally. Previously some ideas would get worked up without proper validation while others would go unheard. They needed a way to capture every idea no matter where it came from and evaluate them on their merits.

More often than not the best ideas don’t come from up the hierarchy but from the people on the front line talking to the donors directly. If those people could present an idea in terms of the value it would bring then they would be more likely to be heard.

Idea generation workshop

Working through our Idea Generation Workshop we helped members of the Action for Children fundraising team dive into their customers’ problems, generate some ideas and work them up into pitches to deliver to the team.

The workshop is aimed at team members of any level. Anyone can have a good idea and even bad ideas can be worked up into something that could be a game changer through discussion and structured evaluation.

Rapid results

The process introduced the team to a simple methodology for capturing their passion and knowledge of a subject close to their heart. It’s proof that a motivated team can and will generate great results given the right framework.

We were surprised that after a few hours we had a few really great ideas that could be taken forward for experimentation and, hopefully, production. The session excited the team and showed that they can produce quality work with relative ease.

Lynn Roberts
Head of Digital and Innovation, Action for Children
6 Ideas generated
4 Hour workshop
8 Team members