Two years ago I made the decision to leave the charity sector and, due to Covid, I’ve actually managed to have three jobs in that time, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on my assumptions going in and share a few surprises I’ve found since making the change.

We value quantity over quality

The most surprising difference I’ve found is the tradeoffs in quality and best practice we are willing to make in order to increase our profits as quickly as possible. In the charity sector, we aim to do things cleanly and well, and we care less about how quickly value is returned for our efforts. We tend to be painfully diligent people, all too aware that our users are living with cancer, degenerative physical diseases or mental health problems and a good day in the office for us goes some way towards lightening that load for them.

In the private sector, however, the speed at which money is generated is the number one priority and we appear to be willing to sacrifice almost anything to get it. The consequence of this is the mounting of an endless and often prohibitive amount of technical debt. This is not only technical debt in the backend, for example in pipeline or service stability, but also in the frontend too. We worry little about bugs, broken UI, brand violations or fragmented user experiences. If a new feature will generate more money than fixing these issues, then that’s what we’ll work on, everything else is off the table until ‘quieter moments’, which of course never materialise.

We believe we deserve our jobs

Approach and attitude is another significant difference that continues to surprise me the more people I meet in the private sector. In charity, I always felt a sense that everyone around me believed they weren’t good enough and that even if they were, they were the luckiest people in the world to have that job and would work tirelessly to prove themselves and keep hold of it in the face of never-ending financial worry.

In the private sector, that sense appears reversed, people generally seem to feel the company they work for is lucky to have them and with that comes a strange sense of complacency and entitlement that feels uncomfortable to me as someone coming in from a world dominated by anxious insecurity.

As a Product Manager, my job includes overseeing delivery and this is where I most notice the attitudinal disparity. If deadlines were threatened in the charity sector, people would be up all night, working at weekends or crying in private meetings with their managers, afraid that they were letting everybody down and would deserve to be fired as a result. Whilst in the private sector, deadlines approach with a disinterested shrug as people casually state they didn’t achieve anything yesterday because they had to take their dog to the vet, it was already 5pm or they couldn’t see the value in the task.

There still isn’t enough money

One of the reasons I was initially interested in seeing what life was like on the other side of the fence was to see what could be achieved with much larger budgets. Working for a charity you become very creative, always looking for new ways to get around the fact that you can’t really afford to do what you need to. In the private sector I came in with the assumption that money would flow more freely and liberate teams to be bolder and more ambitious in their digital aspirations.

Instead, what I’ve largely experienced is a form of financial Parkinson’s Law in which premium capital leads to premium spending and what remains feels equally small and difficult to secure. This is particularly noticeable in recruitment where wages are vastly higher than in the charity sector and teams are comparatively very well staffed. This makes the case for additional resource and even the backfilling of existing roles surprisingly challenging.

And yet, I love it

Despite every surprising difference and every complex challenge, I find it difficult to imagine going back, at least for now.

Every day I come to work it’s interesting, fun and nobody is going to die.

Instead, the worst consequence of a bad day is a little lost revenue or a few disgruntled colleagues. I’m no longer fixated on the fact that what I do is too important for me to be doing it. Because it isn’t important, not really. I like my job, I’m grateful for it, take pride in it and work hard. But when I leave in the evening, I no longer lie awake at night wondering whether I did enough to alleviate the burden on someone living with stage four breast cancer or contemplating taking their own life.

Every time I lose a UX battle, a leadership debate or a consequential decision, I no longer torture myself with the potential implications for users whose lives are hard enough already. I can afford not to place such heavy expectations on myself and those around me because it’s finally, actually, all going to be absolutely fine.

Breast Cancer Now offers physical support courses to people living with primary and secondary breast cancer. One of these courses is Moving Forward, supporting people once they’ve finished treatment to cope with issues such as body confidence, returning to work and managing fear of recurrence.

As a charity, we can’t provide this free service to everyone we’d like to, we can’t run one in every part of the country, we can’t pay for people to travel up to 200 miles for their nearest service and we can’t offer much desired refreshers to previous attendants because it would take away a first time space from somebody else.

As a product manager, I was given the amazing opportunity to create a digital solution to these challenges with an online tool that would allow more people to access and work through the course material from home. It’s been one of the best projects I’ve worked on in this role, so I thought I’d share how it’s going so far!

First off I had research phase, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the needs of the course, the appetite for a digital version, feedback on the physical courses that I could factor into the development and I wanted to know more about what makes a successful online learning and support tool.

After that was a prototype phase, which allowed me to check the conclusions I was drawing in my mind were an accurate reflection of what the tool should be for users, course providers, content and health information specialists.

Then it was time to make an Alpha product which we could take ‘on the road’ to user groups around the country. This was the first time everyone had the chance to see what the tool could look like and how they might interact with it as a participant of a Moving Forward Online course. We’d got a lot of things right, people valued the usability, the content and the interactive nature of what we’d created, but the immense value the users provided as they participated in our workshops and feedback sessions was context.

As digital and health professionals, we were experts in how to technically make and deliver a valuable product, but most of us knew nothing about what it was like to participate as someone who had been through a breast cancer diagnosis. With insights from users with these direct experiences, we were able to identify what we hadn’t got right yet, which means by the time we create a Beta version of the tool for the New Year, we’ll know we’ll have created something that’s not only usable and informative, but also feels safe and empowering for everyone at home who’s been through the trauma of diagnosis and treatment and is looking to understand where to go from here.

The feedback sessions highlighted the importance of connection with others who are going through similar experiences, so we added a private and moderated group to the Breast Cancer Now Forum, which Moving Forward Online participants can connect to via single signon straight from the tool.

They also highlighted the importance of having a healthcare professional available as people worked through the material and worried about issues that might affect them, so we connected the tool to the Breast Cancer Now Helpline with a dynamic prompt, which means a phone icon displays when the Helpline is open, and an email icon displays overnight. That way users are always connected to the best way we can help them at the time they need it.

We knew managing fear of recurrence was what people reported to be most worried about when they came to the physical courses, so we’d made this the first section. But we hadn’t fully appreciated what an emotional trigger the topic would be for individuals participating in the course, so we reorganised the content and the language around this to much more sensitively and resourcefully guide people through valuable, informative and empowering modules and eventually towards issues around breast and body awareness after breast cancer.

After the Christmas holidays, we’ll deploy the sprint that includes these and many other new iterations of the tool, we’ll finalise the content, agree our evaluation strategy and be ready to launch a year long Beta with a select group of live users looking for support to Move Forward after breast cancer.

I’ve loved working on this project and while I’m leaving Breast Cancer Now in the New Year, I’m looking forward to checking in with the team on how the 2020 Beta goes!

When I first started as a product manager at Breast Cancer Care, I was aware that I had a limited window of impartiality, so I decided to use it to conduct a front-end audit of the site. I wanted to see what some of the main challenges of the role would be before I knew anything about our digital history or ways of working.

At the end of the audit, I’d examined every forgotten corner of the site, identified the areas I felt presented the biggest user experience challenges and created a list of seventy-six questions I wanted to spend the next few months gathering answers to, either internally or through user research.

A key challenge to solve

One of the biggest issues I noticed was our tendency to create microsites for every new campaign or fundraising activity. Internally this was taking a great deal more time than it needed to, and meaning quite small pieces of work were stealing the team’s attention for months at a time.

Externally I worried about the user experience implications of treating each activity as separate from the site as a whole, particularly as the microsites were so difficult to navigate to and from, and often contained a number of subsidiary pages that took users away from the actions we wanted them to complete.

Talking to people around the organisation, I realised a lot of this practice had developed because the site offered internal teams no good alternative. We didn’t have a sophisticated suite of content types to cater for the various ways we wanted to engage the outside world in our work, which left staff little choice but to begin almost entirely from scratch each time.

How we tackled the problem

To solve the problem we started working with the design agency William Joseph to create a new suite of content types, so that the site could better cater to user needs as well as our internal requirements. The first type we began working on was a flexible, modular and mobile-first campaign template, which is currently being used to showcase eleven of Breast Cancer Care’s key campaigns and fundraising activities.

Following the success of this approach, we set about creating a full suite of new and updated content types that are now in use across the site and better meet both the user and our internal fundraising, campaigns and information needs. These include types for:

• Campaigns
• Navigation pages
• Personal stories 
• Patient information
• Fundraising events
• Support events
• Statements
• Press releases

The end result

Through this approach we’ve found an enormous reduction in the time and resource needed to create engaging content during key campaigns, activities and other peak periods.

We’ve been able to up-skill digital champions around the organisation to create more of their own content and reduce reliance on agencies to create landing pages on our behalf.

Brand-wise, the site has benefited from a vast improvement in standardisation and consistency, which proved difficult to achieve with so many agencies each interpreting our brand guidelines in slightly different ways.

Finally and most importantly, we’re now in the second year of using our new suite of content types and have seen a marked improvement in engagement and conversion to our key activities and campaigns.

If you’d like to see an example of a campaign page in action, you’re welcome to sign up for a Pink Ribbon Walk this summer. (See what I did there?)

This post was first published via Just Giving.

In the last few months, I noticed our support bills with external developers had slowly been creeping up, so I created a workflow document to manage the way we’re using helpdesks internally.

Although it’s a very low-key, totally internal workflow chart, one developer mentioned that quite of few of his clients ask for similar guidance, and asked whether he could share it more widely.

I hadn’t really considered it might be something useful beyond our team, but he made me realise this is probably quite a common problem, so here’s a format-free copy in case it’s useful for you too:

What’s the issue?

A new requirement: 

1. Have the team given you a full and robust description of what they want?
2. Would what they want provide significant value for Time to Change?
3. If yes, give full brief to Becca
4. Becca puts in development sprint
5. Becca manages sprint, UAT and deployment

A problem with something that used to work:

1. Have the team given you a full and robust description of the problem?
2. Is it broken for everyone, are they using IE, remote desktop, or another likely cause?
3. Can you easily / routinely resolve it yourself without any unknown implications?
4. If difficult to resolve alone, have you discussed with the rest of the digital team?
5. Before escalating to a developer, is it critically urgent, or if not, has it been consistently broken for two days?
6. Have you described the full problem and expectations for resolution in one simple Podio message?
7. Once actioned by the developer, does their solution match or better what you asked them for?

If you’ve had similar problems, l’d also be really interested to know how you’ve solved them!

As Time to Change is a social movement, sharing personal stories from people with experience of mental health problems is an essential part of our content strategy.

A lot of these stories we commission from the general public and host on the Time to Change blog, but we’re also a big fan of amplifying user-generated content, to strengthen the voices of people who will ensure the movement  can continue long after our funding runs out.

As we’re such a big campaign, a lot of user-generated content comes directly to us without much effort on our part. People write blogs or produce video content and tell us about it, knowing we’re always looking for great things to share more widely.

But what this doesn’t allow us to see is all the amazing people out there who are fighting for the same things, but doing it alone. Harnessing these voices really drives the campaign forwards because, as well as being stronger and louder together, every person who produces content for themselves has the potential to inspire someone else to do the same – building the foundations of a sustainable legacy.

In order to reach these people, we needed a social listening tool that would show us all the content being produced around the world that related to mental health and stigma. Google is a great tool for finding the top ranking HuffPo and Buzzfeed articles, but those need no amplification, what we wanted was to find everyday people who had powerful personal experiences, wanted to change the world and would inspire others to do the same.

We looked at four platforms that would do this, along with the other operational requirements we had. They were:

• Tracx
• Brandwatch
• Pulsar
• Meltwater

Having interviewed them all, we landed on two finalists. The first we picked didn’t work out, they had a few development issues they couldn’t resolve and I didn’t want to keep paying for something that didn’t work properly, so we switched to Meltwater, who have been fantastic.

We’ve been with them a few months now and they do everything we were looking for to help make our social media as good as it can be. We aim for every post to get 600 engagements and 60,000 reach, but invariably our user-generated content found through Meltwater vastly outperforms this, growing our online community and spreading our message of change to a wider audience. This month our top user-generated post gained 8,700 likes and 1.3 million reach – all made possible with a couple of clicks in a pre-built search.

If you’re thinking about using social listening more, for this or the many other reasons, let me know and I can share my notes on suppliers we spoke to.

In the meantime, here’s a lovely post from someone whose blog we shared this month!