Introducing agile ways of working to UNICEF UK

Challenge

UNICEF UK works with families, local communities, organisations and governments to protect and support children. Although the charity was successfully raising money, their yearly income and contribution rates weren’t increasing in line with their expectations or organisational requirements.

To tackle this, they undertook an organisation wide restructure to help manage their cost to income ratio, drive better efficiencies and ready themselves for their future ambitions. 

As part of this, a newly formed Public Engagement team was created to bring together brand, communications, marketing and individual fundraising. Together, they would harness their public facing activity to create better integration and set themselves up for future growth plans. 

UNICEF UK partnered with manifesto to help co-create and design new ways of leading, planning and delivering work in the newly formed Public Engagement team. This work would help them collaborate effectively and make sure their efforts and resources were directed in the right place.

Solution

We began with a Discovery phase which looked at UNICEF UK's values and principles, and their existing approaches across planning, governance, and project delivery. This helped us to identify factors limiting the team's ability to adopt new strategies, show us where we needed to focus our efforts and define a shared ambition with their Executive Leadership team. You can use our Open Strategy Starter Kit to run similar exercises in your organisation.

By holding regular meetings and design sessions with the Public Engagement team, we co-created their new strategic framework, setting out the team’s priorities and direction. We were able to augment this with additional sessions with the Executive team, wider surveys and one to one interviews with other senior stakeholders to really pinpoint UNICEF UK's ambitions for the future and build out the structure and processes needed to get there.

We have been able to test these new initiatives in a number of ways to further embed, evolve and refine this new way of planning and working within Public Engagement.

Impact

The strategic framework we built with the Public Engagement team gave them a roadmap to build a relevant, innovative and compelling audience experience. 

The new agile ways of working mean the team can prioritise outcomes and respond more quickly to changing audience and environmental demands. This audience led approach will keep their activities relevant, effective and efficient, generating better results. Understanding the role of effective governance and leadership will also help the team to build confidence, empowering them to work together more effectively.

Thanks to our partnership, the Public Engagement team is equipped to fulfil their purpose to inspire, connect and empower the UK public to take action and deliver lasting support to make the world fit for every child.

In addition to working with this team, we’ve been able to use the project findings to identify more opportunities to scale this way of planning and working across the wider organisation. This will help UNICEF UK to work more effectively, and fulfil their ambition to become more responsive as an organisation.