Weeknote w/c 24th May 2021

What we did

• We’ve set a date for our Demo Day. We’ll be joined by LVN, Mee Too and Youth Card to discuss our digital products for young people and explore the ways in which we might learn and collaborate. We’ve been working on the agenda this week.
• We’re arranging our next Young Person Steering Group meeting for June, where we can show them how the app looked when they started working on it and what it looks like now. We’re hoping to do a bit of evaluation with them so that we can get their feedback on the co-design process and hear about the (hopefully positive) outcomes of being part of the process.
• We’re aiming to conduct interviews with young people over the next three weeks, to ask them about the app. We’re also going to arrange some site visits across Lambeth to test the app with even more young people and get feedback in person.
• We’ve added more services to the web app. We’ve been busy collecting information about all the services available in Lambeth and have added some new and exciting opportunities to the app.

What we’re thinking about

We’re considering updating the Labs website with a landing page specifically for young people. If they want to make sure the app is legitimate before they download it, the landing page would tell them everything they need to know. We haven’t decided on the design yet, though.

We’re also thinking about how to keep up the momentum on the project into the summer and beyond. With the Beta testing taking place throughout June, we’re then expecting a pause in development while we work on the ‘bridging phase’, to help get us from proof of concept to a scalable product, pulling together a team of partners to make it happen. However, we don’t want the product side to stall, so we’re in conversation with our partners at NeonTribe to cover tool hosting and management while we work to get funding lined up for further development.

Challenges

One of the main features the young people we’ve spoken to are keen on is the ability to book through the app. That’s a much more complex feature, but it’s something to think about when we get to the point of scaling the app.

Another challenge is getting all the services onto our app. We’re manually bringing together and uploading the data within the app, which takes a lot of time. We’re interested in how we can streamline or automate the data upload once we scale.

A further challenge is communicating with charities about what we’re doing. While we’ve heard of various informal WhatsApp groups and forums, as well as the amazing network that Integrate has, we are finding it hard to contact all the charities we want to feature on the app. This is a time/resource problem (as we could spend days or weeks emailing them individually), as well as possibly a technical problem (mail merges are not always that straightforward) and a GDPR problem (we may not have the legal basis to contact more than 50 charities at a time). There’s also the problem of cutting through, given how much strain many charities are under and how often they get invited to update their details across different directories. Not an easy nut to crack, all in all.

Wins from this week

• We’ve confirmed our name, created a logo and bought a domain! You’ll get to see all as soon as we launch.