Peers supporting peers supporting peers: weeknote 4

This week I’ve been helping out at four DDC peer support sessions while carrying out a research sprint for a content design project for Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO).

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The good things this week

• Seeing so many DDC participants sharing support and challenges with one another, and connecting in the process. Many of them are defacto/accidental digital leads — people who don’t have digital in their job title but are the person who knows/does the most with digital in their organisation
• Sharing several resources and items from the Catalyst resource library and reuse library with DDC participants after listening to their needs and challenges in peer support sessions
• Hearing in the peer support sessions how many people highlighted the open working workshop and the Human Connection workshop as their most useful thing on the programme so far
• Interviewing people — I just really enjoy it. I spoke to seven defacto digital leaders in small Scottish charities — from the Orkney Folk Festival to a national youth charity about their email behaviour and experience of emails from SCVO

Difficulties

• Tested positive for covid on Thursday, so I decided to cancel Friday’s synthesis session which would have completed the research sprint with SCVO. Although I’ve transcribed the notes onto a Miro board (a synthesis template like this one) I would have liked to have done this while the interviews were still fresh.
• Failing to carry out another task for another client due to being unwell
• Wondering what stopped the four other people who booked to come on Weeknotes with Joe & Co this afternoon from turning up. It might be good to ask for feedback to see if we need to do something different. If its not working, we change it.

Achievements

• 4x peer support sessions: managing breakout rooms while finding useful resources for DDC participants, while making notes and helping get them all onto their Slack groups
• 7 user interviews

Its hard to think of what else I’ve achieved. My brain is not fully engaged even though I’ve been resting most of the day.

Learned things

• Many DDC charities are trying to work out which area of digital to focus their project on
• People in Scottish charities have a lot of different ways for managing their emails — tags, flags, pins, stars, folders, subfolders, inbox, marked as unread… I imagine its the same in most charities
• People are interested in receiving automated digital support by email but they believe they will only read the emails if they are from someone they trust and if they are tailored to their needs and interests at that time

Overarching feeling of the week

• Delight — I felt lots of this interacting with DDC participants and listening to them supporting each other
• Frustration — one of those weeks where it felt like there wasn’t enough time for writing content. A couple of my other projects feel in stasis at the moment.

See you next week!