I joined as cover. I left a design function.
Benefact Trust gives grants to churches, Christian charities and community projects across the UK and Ireland. I arrived as maternity cover in a small in-house team and used the window to introduce human-centred design as a working method, a first for the Trust, then stayed on to run the art direction and technical side.
Design was a service desk, not a discipline.
The team was small, capable and permanently downstream. Work arrived as decisions already made that now needed making pretty, so design never got near the point where the decision was still open. Meanwhile the applicant journey was nobody's job in particular: grants owned the criteria, comms owned the website, operations owned the forms, and the gaps between them stayed invisible because no one had ever drawn the whole thing.
The wedge was not asking for budget or headcount. It was making those gaps visible to the people who owned them, in one room, in one afternoon, and then letting the organisation's own conclusions do the arguing.
Design thinking, condensed into exercises people would actually do.
Stakeholders will not sit through a methodology lecture. They will happily spend ninety minutes arguing about a persona who cannot find the eligibility criteria. So the method arrived as exercises, not as a framework to be approved first, the vocabulary came later, once people had already used it.
- Personas grounded in real applicants, "Julia", the non-expert volunteer filling in a grant form on a Tuesday evening
- Current-state journey mapping, end to end, with the whole room adding the steps they personally owned
- Pain points surfaced by the people causing them, which is the only way they stick
- Crazy 8s to get volume of ideas out before anyone could defend a favourite
- A priority matrix to force effort-versus-impact honesty on everything generated
- UX calls and testing sessions running alongside, so opinion in the room could be checked against behaviour outside it
I ran the sessions and managed the research insights; the UI consultant took them into look, feel and interface. That split mattered, it stopped research becoming a document nobody read, because it always had a named destination.
One artefact that changed the conversation.
The service blueprint took the whole journey, trigger, awareness, consideration, planning, application, delivery, relationship, reporting, and put every touchpoint, system and internal handoff on a single surface. It is not a beautiful artefact. It is a useful one.
- The awareness stage was almost empty, plenty for people already applying, nothing for people wondering whether they could
- Eligibility was decided off-site, in a PDF, before anyone reached a form
- Several handoffs existed only as somebody's habit, not as a system step
- Ran a prioritisation matrix over every gap to separate easy wins from structural work
- Shipped the easy wins immediately, to buy credibility for the slow work
- Used the structural gaps to justify the platform and grant management replacements
Move the first decision onto the website.
The highest-leverage change was also the least glamorous. Eligibility used to be a document you downloaded, read and interpreted yourself, so the first experience of the Trust was homework. We moved it on-site as three plain questions, and put the application journey on a visible stepper so applicants could see where they were and what was still coming.
- An animated series explaining what the Trust funds and who qualifies
- A "how-to" podcast for applicants at the wondering-whether-to-bother stage
- Webinars and a partnerships programme, aimed at the same empty lane on the blueprint
- Query tracking across calls and emails, so support volume became a measurable signal
- Recurring questions treated as content defects and fixed at source
- Impact measurement wired in from launch rather than retro-fitted
Someone has to actually make it.
Beyond Funding interviews charity leaders about the problems underneath their work. Most guests had never been on a podcast before, and several had never been asked to talk about any of it in public. Off-mic is usually where the useful part is.
I produced it. Recording, editing, promotion, and cutting the short-form clips that carried it onto the other channels. I am a voice on one of the episodes too, which changed how I edited the rest of them.
We added a Beneficiary Story series, filmed on site, because the people doing the work do not usually get to be the ones describing it. Then a How-To animated series, aimed at the same empty lane on the blueprint: applicants at the wondering-whether-to-bother stage, with nobody talking to them.
I made the videos that went on the channel across those two years. The growth number is the same work, counted.
Support volume as a design metric.
If the content is working, people stop needing to ask. Tracking inbound calls and emails against a five-day moving average gave us something better than opinion: a recurring question stopped being an inconvenience and became a defect with a location.
This is the part I would push harder next time. We proved the signal was readable, but never got it in front of the grants team as a standing weekly view, so it informed the decisions I was in the room for, and not the ones I was not.
What actually changed.
Two platform replacements shipped, and the awareness gap the blueprint exposed turned into the fastest-growing channel the Trust has.
The channel number is the one that keeps moving. The approach was test-and-learn rather than a content calendar, publish, read the data, change one variable, publish again. Since I moved on, a single video has passed 5,000 views and a short has done 100,000 in a month. I did not make those; the team did, using a method that was working before I left. That is the better outcome.
The traffic number is the one I care about most. Growth from an existing audience is a comms win. Growth from someone searching "grants for church roof repairs" and landing on an eligibility check they can finish in thirty seconds is a service win, it means the awareness lane on that blueprint is no longer empty.
The platform in the wild.
Art direction, content design and front-end all ran through the same brief: make the next step obvious, and never make an applicant guess whether this is for them.
The method outlasted the role.
The lasting output was not the website. It was that "let's map it first" became a normal sentence in a building where it had never been said, and that the blueprint kept getting pulled out for decisions I had nothing to do with.
- Running the method as exercises, not as a framework to be approved first
- Shipping easy wins early to earn the right to argue for structural change
- Giving research a named destination so it never became a shelf document
- Get the query-volume view into a standing weekly rhythm, not just into my own decisions
- Treat the blueprint as a maintained artefact with an owner, not a workshop output that ages
- Test the eligibility questions with genuine first-time applicants earlier than we did
This is the work that made the rest of my practice make sense: services are loops, not pages, and the useful design decision is nearly always further upstream than you have been invited to make it.