Pivoting Local Welcome in the pandemic
The last six months at Local Welcome have been an epic journey.
In March, just as the first national lockdown was announced, we got new funding to expand our meals to 80 locations across the UK. Then the pandemic stopped us in our tracks. We’ve not done a meal since.
In October, just before the second national lockdown was announced, we launched our two new services Local Together and ADHD Together. This time there will be no stopping us in our tracks. Hopefully.
The ride from March to October has not been straightforward or easy. This is the story of how Local Welcome made that journey:
Why is it worth telling this story? Because the 10 lessons from the pandemic are lessons that I’ll carry with me forever. Maybe you’ll get something out of them too.
March - cancelling our meals
At the start of March I spoke at Service Design in Government in Edinburgh about building Local Welcome by tackling our riskiest assumptions. I told the story of growing from our new groups in Cardiff and Birmingham in February 2019 to running regular groups in 8 cities across the UK. We’d worked out a scalable model and we were about to start expanding rapidly.
I was already spooked by the pandemic though. Leaving London I’d struggled to buy hand sanitiser. I’d dug out an old N95 mask that I’d bought for decorating. I’d disinfected the tray table on the train. In Edinburgh I mostly confined myself to my hotel room.
It was from that hotel room that we made our first pandemic response. People at our meals prepare and eat food together so hygiene is important. We couldn’t get hand sanitiser or antibacterial spray due to supermarket shortages so we cancelled our meals on Sunday 8 March.
The next week, my colleague Andrew shared evidence that coronavirus was being transmitted by people with no visible symptoms. There was no way to keep people safe at our meals with asymptomatic transmission. We cancelled all our future meals.
Our team took these difficult decisions - to cancel the meals that were the main focus of our team’s work - before the UK government took its own action. Bizarre.
Four days into national lockdown we got funded to scale up our meals to 80 locations across the UK by the National Lottery. Without this our whole team would have lost our jobs in April.
The rest of March was a bit of a blur to be honest.
April - deciding what not to do
People we knew started getting sick in April. Loads of my close friends in London went down with the virus. Then our designer, Efe, got sick. And our founder Ben - who has higher risk factors - picked up the virus and spent several horrible weeks with difficulty breathing.
We were scared. Watching people dying on the news every night. Doom-scrolling social media looking for risk information. My girlfriend Esther, a woman I’ve spent 19 years with, is a type 1 diabetic and all we could see was the 8% diabetic death rate in the Wuhan data.
At work we had stressful, unproductive meetings as we tried to work out what to do. We struggled to comprehend the path ahead of us. Anger, frustration, sadness, impulsiveness, fear and tension abounded.
These early conversations ended up being about ruling things out:
We decided not to take our service online. We didn’t see how we could make our meals work remotely because the food element wouldn’t translate. But - more importantly - our refugee guests don’t always have devices or the internet. Online wouldn’t work for us.
We decided not to pivot to community support. My girlfriend works at The Winch in North Camden and spun up a service to distribute food packages, pick up medicines and do befriending calls. But we were a national charity and it was clear that local mutual aid groups were better placed to do this work than us.
We decided not to furlough our staff. It made sense to save on staff costs, but we’re a charity who relies on our multidisciplinary team. It took Ben a long time to build the team in the first place. Half the team were contractors who would have had to find new jobs. Going back to zero would have sunk us in the long run.
It sounds coherent in hindsight. In reality it was a mess. We knew what we wouldn’t do - move online, pivot to community support, cut the team to save money - but we didn’t have a clear plan. Yet.
May - developing a clear strategy
In May we committed to working out a plan between the three of us - me, Ben, Claire - in the leadership team. We locked ourselves in a room and talked it out. It was a lot of time, it was slow going, and it was intense. But it stopped us jumping to incomplete solutions too early, ensured we’d all been heard, and meant we committed to a shared strategy.
Speaking of strategy, I once read a wonderful book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. It said a good strategy has three elements: a diagnosis to define the challenge, a guiding policy to respond to the diagnosis, and a set of coherent actions to implement the guiding policy.
Our diagnosis was that although we had money in the bank we would not be able to restart meals until April 2021 at the earliest. Yes, we hoped the pandemic might fade before then. But it didn’t make sense to plan based on this uncertain hope. We needed more stability than that.
Our guiding policy was made up of three elements:
Restart the meals as soon as it’s safe. We’d spent four years developing meals with great outcomes that could be scaled up to create a sustainable organisation. It would still be our top priority to relaunch the meals when possible.
Keep our team together until then. We’d also spent two years building a multidisciplinary team. This wasn’t just about hiring people, it was about finding ways of working together to be more than the sum of our parts. Our team was our strongest asset.
Develop new services in the meantime. We needed to create Covid-safe services with similar outcomes to our meals. Yes, we might fail, but we’d learn lots by trying and maybe (just maybe) we’d find another scalable service model for the future.
Finally, this made it possible to create a set of coherent actions:
May, June, July - fix all the broken things. We wanted our meals to be ready for a future relaunch. We had a backlog of work that included adding new recipes, improving our leader guide, automating leader approval, fixing our CRM, and other things.
August - generate ideas for future services. We decided to make space for a series of innovation workshops with the whole team to expand our understanding of the possibilities, imagine new services for a post-Covid world, and choose what to do next.
September to March - run the new services. We didn’t know what these would be, but we knew that giving ourselves six months to work through the riskiest assumptions would yield a huge amount of learning. And perhaps we’d find something special on the way.
Towards the end of May we communicated this strategy to the rest of the team. Like any good design work, it felt clear and obvious after the fact. Only the three of us know how hard it was to get to that point.
On a personal note, I can’t tell you how relieved I was to reach this clarity. It was a turning point for me in the pandemic.
June and July - fixing our meals for the future
In June and July we all got our heads down and spent time fixing the things that were a bit broken about our existing meals service.
Why were things broken in the first place? We work using lean and agile principles which means we fix the most important things first and put the rest in a backlog of work. So now we used the time to:
Develop new recipes
Update the on-the-day guide for leaders
Improve the first-time member journey
Automate the leader approval pathway
Clean up Hubspot (our contacts database)
Document the cloud-based tools we use
Update data handling and GDPR policies
Tidy up Google Drive (srsly!)
Choose locations for the next 10 groups
Streamline our process for finding new venues
Create 5 pieces to share what we’d learned
Why bother if we weren’t relaunching meals until April 2021? When we’re working in a lean and agile way lots of the knowledge about how to fix these things is in our heads as we operate the service. Given that we were going to relaunch meals in the future these things needed to be done at some point. It was best to do these things while we still remembered them!
There was a softer benefit too. Our team, along with the whole of the UK, had been through a traumatic three months. It was a relief to spend some peaceful time fixing known problems, working out better ways of working from home, and feeling a sense of calm achievement.
During this time we furloughed our CEO too. Saving money while the team fixed operational problems saved us a chunk of money.
August - running innovation workshops
In August we ran a series of innovation workshops with the whole team. Our goal was to come up with strong ideas for Covid-safe services to run between September 2020 and March 2021.
The idea of running innovation workshops was to harness the diversity of the team to think more expansively about the possibilities. The same-old same-old thinking isn’t helpful when you’re making a radical change. It was important to do this as a team so we were all bought in.
I’ve been running innovation workshops for a long time and there are lots of pitfalls. Which is another way of saying I’ve made lots of mistakes along the way. So we made careful, deliberate choices to avoid these:
Scheduled our workshops over three weeks and never did more than two hours in any single day. This gave us time to rest and recover in between each one. There’s magic in having a night’s sleep between sessions. Design work loves the subconscious.
Created a shared understanding in the first week so the whole team understood our strategic position. Too many innovation workshops operate in some kind of blue sky fantasy world. We wanted to come up with ideas within useful constraints.
Spent the next two weeks repeating a two-hour design process 6 times: understand the day’s constraints, generate quick ideas, flesh out one idea each, expose it to helpful critique, iterate and improve it, pitch it to the team, score the pitches, and pick two winners.
Scored the 12 winners against the strategic criteria we’d agreed at the start. We scored the ideas to give us closure and to get a sense of where the team’s energy was. We were always clear that it wasn’t as simple as taking the overall “winner” and running with it.
Doing these innovation workshops was a huge amount of fun. It brought the team closer together. It gave us hope and excitement about the future in a dark time. And it definitely - without a shadow of a doubt - shifted our team’s Overton window of what we considered possible.
September - designing two new services
The most powerful effect of the innovation workshops was accepting that the (much-loved) model for our meals had serious problems. It was expensive to scale, logistically complex to operate, and contained a problematic power dynamic between ‘members’ and ‘refugee guests’. Sometimes it takes a crisis to see what’s right in front of you.
The other (accidental) effect of running the workshops in August was that by the time we’d finished them the Covid-optimisim of the summer had evaporated. We were heading for a second wave of restrictions.
These two effects set the constraints for our new services. They must be:
Covid-safe. The meals took place indoors at close quarters which made them hyper-vulnerable to Covid restrictions. The new services needed to be much less vulnerable to the virus.
Logistically simple. The meals needed four boxes of equipment, a weekly delivery of groceries, and periodic resupply of essentials like salt. The new services needed to be simpler to organise.
Not about ‘members’ and ‘guests’. Our meals brought together equal numbers of members and refugee guests. This created an imbalance in power dynamics that was problematic. It added a ‘matching’ element that increased our logistical complexity. The new services needed to eliminate this divide and complexity.
Cheap. The meals were expensive to set up - all that equipment and groceries plus venue hire - which meant our groups took 6 months to pay for themselves. This was going to force us to raise ticket prices. The new services needed to be cheaper to scale up.
With this clarity we chose two concepts for our new services:
Something outdoors for people craving more local connection. Our meals reduced loneliness and increased local connection. The pandemic had increased the importance of these outcomes. We felt we could have similar impacts outdoors in a way that was safer and would only be prevented by the highest restrictions.
Something online for people who have a shared experience. One way to sidestep ‘members’ and ‘guests’ was to only invite people who shared a lived experience. Our founder, Ben, has ADHD and was interested in running groups for people with ADHD. We felt that doing things online would help if restrictions tightened too.
We spent September developing these ideas into services. For each service we:
wrote a proposition
chose a name and bought the domain
defined a starting audience
designed a lightweight brand
published a website
set up Facebook and Instagram adverts
configured our contacts database
created data protection and safeguarding policies.
When we did these things for Local Welcome meals in 2019 it took us two months. For each of these new services it took us two weeks. That’s what happens when you embed knowledge in a high-performing team.
October - launching two new services
Less than a month after starting work we launched the two new services:
Local Together connects people who want to make friends, support their community, and feel at home in their neighbourhood. A group of 15 people meet in a park to go on a walk. Lots of people wish they knew more people that live near them. Covid-19 has only made this more important. We launched in Putney, Stratford and Deptford and had 300 signups in the first month.
ADHD Together is a place free from expectations where people with ADHD can be themselves, connect and feel supported. A group of 8 adults meets online to discuss life with ADHD. Adults with ADHD often don’t know other adults with ADHD. Most ADHD services are aimed at children. We launched in Waltham Forest, Southwark and Putney and had 150 signups in the first month.
You can read more about why we’ve chosen to run with these two ideas in this blog post about what’s next for Local Welcome.
As soon as we’d launched we started researching the motivations of our users. Whenever someone signed up we did a phone call with them to:
Understand their initial motivations. We asked what they thought the service was, why they were interested, and what concerns they had. This helped make our services more human-centred.
Explain our service and our organisation. We gave a detailed explanation and some background info about Local Welcome. This helped them understand what they were getting involved with.
Answer any questions. We left lots of space to answer questions honestly. Even when being asked difficult things like if it’s free (yes for now, no in the long run). This helped people trust us more.
In parallel we started doing the detailed design work needed to run our first events. Who would lead? What activities would we do? What were the timings? How would we deal with problems? We also put in safeguarding, did risk assessments, and set up insurance.
Honestly, it felt amazing doing this work. Six months after shutting down our meals we were back doing all the things we were here to do.
November - holding our first events
I’m writing this in November and we’re running our first events.
Except...we can’t do Local Together walks during the national lockdown! We support the restrictions and are putting the walks on hold until restrictions ease. Probably January at the earliest for our first walk.
But we’re OK with that because we’ve got ADHD Together that takes place online. It’s almost like we designed it for this purpose! Our first ADHD sessions were on Saturday 21 November. They were kind of mind-blowing. We’ve got a long way to go but we’re onto something.
Our team is excited about the future again. We have a Covid-safe service, another Covid-friendly service, and our original tried-and-tested meals service ready to start when it’s safe. All with strong user demand.
Lessons from our pandemic experience
The pandemic has been difficult and heart-breaking for everyone.
In this post I’m not trying to be glib, or triumphalist, or to minimise things. I’m trying to write an account of what we’ve done and how we’ve responded because we think it’s important to tell the truth.
We made a ton of mistakes. We could have done many things better, quicker, or more effectively. Maybe our decisions will turn out to be terrible decisions. Perhaps our new services will fail.
I’m OK with that. Someone said, early on, that we’re not just working from home - we’re working from home during a global health crisis. This is what we did during this crisis. We did our best. That’s all there is to it.
Well, maybe not quite all there is to it. We’ve learned some things too:
Our multidisciplinary team is our strongest asset. We believe in investing in a strong, diverse team and then setting this team to work on our vision and mission. This is a contentious stance at times. But it’s our team - me, Ben, Claire, Efe, Celia, Andrew and Helen - that has carried us through this pandemic.
Our team wouldn’t be here without the Lottery. They gave us £500k in March to scale up our meals. It was one of their last pre-Covid awards and it’s kept us going. Their kindness and flexibility gave us hope when everything looked bleak.
It’s been (very) hard going our own way. We felt huge pressure to react in April and May by moving things online, pivoting to community support, or furloughing our staff. We didn’t do these things for good reasons. But I’ve felt weird shame for this at times.
Our goal was always bigger than the meals. The pandemic took away our meals but we always had a bigger goal. We were about operating rituals that bring people together, create community leaders, and have a positive impact on people’s lives. We still are.
It took two months to decide our strategy but it was worth it. At times I feel guilty it took so much time to choose a new direction. But what is obvious with hindsight was not obvious then. When you believe in taking decisions as a team it takes time. That’s OK.
Paying down service debt is meaningful work. We had three peaceful months from May to July where we were doing useful work to improve the meals for future relaunch. It helped our team find our feet when we were dizzy. More than that, it set us up to move quickly and confidently when we launched our new services.
Innovation workshops are an incredible thinking tool. “Innovation” processes get knocked a lot in my world (often justifiably). But working out what to do in the face of uncertainty is a hard problem. The innovation workshops helped us let go of the past and imagine a new future. They’re the path to the services we’re running now.
It takes a long time to accept loss. We loved doing our meals. They lived deep in our hearts. They formed part of our identities. Losing them was tough for all of us. And - even harder - we’ve all been letting go of them at different rates. The grief stages are real.
Our meals had serious problems that we were hiding from. They were expensive, logistically complex, and problematic in their separation between guests and members. We found it impossible to acknowledge these issues while working flat out to honour our commitments to scale up our meals. I’m still trying to sit with this.
We’re here as much by luck as by judgement. I’m proud of how we responded to the pandemic but I have to acknowledge the role that luck played. The Lottery gave us more funding. We planned new services just after the optimism of the summer faded. Our founder has a lived experience with ADHD that inspired our new service.
On a personal level, Local Welcome has kept me going through this pandemic. I’ve been up and down with my mental health, scared about my girlfriend and her type-1 diabetes, and worried about losing my mum (she had cancer last year and lives on her own).
Mostly, now, I feel relief. Relief that the Lottery funded us. Relief that our team was compassionate with each other. Relief that my faith in innovation workshops was justified. Relief that we’ve found promising services. And - yes - relief that I’ve finished writing this epic blog post.
Thank you for reading.
Say hello or ask questions to @myddelton. Originally published on the Local Welcome website and reproduced with permission here.