British Red Cross - Research and Service Design

British Red Cross had a challenge - where does our money go, and what is the impact? In order to understand this better, we were asked to map their services across the UK. I led a team of 4 researchers, to travel around the country, visiting British Red Cross sites, interviewing nearly 300 users and staff and identifying over 30 services. BRC needed to understand how their BRM (beneficiary relationship manager) tool could be used more successfully to track and manage their impact and provide data on where and who was using their services. Our job was to try to consolidate and rationalise the core services into blueprints, identifying opportunities to both improve them, make them more consistent and measure their impact.

The discovery resulted in a set of both service user personas and internal/staff personas, to show the breadth of individuals that interface with the organisation. We also produced an extensive report which uncovered challenges within the organisation, uptake or barriers to using their chosen tools and rationalised a set of recomendations to move forwards.

These insights were presented at board level and publicised across the business through a number of presentations and Q&A sessions.

“Not only did you completely get it, but you managed to see the value beyond BRM. I believe we made a significant contribution today to improve our customer journey. Great stuff, well done - so exciting.”

Juliet Mountford
*Director of Innovation and Insight, British Red Cross

Following on from the discovery work, we honed in on a particular service “mobility aids” to further research, design and prototype a future service and tool. This time working in a blended team with BRC, we again toured various sites, went on ride-alongs with staff and deeply understood the challenges and needs of the service, the users and volunteers involved. We mapped out journeys and built a prototype to test what we had learned. This was later taken forwards, developed an is now a self-serve part of their service offering.