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How Opencast helped the ALLIANCE improve its member offer

UCD

Healthcare

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Opencast recently supported the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the ALLIANCE) with pro bono expertise in user-centred design. Here the ALLIANCE membership team shares its perspective, answering questions from Opencast’s lead service designer on the project.

What is the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland?

“The ALLIANCE is the national third-sector intermediary for health and social care in Scotland. As a membership organisation, we bring together the expertise of people with lived experience, the third sector and organisations across health and social care to inform policy, practice and service delivery. We believe that together our voice is stronger and that by coming together we can work to fulfil our vision of a Scotland where everyone has a strong voice and enjoys their right to live well, with dignity and respect.”

Close-up of hands writing on a yellow sticky note with a marker on a wooden table, with other stationery items visible nearby.”

What made you think Opencast would be able to help you?

“The ALLIANCE had been exploring how to improve our membership offer. We’d already gathered a large volume of data, but we needed support to consolidate our findings. User-centred design (UCD) includes service design as a key discipline – and we were interested in exploring this for our programme. Opencast brought its UCD expertise and experience to help us develop skills to suit this bespoke project.”

What was the key challenge you faced?

“The ALLIANCE membership is a core and integral part of our organisation. A key challenge we have faced is how to scale our offer to accommodate our growing membership. We understood that membership was valuable to members, but we wanted to step back and reflect on the experience and delivery of our membership benefits to best capture the needs of members across the sector.”

How did Opencast help you?

“The team at Opencast delivered a series of guided workshops, building on our understanding of our membership benefits and delivery channels. Importantly, the Opencast team took the time to get to know our organisation, team and programme. Because of this they could provide us with tailored support, which has helped transform our approach to our programme development. In bringing us together as a team during bespoke workshops, Opencast helped us to develop a shared understanding of our membership offer, member personas and our value as an organisation overall. We began reframing our offering to reflect its true value and explored the different needs and experience of our diverse membership to allow us to be more targeted in developing our offering.”

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What was the highlight of working with Opencast?

“The opportunity to take a step back from our work, reflect on our growth and successes and come together as a team to formulate future developments. We’ve learned new skills, strengthened our future approaches and come together as a team to share our knowledge and learning.”

How do you think other health and social care organisations could benefit from working with Opencast?

“Our experience with Opencast has demonstrated the value of taking that step back, analysing and refocusing on the user experience. As an organisation we champion the design and development of person-centred care and designing services for the people who use them. But knowing we should do this and understanding how to do it can be challenging, particularly in the third sector where we often work in small teams with conflicting priorities. Working with Opencast’s UCD experts was a first step in giving us the skills and tools to begin fine-tuning our membership offer to the experiences and needs of our members.”

What are the main challenges facing other organisations like the ALLIANCE when they’re looking to change?

“Organisations across the third sector deliver fantastic support and services – but there are challenges to implementing new ways of working in this setting. Funding constraints, a rising demand for support and a shortage of skills are some of the challenges that, like us, our members find themselves up against when delivering and developing their services. Allowing ourselves to make space to step back and reflect was at first challenging, particularly given the busyness of everyday work. It became clear to us that these challenges require a new way of working, where we innovate and where we get it right. This is where service design has proven integral, ensuring that we are investing our resource into designing a membership offer that works.”

What did you know about user-centred design before working with Opencast?

“As an organisation that champions the voice of lived experience, the ALLIANCE understands the need to design services that put people at the centre. But we’d never applied service design concepts methodically to our membership programme. Where we had identified a need to review the experience of our members to enhance the development of our programme, Opencast was able to deliver bespoke UCD support and skills our team needed to support us in exploring a new long-term approach.”

What value do you now see in working with UCD professionals?

“The experience of working with the Opencast team was refreshing. Having external experts immerse within our organisation and guide a period of reflection was such an asset to our team, allowing us all to be present and engaged in the project. In just 10 days, Opencast supported us in identifying an actionable plan of work, helped us to understand and articulate our membership offer and designed bespoke tools to allow us to integrate this way of working within future design. UCD professionals bring new ways of working and the ability to support you in embedding the needs of your service users at the heart of your service offer.”

What impact has the work had on your organisation?

“Working with Opencast to apply UCD concepts to the development of our membership programme has allowed us to take stock of our growth as an organisation and purposely reflect on how we can continue to improve and scale our offer to support all members. As an organisation that champions the value of a people-centred health and social care system, learning about how to apply UCD has allowed us to embody these principles through our membership to improve our support to members. Incorporating these principles and a new mindset going forward, we look forward to building on the strengths and delivery of our offer in a manageable and member-centred way.”

Read our ALLIANCE case study.

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