Reflections on the Towns Fund

Mike Chatterton, Information Architect, Towns Fund Delivery Partner?

As a ￡2.35bn programme run by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), the Towns Fund supports 101 towns across England, all of which have produced investment plans detailing their own local challenges, opportunities, and specific projects for investment.?

In early 2020, the Department made the innovative decision to appoint a private sector consortium to provide consultancy resources for the towns, to help develop their investment plans and build capacity and skills through leadership coaching and project management training. The logic behind this being that one single consortium could provide more effective and efficient support to towns by looking across them all and making links between areas of common interest, in a way that might not be feasible if each town took the journey alone. As a result, the Towns Fund Delivery Partner (TFDP) consortium was established made up of Arup, Nichols, Copper, Grant Thornton, Future Gov and Savills.??

So, how did it go, and what did I learn??

Successful collaboration is crucial to all projects and programmes, but in the throes of the sudden and unpreventable physical separation of people – for example during a pandemic, it is all the more important. This is where carefully designed and effectively implemented technology, really comes into its own. Whilst the COVID-19 pandemic did not change the approach we planned for creating collaborative communities, it made the requirement and its efficient delivery, even more significant.??

The three key elements that underpinned the success of the solution we designed – in the unique working environment we found ourselves in – were:?

Establishing a digital community at speed?

The importance of establishing a collaborative community across over a hundred towns, each with multiple stakeholders was key to success. Given the impact of the pandemic and radically changing working behaviours, we needed to get information out and establish connections with stakeholders as quickly as possible. To this end, we prioritised building an online presence and establishing a website to provide context, background information and guidance as the highest priority. Making this happen quickly was always going to be a challenge, to address this, we used existing collaboration tools to mock up and build working prototypes of interfaces, expected content, structure and user experience models in an agile and highly iterative way. Working in this way accelerated our ability to get online collaboration happening quickly and efficiently, without sequential dependencies holding up development.?

Prioritising a user-centred approach that could grow organically?

Each town we worked with was entirely unique, and as such, we needed to build a website that could grow in line with specific town requirements and become more information rich over time – as more resources were produced. Developing a content strategy, beginning with initial FAQ’s and building up to complex content to cover the needs of the towns, was a key area of development which helped to build a comprehensive and engaging platform. We built a concept where digital engagement would amalgamate both programme delivery and subject matter expertise in a visual, engaging way. Dashboards were used to enable understanding of data both at a programme level and at the subject matter level – building the visualisation of all data into the programme over time. This was key in helping to shape and share information organically, allowing users a thorough understanding of the unique features of the programme.?

A truly open platform to encourage engagement?

Having confidence in users forming collaborative, positive, online communities while in a pandemic, was critical. Therefore, to help encourage use of the website we took an open approach - actively deciding against things like log ins and passwords to enable greater engagement. All interfaces were built to be accessible to everyone, removing as many barriers to the access of information as possible. Information requests, reporting and contact points were all automated using forms to simplify the collection of information and move it to the right place. Without exception, this open and pragmatic approach to sharing information built the confidence and positivity needed to realise the level of collaboration required for programme success.?

Working in this role in such unique circumstances, really showcased the impact that well-designed and integrated technology has on rapidly bringing together diverse sets of stakeholders into effective, virtual, communities.?

If you have any questions or observations on Nichols’ experience working on the Towns Fund, then please do get in touch!?