Fellowship Digital Services: Beta Phase Sprint Notes 4

In this Sprint, we hosted a demo of Circle at the Fellows Festival and met with Fellows for direct feedback, which informed how we progressed with our service design and Beta planning.

A reminder of the project's focus: this beta project is focused on enhancing existing and implementing a new technology at the RSA called Circle, to help improve how Fellows engage and contribute to the RSA work and collaborate with other Fellows.

For further detail see Beta Phase Sprint Notes 3

What happened in Sprint 4

There have been four Sprints leading up to the RSA’s Fellows Festival 14 May. During the Festival, which took place at the weekend, we presented the project and our private beta plans, as well as delivered a demo of the new online engagement platform to the participating Fellows.

At the Festival, we gave the attending Fellows an opportunity to register their interest in taking part in the private beta phase testing. Now that the festival is finished, we will work on finding more Fellows to sign up and selecting a diverse group to test the service and help iterate it during the private beta.

We focused most of Sprint 4 on preparing the new online engagement platform and the demo for the Fellows Festival. We have also been busy with mapping out the overall service blueprint, user journey and private beta plans that bring together all three areas of the service - Explore your RSA, Fellow Spaces and Invites to Engage. We have also worked on considering the mechanisms for collecting feedback and facilitating Zapier integration that creates a link between Eventbrite and Circle.

Fellows Festival

Preparations for the Fellows Festival were the main priority for the team during Sprint 4. We have collaborated on setting up and testing the new online engagement platform in advance of onboarding a larger group of Fellows after the Festival, including mock posts in Circle for the Festival demo

At the Festival, the Team:

• Presented the project and private beta plans
• Delivered a demo of Circle
• Facilitated the registration of interest by Fellows to join the private beta testing
• Collected valuable feedback from Fellows on the service and RSA work, and
• Answered questions from Fellows about the service and the new online engagement platform

The Festival delivery went smoothly, and we experienced good engagement from Fellows who expressed their interest in the service and shared very useful feedback and suggestions with us.

Service design and planning private beta

The decision earlier on in the project to focus on preparing the new online engagement platform for the Fellows Festival has meant we needed to change priorities for the private beta phase and deliver the Circle set up and testing to a tight deadline for the Festival.

As a result, we have so far mostly worked on one part (Fellow Spaces) of the three main parts of the services - Explore your RSA, Fellow Spaces and Invites to Engage. During Sprint 4, we started to bring our focus back to the three parts of the service as we returned to designing and mapping out the service. We have delivered a couple of team workshops and sessions to:

• Create an end-to-end service blueprint based on the backlog of priorities identified at the end of the Alpha phase
• Discuss research and engagement activities that Fellows participating in private beta testing will take part in
• Start to develop an overall private beta plan outlining our Sprints, their key goals, and dates we are working towards

We will continue to progress the end-to-end service design and private beta plans in the next Sprint.

Next Steps

During the next two weeks (sprint 5), we’ll work on progressing the end-to-enddesign of the service, starting with a team workshop on the 18th May. During this session, we’ll look at the end-to-end service from the user and technologyperspectives and plan high level goals for the sprint 5 - 14. We’ll focus onconsidering and incorporating all three parts of the services.

Another core priority for sprint 5 will be to take a look at the group of Fellows whoregistered interest in joining the private beta testing to select a diverse participantgroup. We’ll be preparing for onboarding selected Fellows onto Circle and theplanning activities we’d like them to take part in - both starting from Sprint 6.

We’ll also aim to undertake a review of content to identify what existing content canbe brought into the service and the new content that may need to be created for thedelivery of the service moving forward.