What COVID-19 has taught us about technology & key things we’ve learnt

Matthew Green, Director of Technology & Data at The National Lottery Community Fund, reflects on how we successfully ensured ongoing support for our grantholders through the COVID-19 crisis.

If somebody had said at the start of the year that we’d find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic, with our offices closed, but continuing to ensure that vital National Lottery funding reaches communities in crisis across the UK, many wouldn’t have believed it was possible.

But here we are today, with over 800 staff all working from home, successfully receiving, awarding and paying grants, having launched our response to the COVID-19 pandemic to support communities, and now distributing a further £200 million of COVID-19 funding on behalf of the Government.

Here’s an overview of the journey we’ve been on and what we’ve learnt along the way.

We spent two years delivering a large part of our Technology strategy, fulfilling a vision to enable and equip all of our colleagues with the technology they need to be effective in their roles.

We were already using a wide range of tools such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Surface Pros and One Drive.

We had also recently launched a new Grant Management System, which has enabled us to streamline our funding management processes and we’ve received positive feedback from those who use it, saying that it delivers a great experience.

We had made the decision to ask everyone to work from home on Tuesday 17th March, having spent a few days making final preparations to some of our technologies behind the scenes.

An email and text message had been sent to every member of staff asking them to work from home the next day and not come into the office.

We had previously advised colleagues to ensure they had their laptops in case a potential lockdown, like those we saw in other countries, was enforced.

Almost all our colleagues were able to work from home with exactly the same access to systems they had in the office.

A project to equip the last few colleagues with mobile devices was in the planning stages, and should have taken months to complete, but due to our amazing team of technology superstars, was turned around in just three days.

When the Prime Minister announced that we must work from home if we can, everyone was already at home, working productively, with access to each other and everything they needed. We didn’t miss a beat.

You would think that working from more than 800 dining tables, kitchens, or other home set-ups would mean we’re communicating less, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The messages we send to each other over Microsoft Teams has more than doubled from 10,000 messages a day before COVID-19 to 22,000 per day in lockdown.

Calls via Microsoft Teams have also sky-rocketed from 50 a day on average, to 550 per day. Although real-world meetings are currently a thing of the past, we’re still having 320 virtual get-togethers a day, compared with just 30 a few weeks ago.

In addition, our four advice lines across the UK – which provide that first touch point with would-be grantholders - have now been set up virtually, so applicants and grantholders can continue to get in touch with us.

We’ve also virtualised our internal IT and HR helplines for colleagues. Since setting up these virtual call centres, we’ve received more than 120 calls a day.

Despite the current difficulties in our lives, The National Lottery Community Fund has thankfully remained constant, providing a lifeline to communities combatting the existing, and now new, challenges they face.

Within the first seven weeks of lockdown, almost £120 million of National Lottery funding had been distributed successfully to over 4,500 community projects across the UK.

Our transition to remote working was smooth and didn’t affect us getting funding as quickly as possible to charities and community organisations, big and small.

National Lottery funding has never been so vital. The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked an influx of groups seeking funding to support their communities through these incredibly difficult times. Compared to the same time last year, requests for our funding have increased by 55%, while visits to our website are up by 47%.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve had many requests for funding where technology is being used to bring people together in a safe, remote way, and many organisations we fund have been well-placed to quickly adapt to remote-working and move vital services online.

I am proud of how our organisation and the communities we serve have adapted to such an unprecedented era of challenge and change. I hope we can continue to harness the best of people and technology, as we look to the future.