Open working toolkit

Author: Sonya Hayden; Reading Time: 2 minutes
We've made this resource open. You are free to copy and adapt it. Read the terms.

The open working toolkit is the brainchild of the ‘Open Working Lineup’ (or ‘OWLs’ for short), a collective of content and service designers that came together at the end of last year to help grantees of three Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response programmes share their research, processes, design work and general reflections publicly.

The OWLs helped grantees overcome initial barriers, explaining that openly-shared work didn’t need to be perfect or polished in order to be useful. As the team coached grantees through six months of open working, they shared a host of practical tools and templates designed to make the process easy, enjoyable and rewarding.

And now all this content has been collated into one comprehensive toolkit, designed to help charities, funders and other organisations share their own work openly – and reuse the assets, ideas and advice already made public by others. Written by content experts and structured into a ‘handbook-style’ format, the toolkit enables readers to quickly absorb the ‘why’ and get straight into the ‘how’.

Access the open working toolkit here.

As participants across the Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response programmes began to share – either via Medium, or in the form of downloadable assets – they discovered the benefits for themselves, amongst them (and in grantees’ own words), “enabling connection and opportunities”; “positioning (us) well for funding”, and “saving time on report writing”.

And of course the process is two-sided: whilst making work open benefits the sharer, it also helps the ‘finder’ – that is, anyone that finds and reuses the work. Reusing open assets can save time and money – and shared peer reflections can be an excellent source of inspiration and reassurance.

For more on open working and reuse, see the Open Working section of the new handbook, created to host all learnings and assets from the Catalyst and The National Lottery Community Fund COVID-19 Digital Response programmes.

Commissioned by Catalyst