Written by Overview:
The Google Design Sprint is the latest thinking in tackling a customer experience or fundraising challenge. It is an exciting product design technique that is starting to be used in the charity sector this year.
It’s a unique 3–5 day process invented by the team at Google Ventures (GV) to solve tough problems or evolve an idea within a short space of time — within 3–5 days!
What is a Design Sprint?
A design sprint is a five-phase framework that takes place over a 3 to 5 day period that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. Sprints let your team reach clearly defined goals and deliverables and gain key learnings, quickly. The process helps spark innovation, encourage user-centred thinking, align your team under a shared vision, and get you to product launch faster.
Here’s a short 90 second video to explain by Jake Knapp — Design partner at Google Ventures and inventor of the Design Sprint.
Phases within the Sprint
The Google Design Sprint is organised into five phases: Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test. The process does not change regardless of the whether you do a 3 or 5 day Sprint, just the amount of time allocated to each phase is changed.
What can it be used for?
We’ve run a number of sprints now for our clients — they can be used for things like a new fundraising product idea, a new mass participation event, a new digital product for service delivery, a new campaign, or a revamp of an existing product or website.
What are the benefits?
• Speed — within 3–5 days you’ll move from idea to prototype to user testing & decision.
• Cost — save countless hours of time from too many internal meetings. Save money with reducing the time needed with an agency to define & design the solution. No endless rounds of iterations over several weeks!
• Stakeholder engagement — the key stakeholders are part of the Sprint and therefore co-defining the output. This reduces time and increases engagement. The follow up business case is then easier to get signed off!
How can we help?
We have run a number of Sprints now to help define new fundraising products, websites or digital products for charities. We typically run the 3 day Sprint version, as we have found it is just too hard for charity stakeholders to clear their diaries for more than 3 days!
We offer to facilitate the Sprint and provide the User Experience and Creative resources to be in the room to design the prototypes/creative outputs. We can also offer a technical resource if needed within the sprint.
Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more about how a Sprint might work for your fundraising idea. We also now run Sprint overview workshops so we would be happy to invite you to a future workshop. They are free for charities to attend. Just email us on hi@addition.london