After 4 meetings involving 9 Keep Tidy volunteers from across the borough the Digital Team had a mountain of feedback, ideas and comments to work through. We needed to get all this is some sort of order so we could see visually the task we have embarked on. In the past this would have been done in an office space during a workshop. This time we went virtual with the help of a Miro Board.

It was interesting to hear that all our volunteers talked to us about the same areas for improvement and likewise thoughts around what was working well was similar across the groups.

Many people had ideas about how the volunteers could work with the Council so that our residents can benefit from the great work that gets done on a daily basis. It was equally great to see that people understood the budget pressures of a Council in 2021 and accepted that although we would love to employ more staff to clean our streets, it is just not possible.

Common Themes

The task of categorising our feedback was a big job but we finally came up with some common themes and areas that we could focus on. These areas are;

• BwD Website
• Reporting issues as a volunteer – This ranged from fly tipping to red litter bags to collect
• Education within communities
• Education of new volunteers
• Communication from the Council to volunteers
• Organisation of resource for a community clean up

Meeting with the Environment team

Next we decided it was time to engage with our Environment team and feedback to our staff members whose job it was to manage the street cleaning and arrange for all the hundreds of red bags to be collected.

Any new ideas or recommendations we can come up with must be fit for purpose for these teams and be realistic enough for them to achieve.

This meeting gave us loads more feedback, comments and ideas to add to our Miro board

Time for the hard work….

The Digital team were set specific tasks to design and build forms for reporting and requesting, research and design web pages, further investigate current processes and redesign to make them more user friendly. This was among many other tasks and throughout we have been liaising with both volunteers and staff to check that we are focused on correct areas and outcomes.

In a few weeks’ time we will have something to show our volunteers and give them the opportunity to comment and feedback of both our recommendations and designs. This will form part of our work to involve them in our user centric design to ensure that we are working with our users to build processes that are fit for purpose and work for all those involved.

In part 3 of our blog find out what our volunteers think of our work so far……….