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Open Working Manifesto

Just start

Share small, share often

Format doesn’t matter

Protect private details

Be intentional

Build trust by sharing

Own the story of your work

Supercharge your development

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Open Working Manifesto

Build relationships

Connect with others

Converse don’t announce

You don’t know everything

Stand on shoulders

Assume the solution already exists

Reuse work from other people

Use Creative Commons licences

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Our 8-week Open Working Programme cohort participants get:

A place on our Open Working & Re-use workshop
A place on our 'Five Ways to Get Started with Agile Comms' Masterclass with Giles Turnbull
A place on our Writing for the Web workshop
8 x weekly open writing sessions with your cohort
A free copy of The Agile Comms Handbook by Giles Turnbull
Access to the Open Working Toolkit
Use of the Open Working & Reuse Medium blog as a space to publish your content
Continued access to our growing Slack community of others working in the open
Tailored support to embed open working approaches and confidence within your own organisation

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We are building a community of charity professionals with the skills, practice and confidence to make open working the norm in the third sector.

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119 blog posts & weeknotes published by our cohorts so far

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Our January - March 2023 Cohort includes people from:

Minority Ethnic Carers of Older People Project
Families in Trauma and Recovery
Saheliya
ENABLE Scotland
DataKind UK
Refugee Action
Cwmpas
International Civil Society Centre
Voluntary Action Sheffield
Child Growth Foundation
Christian Aid
The Wildlife Trusts
The Salvation Army
Rape & Sexual Abuse Service Highland
Skye & Lochalsh Council for voluntary organisations
The Boys' Brigade
Network of Youth for Sustainable Initiative
Action Against Stalking
Glasgow Alliance to End Homelessness
Barnardo's
Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action

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If we "honestly" want to support those we serve, working in the open is putting our money where our mouth is - and not being afraid to share.

Maggie Wright, Families in Trauma and Recovery

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In Wales we are still very much stuck in 'silo-mode'. As part of the operational team for Newid - Wales' bespoke project to help the Welsh Third Sector better embrace the digital world - we want to lead by example.

Paul Stepczak, Cwmpas

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The Open Working & Reuse programme helped participants:

83% - Identify what learning would be most useful to share internally
66% - Identify what learning would be most useful to share externally
83% - Increase confidence to share learning and their work
100% - Increase confidence to communicate about their work
100% - Increase understanding about how to share learning more effectively
50% - Overcome barriers to generating or sharing learning and their work

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“Wouldn't have had the confidence in sharing learning outwith our charity before.”

“It’s been one of the best online courses I’ve ever done. I now have remembered my writing will get better the more I write, and it’s helping me move things on so much more quickly.”

“I am now in a much better position to understand the range of benefits of open learning and to imagine how we could hopefully make it work within our organisation, practically. It has helped me to just start writing and sharing blogs, even if they're not perfectly formed.”

“It was extremely helpful to have a network of peers who were all committed to being open and honest so we all felt confident in sharing - once you realise it's ok, it opens more doors.”

“The course gave me permission to just write, just express myself, and believe that some good would come of it.”

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“The programme was really helpful for developing my reflective practice. This is something I'm very interested in anyway, but open working - and weeknotes in particular - provides a discipline for actually doing this in a way that is embedded in my ongoing work. And I am excited to now be able to look back at my blogs for content for my next learning paper for the Board! Having all this useful pre-created content for things like that helped me justify spending time thinking and writing.”

“As a funder, I think working in the open is particularly important in terms of being able to share what you're spotting in terms of patterns, trends and insights from across a portfolio of grantees. Too often funders are a 'black box', with information going in but never coming back out. Or even being made sense of internally.”

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