We unlock power with coastal communities.
Blue Ventures connects coastal communities, restoring the ocean, providing the resources
and partnerships they need to unlock their power and turn local action into global impact.
We link communities with allies, knowledge and influence to create unstoppable waves of
change.
Together, we’re placing communities at the centre of solutions to sustain fisheries, manage
ecosystems and redefine how the world protects the ocean.
Background
Blue Ventures works with independent local organisations that support coastal
communities to manage fisheries and protect the ocean. These partners include
community organisations and local non-governmental organisations. They bring their own
expertise, relationships and priorities; Blue Ventures provides funding, technical support,
learning, data and connections to help them achieve their goals.
Our approach has increasingly shifted towards enabling partners to lead change in their
own contexts. This has included establishing dedicated partnership teams, launching the
Frontline Community Fund and developing a partnership operating model to guide how we
establish and support funded relationships. Our Theory of Change places locally led
organisations and coastal communities at the centre of change, with Blue Ventures
increasingly acting as an enabler, facilitator and connector.
We have invested significantly in the systems, processes and teams supporting this
approach. Partners value our relationships and support highly, as demonstrated by our
2026 external Keystone partner evaluation. However, working with Blue Ventures can still

be time-consuming. Partners interact with multiple teams, systems, and requirements, each
shaped by specific professional disciplines, functional responsibilities, and operational
needs.
Our existing surveys and improvement processes provide valuable feedback, but do not
fully capture how these interactions fit together from a partner’s perspective. We want to
understand the complete experience: how partners access and use our support, navigate
requirements, move between teams and experience the relationship over time.
We also want to use that perspective to challenge how we organise ourselves. What would
we design differently if our functions understood their role primarily through the value they
provide to partners, and worked together around partners’ goals?
Our ambition is to bring a more deliberate service-provider perspective into Blue Ventures:
making our expertise easier to access and use, reducing unnecessary effort and organising
support around partners’ success. Partners are independent organisations with their own
agency and priorities. We want to adapt the discipline of service design and customer
experience to that relationship, while preserving what partners already value.
Summary project description
We seek a consultant or team with strong experience in service design, customer
experience (CX), user experience (UX) or human-centred service transformation to bring an
independent partner-experience perspective and organisational critique to this work.
The consultancy will examine the end-to-end experience of working with Blue Ventures and
connect it to the organisational choices shaping that experience. This includes how
functions such as training and learning, partnerships, programme performance, data
science and advocacy engage partners and coordinate their work.
Direct partner research will inform the assignment. The consultant must also bring the
expertise to interpret and challenge existing arrangements, develop alternative approaches
and demonstrate how support could be designed and delivered differently.
The work should introduce a shared framework that Blue Ventures can continue using
beyond the consultancy. By applying this framework to selected priority areas, the
consultant should demonstrate its value and help teams develop the understanding and
practices needed to maintain it. The assignment is not expected to identify or design every
change the organisation may need.
The primary focus will be partners funded through the Frontline Community Fund (FCF) and
their interactions across Blue Ventures. The consultancy will complement our wider
Partnership Strategy and internal operating model review, informing both without taking
responsibility for the overall strategy, a comprehensive internal efficiency review or full
implementation of recommendations.

Scope of Work and Key Tasks
The following percentages indicate the anticipated share of consultant effort. Applicants
should propose and justify their methodology, level of effort and workplan; the detailed
approach will be agreed during inception.
Review and frame the design challenge (10%):
Review the 2030 Strategy, FCF principles, Theory of Change, partnership model, existing
partner journey, Keystone findings and relevant organisational materials. Understand how
Blue Ventures currently defines and delivers its support to partners. Agree the priority
questions and scope, building on existing evidence and coordinating with related work.
Understand the end-to-end partner experience (25%):
Investigate how partners encounter Blue Ventures across teams, systems, forms of support
and stages of the relationship. Develop a practical representation of the experience,
including needs, expectations, key touchpoints, areas of value, effort, friction and
transitions between teams. Connect the partner-facing experience to the internal activities
and responsibilities behind it, recognising differences between partner contexts.
Critically examine the organisation of support (25%):
Use this understanding to challenge how Blue Ventures’ functions define their roles,
organise their expertise and deliver support individually and collectively. Examine how
priorities, professional identities, responsibilities, behaviours and internal requirements
shape partner experience. Identify where current arrangements enable partners to
succeed and where alternative approaches could provide greater value or reduce
unnecessary complexity.
Design and test priority approaches (25%):
Develop a clear description of a more partner-centred approach and apply it to selected
priority areas. Co-design and test proposals with partners and relevant Blue Ventures
teams, considering both what partners should experience and the internal conditions
needed to deliver it. Assess proposals against partner value, accessibility, organisational
feasibility, appropriate accountability and the ability to maintain quality as the network
grows.
Embed the framework and hand over (15%):
Refine and prioritise recommendations, distinguishing immediate opportunities from
changes requiring wider decisions or further testing. Develop practical principles, tools and
guidance that teams can continue using. Recommend how ownership, collaboration,
partner insight and review can be embedded into existing planning and decision-making,
and how future improvements can be assessed.
Throughout the assignment, engagement should provide trusted conditions for candid
partner feedback, account for relevant languages and contexts, and minimise demands on
partners. The approach should address consent, confidentiality, safeguarding and the

power imbalance that can arise when funded organisations are asked to comment on a
funder.
Expected Results/Deliverables
- Project plan: An agreed design challenge, scope, methodology, engagement plan,
timeline and deliverable schedule, showing how the assignment will build on existing
evidence and connect with related work.
- Partner experience and organisational diagnosis: An evidence-based synthesis
and practical representation of the end-to-end experience. This should identify what
partners value, how touchpoints fit together, where partners encounter
unnecessary effort or inconsistency, and the organisational choices contributing to
those experiences.
- Partner-centred framework and tested design proposals: A clear articulation
of how Blue Ventures could organise and deliver its capabilities around partners’
experience, including shared design principles and implications for roles, priorities,
behaviours and collaboration across functions. Demonstrate the approach through
proposals for selected priority areas, documenting how testing and feedback
informed their refinement.
- Prioritised recommendations and practical handover: Recommendations
setting out expected partner benefits, feasibility, dependencies and next steps,
alongside editable tools and guidance that enable teams to apply the framework
themselves. Include recommendations for embedding the approach into
organisational practices and monitoring future improvements.
Quality and Measures of Success
Applicants should identify a recognised cross-context and/or cross-industry service-design
or customer-experience framework and explain how they would adapt it to Blue Ventures’
partnership context. During planning, the consultant and Blue Ventures will agree how this
framework will be used to assess current practice, guide design proposals and support
ongoing review.
Assessment should consider the coherence of the end-to-end experience, effort required
from partners, accessibility and usefulness of support, and how effectively teams organise
around partner needs. Relevant Keystone findings should inform this assessment,
supplemented by measures appropriate to the priority areas selected.
Knowledge and Skills
- Proven experience in service design, CX, UX or human-centred service
transformation across complex organisations with multiple functions and
touchpoints.
- Demonstrated ability to use end-to-end user insight to challenge and change how
organisations deliver services, including roles, priorities, behaviours and ways of
working.
- Strong qualitative research and synthesis skills, including the ability to connect user
experience to underlying organisational factors.
- Relevant experience in journey mapping, service blueprinting, co-design and testing
service concepts or improvements.
- Experience helping teams adopt and maintain user-centred practices beyond an
individual assignment.
- Strong facilitation skills and the ability to constructively challenge specialist teams
and translate findings into practical organisational decisions.
- Sensitivity to power, equity and cross-cultural relationships, and the ability to adapt
service-provider approaches to partnerships with independent organisations.

Please Send your resume/CV