You don't need to look very far to find charities using digital in increasingly creative and innovative ways. From last week's Macmillan/RNLI/Mencap charity shake off (as captured in Kirsty Marrin's Storify) to the British Red Cross' more serious First Aid app, charities are demonstrating that they are not short on ideas or ambition when it comes to digital.
And yet, talk to digital managers and charity leaders and you get the sense that there is much more to be had. Charities are struggling to realise the full potential of digital and effect the truly transformational change that will secure a sustainable business for the digital age.
Much has been said of the need for charity leaders to embrace digital. Indeed, Lasa's crowd sourced report "Digital: What Every Charity Leader Should Know" argued that engaging with digital is crucial to the sustainability of the sector and provided some excellent advice from experts across the sector.
But beyond embracing and understanding the value of digital, what more can and should charity leaders be doing to drive digital transformation in their organisations?
Last year, working in partnership with CharityComms, we set out to explore the state of digital in the sector to try to better understand the key factors that might inhibit change. We thought that digital literacy would be one of the crucial issues facing charities. In fact, while it is clearly important, what emerged was a far more important message about the role of leaders in creating the right conditions for change and doing what they do best: leading.
Our survey of digital managers from the top 100 charities, by income, showed a picture of patchy senior management engagement with digital – over 75% had a digital strategy, and yet 35% said this was not monitored by senior management. When we talked to charity chief executives, some acknowledged that digital was rarely, if ever, discussed at senior management meetings. And yet, none of the chief executives we spoke to were in any doubt about the impact of digital on their organisation, nor the size of the opportunity.
Digital managers from across the sector have told us that they are trying to drive ambitious and strategically important digital programmes against a backdrop of limited resources and conflicting priorities. They lack confidence that they are supported by leadership that "get" digital, with over half reporting that their senior management have a poor understanding of digital. They believe that this, and the general lack of digital literacy, is having a real impact on results, notably in fundraising where 75% believe poor digital literacy is hampering efforts.
We would argue that the level of leadership engagement is the crucial factor for success: charity leaders who have fully grasped the impact of digital and understand their own role in driving change can see the benefits. As Chris Askew, chief executive of Breakthrough Breast Cancer puts it in his foreword to our new report, Leading Digital Transformation: Recommendations for Charity Chief Executives: "Charity chief executives have a responsibility, I believe, to champion digital strategy and empower their teams to operationalise it throughout the organisation. They need to create an environment that enables the right things to happen".
Our report looks into the role of leadership and advances six practical recommendations for charity chief executives to consider:
1. Own and drive your organisation's digital ambition. Leaders need a full line of sight to their organisational digital strategy. Digital programmes can be uniquely complex and require high levels of cross-organisational collaboration. The programmes that work best are those that have clear leadership from the top and strong governance.
2. Maintain a strong chain of command to your head of digital. Digital managers are leading business-critical programmes in an area that is subject to unusually high levels of dynamic change, and they need support from leaders.
3. Keep the position of digital in your organisation under review. The traditional home of digital in most charities is within communications. While there are obvious benefits to this, digital has ramifications for every aspect of a charity's operations, and leaders should be open to considering the best structures to meet the changing needs of the business.
4. Operationalise digital. Consider digital beyond its marketing and communications potential. Charity leaders should consider how digital can transform every aspect of the business model, whether it is services, fundraising or campaigning.
5. Invest in digital as infrastructure not marketing. Budget for digital development as an infrastructure investment, not as marketing collateral – your digital platform is business critical infrastructure that requires a long-term investment.
6. Make your senior team more digitally literate. Charity leaders don't need to be specialists but they need to equip themselves with enough knowledge to have the confidence to make business-critical decisions about digital investment.
We believe these recommendations will help charity leaders, and their digital teams, ensure that they are able to drive digital strategies that will deliver meaningful and sustainable results.
Download the full report here.
Katie Smith is head of third sector at Cogapp.
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