Access All Areas Preview: Driving digital advantage - 10 things you can do right now

For this year’s Access All Areas we requested the support of three leaders of digital change; Natasha Chadwick - Change Consultant & Founder of Impact People & Change, Alice Verlander - Project Management Consultant at Ginniff Consulting and Ian Patterson - Freelance Digital Strategist at Desktop Shortcut. Each panel member focuses on slightly different aspects of digital change in their day jobs, and as such comprise a ‘super panel’.

Before the panel sits next week, we wanted to cut to the chase and challenge these individuals to dish up some practical tips. Here’s their top ten suggestions of how you can drive digital advantage, without breaking the bank…

1. Know your audience

Before embarking on any new digital initiative, it’s important to understand all the audiences you will need to consider as part of the work. For example, an outward facing digital project such as a new website, might need to engage with supporters, service users, families of service users, corporate partners, statutory funders, volunteers, and new recruits.  An inward facing project such as new CRM database or setting up video meetings might need to support your fundraising team, care support staff, finance, recruitment and wider leadership.

Documenting these audience segments (or ‘Personas’) means that you and your colleagues can fast-track many conversions in future. You can also give your personas memorable names, such as “Fay the Fundraiser” as a shorthand to speed up your digital planning and content creation. It’s also important to see people as people (and not a spreadsheet of data segments!) So our advice is to use digital as a reason to build strong and lasting relationships where you learn, laugh and grow together.

2. Own your goal

By its very nature, digital can be distracting. Sometimes if feels like you’ve stepped on to the Starship Enterprise with all the exciting options, flashing lights and buttons! Digital agencies and suppliers are very good at giving you options, some of which could serve to distract from your goal. Without understanding your end-game you are risking technology taking centre stage and people coming to their own conclusions.

Our suggestion is to set no more than five executive objectives that directly support your business targets. They don’t have to be scoped in minute detail, but it’s a good idea to do this before you get too excited about the ‘art of the possible’. Then, be protective of your aims and keep reminding people of them, in every meeting if you need to! As someone leading digital, your goals may evolve as you begin to understand more about what’s possible. You may want to make time for worthwhile distractions and even happy accidents but be sure to start out with a simple vision that others could get behind.

3. Bold moves are safe

Digital can (and will) be scary at times. There - we said it! However, you can help yourself by not being afraid to ask the difficult questions and openly discuss things that may be controversial. Being open minded and asking questions are two of your most powerful transformational tools – and you will be surprised how many doors they can unlock! At times you won’t know what to do next and will be expected to make a decision without all the facts. At times like these you WILL get mixed responses from people, and it will be a learning curve.

Be open about your decision, why you’re doing it, what information you’ve used to make that decision, and why it’s the best decision given the information you had to hand. Never be afraid of making decisions, they keep projects moving. Be bold in your timescales, be bold in your ambitions of what you want to achieve, but most of all - be bold by knowing that even digital experts need to tell themselves once in a while to “Be bold and don’t panic”.

4. Demonstrate digital

In every organisation there can be digital doubters. They may be uncomfortable talking about digital due to their lack of experience or even their age (remember – not everyone had a computer in school). A great way to satisfy those uncomfortable with digital advancements (and change in general) is to involve them in an early success story. To bring change to life (and prove that it’s not so scary after all) you can create a pilot site or group of early adopters. Use this to test, refine, iterate your product and approach.

Create opportunities for everyone (including your harshest critics) to see, hear, and feel what’s to come.  This could be using videos to demo a new technology, or a ‘show and tell’ where you set-up live tech examples (or ‘labs’) for people to experiment and play. It’s important to invite honest feedback and be prepared to act on the answer. When demonstrating digital we take people on a journey of understanding. The closer they can be to the experience themselves, the more affirming it will be.

5. Be realistic

Transformation and most digital projects are demanding. Even when planned to the nth degree they will invariably need something at some point that wasn’t expected. So make time for digital transformation! Ensure you have flex in your role, especially if you’re fitting this in as part of your normal job, as many people are expected to do. Ensure the people around you are aware that they may need flex too and may need to support you at times. Pinch points can occur during: determining specifications, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), training, launch, and post implementation.

6. Seek out supporters

This could be a group of digi-champions, super users, buddies, or a change network. These are the people who ‘get it’.  They see the benefit of what you’re trying to achieve in your digital change programme, they are excited by it, they want to be first in line to try it out.  Some of these people will come to the fore naturally, others will emerge as your programme moves along.  Give these people a clear role, a development opportunity to be involved in - use them to test ideas (about what the digital changes will be and about how you plan to implement those changes) and to be messengers and givers of feedback.  Make them feel special, give them an identity, you don’t need to pay them more, you need to help them and others see that they are part of something special.  Soon everyone will want to be involved.

7. Invite feedback and act on it

Any good change project provides plenty of opportunities for people to provide feedback. This costs nothing yet has the potential to save you time and money in the long run if done well and acted upon once received.  There are a range of feedback mechanisms – it could be a customer focus group or a staff survey – and most of these can be delivered for free or at a very low cost.  Offering opportunities for feedback demonstrates you value others’ input. 

Consider how you can build feedback into existing channels and find ways of gathering this into one place as well as segmenting it, so you know how to respond in different areas.  Genuinely using this feedback to shape your decisions or approach and sharing with others how you’ve done takes this to another level.  It shows you’re serious about getting it right.  The gift of feedback is one of the best gifts that can be given – don’t waste it!

8. Buddy up!

Successful projects bring people together to share common goals. Whilst we can hope for that to happen organically (and sometimes we strike lucky and a digital project forms strong relationships) it’s better to build-in a buddy system from the start. This means putting someone who might be more confident with digital together with someone who is a novice. Buddies can exist within your organisation, or comprise of people from an outside agency, supplier or partner. You might be ‘the novice’ yourself and want to find a mentor, or you can create key contacts through a project. Buddy point of contacts can be prefaced with specific areas such as: CRM Buddy, Digital Fundraising Buddy or more simply: Digital Helper or Digital Star let people know there is help available.

9. Protect yourself with prototypes

There’s a time and a place to paint a masterpiece. Even so, the most intricate works of art started life as simple line drawings, with layers of paint being added afterwards. Digital specialists use a whole range of methods to protect and ‘gate’ resources. Meaning: don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need polished designs and fancy presentations in the first month of your project, when a prototype will just as easily explain your vision and allow others to give you feedback.

Prototyping comes in many formats; post-it-notes, whiteboarding – building an event space with Lego! So long as your idea can be relayed to others quickly and (ideally) allow them to make collaborative changes, then there are no rules. Remember: Prototypes can be sitemaps, sketches, wireframes or mock-ups. Where possible request the use of prototyping software from your agency, to allow you to test and validate quickly, without committing the day rate of expensive designers and developers.

10. Money matters

It goes without saying that digital projects live or die on getting the financing right. Even some larger enterprise transformation projects have been unsuccessful due to funding, and the last thing you want is to commit six months of your life, only for the work to be cancelled. The best digital specialists achieve project success by identifying operational or organisational KPIs to support. This means avoiding all those digital buzz phrases and reporting acronyms, in favour of talking the same language as your senior decision makers. Cost-neural or ‘spend to save’ initiatives can make digital investment sound more appealing, and there’s nothing like researching how your project could be funded or written down to really impress the money men and women. These methods give your finance functions confidence in your ability to deliver and help them manage risk. So, two things: A) own non-digital KPI’s and B) see is as your job to think like the finance team.

Considering we put our panelists on the spot, we think this is a rather handy prompt-list to share with colleagues, blu-tac to a wall or bookmark for future ref. Because - you never know when you will encounter another digital guru ready to bamboozle you with fairy dust!

Our suggestion? Baby steps that really matter are better than big announcements that might never happen.

 

Register for our panel session "Digital Change for Charities and Not for Profits" - Thursday 24th September 10am - 11am