My top 3 learnings from trying to do digital transformation (1. Don’t call it digital transformation)
For the last 18 months, I have been running a team who are embedded in the fundraising department at Cancer Research UK. We’ve named ourselves the Supporter Insight and Testing team and our aim is to help people to use the new tools and ways of working that the emergence of the internet has created. We do this by supporting people to put supporters’ needs at the heart of their work, act on evidence, and deliver long-term change rather than short-term fixes.
We’ve achieved a lot. Fundraising teams now have a better understanding of what their supporters want and are quickly finding new ways to offer that to them. Through this, we’ve learned lots about what works but potentially we could have done even more if we’d stuck more decisively to the principles of the web; openness, inclusivity, collaboration, and trust that Tim Berners-Lee laid out when he built the web (learn more about this in my other blogpost).
3 things I’ll do differently next time
- Can everyone understand what I’m saying? — If people don’t understand what you’re talking about then you’re alienating them. Obvious, right? While you may think you’re being clear, the reality is that we all use jargon and acronyms all the time. My team tries to test what they’re saying on someone who doesn’t know our world. We aim to build trust so that the people around us feel comfortable calling out when we use jargon or they don’t understand. This work is never done!
- Can everyone see what I’m doing and be involved? Make every aspect of your work available for people to see. More than putting it into a shared wiki, this means proactively understanding your internal audiences, the way they access information and then making what you’re doing available to them in the way they would expect. We used fortnightly remote demonstrations of our work as a way to learn about our stakeholders and give them the opportunity to participate.
- Are we focusing on the most important thing? Whatever the ‘most important thing’ is for you, keep checking that this is what you’re focusing most effort on. For my team it was making sure decision makers were seeing, engaging and agreeing with what we were doing. Not the easiest thing to do as they are normally very busy people, but we knew lack of trust would slow us down and potentially lead to it being stopped. In our current organisational structures change must happen both bottom up and top down.
For me, it all boils down to simple and frequent, two-way communication with the most important people around you. While we all know it’s integral to the success of most things, for us it often felt like an afterthought rather than ‘how we do the work’. We’ve learned that great communication is really, really hard to do well. You never feel like you have the time to do it, but if you don’t bake it into what you’re doing it’ll probably catch up with you and bite you on the arse!
My time in my current team is coming to an end, and I will be taking up the role of Head of Innovation. So expect to see a lot more about the Innovation team at Cancer Research UK.
So what happened over the last 18 months?
In the beginning….
In early 2017 I had just finished a piece of work called a ‘Spoke’ with the Volunteer Fundraising team (aka Community Fundraising). The piece of work was to increase the amount of money we raised from our cash collections, but also to support them with learning new tools, technology and ways of working to apply to all areas of their work.
From doing this piece of work we identified an opportunity to transform how the whole supporter experience was being delivered locally, and, the need for changing the culture in the teams that deliver it. Read the original proposal that was successful in getting funding!
Identifying the problem and how to potentially solve it
In July 2017 I got started and I quickly realised that I shouldn’t jump in and try to do it all on my own, but I should focus on creating the environment that would empower fundraising teams to improve the supporter's experiences themselves, and, enable them to keep on improving it when I’m gone.
I did this by creating a strategy (my hypothesis) that I believed would create a more scalable and sustainable model for transforming fundraising. The biggest assumption of this strategy was that by investing in a team of people would create the change we were trying to make. Read the strategy and how I planned testing the assumptions that I had made in it.
Between July 2017 and now we have delivering on the strategy by testing various iterations of the team. Testing everything about it from our name, our vision, the structure, where we should focus, how we should show our impact, how we work, what tools we use….. the testing and learning will never stop.
Where are we now?
Right now we are called the ‘Supporter Insight & Testing team’ and we help people to:
- know what the supporter’s needs are
- use a ‘test and learn’ approach
- get access to the right data as simple as possible
- work together better from across the charity (not just in our silos), and use everyone’s skills and experience
- use plain language — UX, Lean, Content Strategy, Agile, Scrum Wizards…..it all gets a bit Hogwartsy so we try and steer away from it.
Our current vision is to support people at CRUK to put supporters’ needs at the heart of their work, act on evidence, and deliver long-term change rather than short-term fixes.
