6 things I learnt at one of the largest charities in the UK
It’s been four months since I left the digital team of one of the top UK charities. During my time there I learnt more than in any other role in my career combined; it was probably my most favourite place I’ve ever worked (before moving to William Joseph of course).
Inspired by an article written by my colleague, and reflecting on my own experiences, I feel I made a few discoveries that are worth sharing.
1. Your users should be central to every decision you make
It may sound like the most obvious piece of advice going. However it’s something I’d never heard talked about in the previous not-for-profits I’ve worked at. Managing the digital presence of small — medium charity often gets taken up with handling the competition for which department gets to feature their information on the homepage, or gets tweeted about next. If that’s you, I don’t think you’re alone.
You need to turn the question round from which area of the charity is important, to what the users who view your content find most important. Who is your audience? How does this audience typically engage with content? What do they need from you? What can you offer that meets those needs? These are the questions any communicator should constantly be asking themselves.
One way to approach this is by completing an exercise to identify who your organisations audiences are, what they need from you and what you want them to commit to doing. The KFC formula is a good place to start.
2. Agile working can be applied to most types of team
Agile has been a buzzword circulating across different types of workplaces for a good few years. Originally applied to software development, it’s a methodology based on breaking down work into smaller pieces and focusing on iterative cycles.
Purists will tell you adopting agile means you have to operate in 2 week sprints, have daily stand ups without fail and story point everything. This is a popular misconception.
The principles behind agile are about:
- Being transparent
- Communicating ideas
- Taking on manageable chunks of work
- Engaging with others
- Self-managing teams
- User centricity
Another way of phrasing it is ways to improve organisational culture. With this in mind, agile can be adopted by any team at any workplace (as long as attention to detail and rigour isn’t lost in the finished outputs).
We had many teams decide to take up some agile practises throughout the charity, but all were buying into the same principles. In every case, team effectiveness was improved — and not only the number of outputs, but their outcomes as well. By communicating better amongst ourselves and focusing on the stuff that mattered to our users above anything else, we were better able to achieve our goals.
3. Testing upfront is less risky
Lean methodology is another trendy term I learnt about in my time there. I remember realising what it meant —you take the beginnings of an idea, put it in front of real users, and see how they the thing. I realised this was a much quicker, cheaper way of knowing if the idea would work than spending months on design and build, then launching the thing only to discover all the reasons why users didn’t like it. If research was included, it was often long, quality focus groups, which tests the intent of a user, not the actual action they might take. There’s much more risk involved in this than in testing a prototype. With lean, you can have the same questions answered in a much shorter time frame, costing a fraction of the price. Almost anything can be tested with real people within 24 hours.
I’ve seen many fantastic products and ideas launch and grow in this way. I‘ve also seen things being tested that users didn’t engage with, so they were parked or pivoted. This kind of failure should be celebrated as lessons have been learnt.
4. Digital transformation means something different to every single person you talk to
When I first heard the term Digital Transformation being used, it was in the context of changing the culture of the organisation. In this fast-paced world we find ourselves in, charities are starting to understand the need to keep up with users expectations. In order for a large, legacy organisation to adapt to the ever evolving world of technology, more of it’s people need to be digitally literate in their every day roles.
We adopted a model for the digital team to grow this capability across the charity, and called it Digital Transformation. But as we started the process, I realised the term meant something different to each person I mentioned it to. Some think it’s that big whacky new database that is going to revolutionise the organisation by providing a single supporter view. Some see it as digitising all legacy services. Some see it as decentralising their digital teams. And some see it as taking skills once specific to digital, such as data analysis and good content writing, and up-skilling all people within the organisation.
Any of those are fine because in all those cases, it’s getting people talking about making better experiences for their users.
5. In order to be prepared for the future, there needs to be some focus on people
Whatever it means to people, Digital Transformation is a huge ‘thing’ right now. Unless updating a massive CRM or installing some all encompassing email solution, you’re probably talking about changing the way your organisation works. Whatever your programme is, you want to be thinking about making sure you’re embedding relevant and necessary skills into your workplace. There aren’t many roles that don’t need to have some of those more ‘digital’ skills — both practical ones like how to update a CMS, but softer ones like how to work in collaboration with your peers. This is arguably much more important than any technology you introduce.
6. Any change needs buy in at every level
Change is a scary thing. As soon as the term upskilling is mentioned, people are quite rightly going to be worried. Implication is their skillset isn’t good enough, they aren’t relevant any more. Especially if they haven’t been explained why.
It’s not enough to just have leadership buy in. When we kicked off our transformation programme and started working with our first teams, they hadn’t been told any of the details. They didn’t have capacity to allow time for training, and to take on the extra tasks as part of their day to day roles. Sign off at a theoretical level is one thing, but for change to really happen, every team manager needs to understand what is involved and have an action plan. The more knowledge someone has, the more they are going to be bought in, and are going to want to be a part of it.
None of these things should be seen as big or scary. They are not only relevant to big charities either — any organisation, any size, in any sector, can start to adopt this stuff.
