Charity digital resolutions for 2019
We ran a Retrospective with a group of senior leaders working in charity digital — looking at what worked well in 2018 and what could be improved on. Here are the resolutions that people were taking into 2019…
Creating integrated supporter journeys is great in theory and bloody hard in practice — so find small wins which deliver actual progress.
Everyone is struggling to implement supporter journeys that flow from one product to another, building loyalty along the way. In the world of media agencies and siloed organisations, it’s easy to say what the end goal is, but very difficult to get there.
Those which have made progress, started with a couple of achievable improvements, rather than trying to change everything all at once.
Step 1 — Run a collaborative marketing effectiveness review. This helps to uncover issues which individual teams might struggle to see. By creating a group understanding of the problem, you can come up with solutions which cut across teams.
It’s crucial that this work is done by the people who are going to be asked to change their approaches. If it’s completely handled by an external or central team, then it comes across as ‘homework being marked’. Make sure you involve everybody in creating the effectiveness framework. Then get them to evaluate the marketing materials for themselves.
Step 2 — Quarterly marketing plans that look across different products, teams and services are the first step to actually creating integrated supporter journeys.
At the very least, these allow you to plan your awareness marketing investment across the whole organisation, rather than having to invest on a project by project basis. This means you have a pool of people who are more receptive to your messages who might Consider and then Convert to supporting you.
Start up-skilling programmes with reporting and go from there
Everyone has some sort of programme to improve their organisation’s digital capabilities. These ranged in terms of scope and ambition — but all were making the most of the enthusiasm of their colleagues to do more digital. The top tips were:
- Start with reports — once people can dig into the numbers of their digital work, they will understand what’s working and what’s not. They will then come to conclusions for themselves rather than being told by someone else — meaning they’ll be bought into them from the start. Make use of this and ensure that everybody knows how to use Google Analytics, your Email provider’s reporting suite or Facebook results & reports
- Build your own marketing fundamentals session — much of digital up-skilling is actually marketing up-skilling. Create your organisation’s own fundamentals course in this — looking at things like audience segmentation, messaging and reporting. Once you have this you need to repeat it and eventually get attendees to run it for themselves across the organisation.
- Reverse mentoring — set up a scheme where your senior leaders can be coached by those ‘on the ground’ to get a good basis of understanding for digital. Be prepared for some awkward questions and the inevitable ‘I just want to do Twitter well’…
- Create internal benchmarks for people — once you’ve got folks excited about digital, you need to help them understand if what they’re doing is working. Create a set of figures that people can use to understand the success of their campaigns — even if they need to be heavily caveated.
Make friends with HR
Most digital teams are trying to some greater or lesser degree, to change the way their organisation operates. If you’re going to achieve this, then you need to win the hearts and minds of the people in your organisation. Thankfully for us, there are usually very good people in HR who know all about this type of work.
From a very practical point of view, they normally have budgets for running up-skilling or Learning & Development work. They’ll also have a detailed understanding of how people-centred change should be structured.
Make time for building relationships to break down silos
We all complain about our organisations being too siloed. If we want to go about fixing it, we need to build understanding of other peoples’ worlds. This means building relationships with them so we can start to empathise with and respect how they operate. From here you can trust each other to build new ways of working.
So book out time in your diary for coffees, team meetings and workshops where the sole purpose is to explore another perspective. There might not be an immediate end result (although there often is!) but it’s the only way to achieve the big changes you’ll have on your agenda.
To fill junior roles, make remote working work
Everyone is struggling to recruit junior roles. Some think that charities can’t compete with commercial budgets. Others wonder whether these people aren’t able to move to London on entry level salaries. Either way, if you make your roles home based, then you open up a whole new group of applicants.
Be brave and push yourself and your organisation to handle more remote or flexible working. If you don’t, then you’ll be left behind very very quickly.
Spend time building understanding of any trustee that is interested in digital
If you’re lucky enough to have a trustee that ‘gets digital’ then spend time with them.
Most digital teams haven’t really worked out how best to utilise their ‘digital trustee’ — but the solution will come from better understanding each others’ worlds.
They’ll have their own vision for how they can contribute and will no doubt be interested in your ideas for moving things forward. Perhaps invite them to a team meeting or retro so they can better understand you and your team…
Make friends with your Data team
For the longest while, data has been something done in another part of the organisation. We know it’s important but we don’t get our hands dirty with it (because we’re normally a little scared by all the numbers and formulas).
For organisations and their leadership though, data is the reality of their digital experiences. It’s only going to get more important if we’re trying to build the digitally led, fully integrated supporter journeys we keep talking about. So we’ll spend time understanding the data team’s world and how we can best work together.
