Digital leaders retro April 2023

From ways of working to the challenges of using Twitter, our retro with digital leaders covered lots of fascinating insights into content, channels and team approaches across charities, not-for-profits and healthcare organisations. These are some of the biggest trends, tips and opportunities they are seeing at the moment.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Ways of working, integration and skills

Regardless of size and digital maturity, there was a lot of shared discussion on the challenges of working with people across an organisation — and in particular how to make the most out of digital. Common themes included challenges with silo-working, difficulties with embedding Agile or new ways of project management, and blurred roles & responsibilities between Digital and Comms/Marketing teams.

These have been the biggest wins:

• Show don’t tell — by taking your stakeholders on a journey of how a new approach to digital has made a difference, you enable the results and the collaborative process to speak for themselves. This approach can also include involving non-digital teams in strategy creation e.g. take them through the social media strategy development as you are experiencing it — sharing and navigating decisions and insight together.
• Introduce digital kick-off meetings — getting everyone on the same page from the start of the project, breaking down where and how digital channels, content and marketing are going to make an impact and the processes and planning needed to deliver this.
• Business partnering — deepening 1:1 relationships with stakeholder teams will build understanding and empathy for each other’s processes, approach and priorities. It also enables open questioning in a smaller, safe environment where both parties can learn ‘on-the-job’.
• Find a senior leadership ally — cultivating a relationship with senior leadership to get their buy-in for new ways of working will support your new strategy and also gives you a voice in leadership discussion

Attracting talent for digital teams

Recruitment remains a challenge across all organisations. Some charities were struggling to fill junior roles in the team, whereas for others it was the more specialist roles that required specific skills and technical expertise that have proven tricky.

Advice on how to recruit the best people:

• Sell your organisation and the role — treat your vacancy like a campaign and think about your audiences, key messages and motivations.
• Run an inclusive recruitment process — covering everything from sharing the interview questions in advance to ‘Ask Us Anything’ drop-ins about the vacancy, these steps will help all candidates to understand more about the role and organisation.

For more on resources on inclusive recruitment, we recommend:

• Reducing the power imbalance in recruitment
• Autistica’s Employers Guide for Neurodiversity
• William Joseph and Collaborative Future’s inclusive hiring process
• Follow Elvira Morrison’s recruitment journey for Maudsley Charity which includes tips such as blind CVs, external experts on panel and open, detailed job packs.

Twitter 🙄 and other areas to focus energy

Following unanimous agreement that Twitter was challenging at the moment (“a total binfire” according to some…) — and actually that some of the newest changes (e.g. paid for blue ticks) are spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, particularly in public health e.g. the spread of anti-vax messaging.

This was particularly worrying for digital leaders and they shared advice on how to navigate this and where else to focus attention to get their messages to their audiences and service users:

• Learn about the Twitter algorithm so that your teams and stakeholders are clued up and can plan campaigns accordingly
• Use this time to test — implement learnings from other platforms across your Twitter content while we’re all navigating unknown territory — use this as an opportunity to test new approaches and ideas
• Focus on other channels — explore LinkedIn, YouTube or other channels that you’ve invested less time and resource in. One organisation had since huge spike in LinkedIn engagement recently and another has invested in a YouTube content strategy to get their messages to target audiences.

Search and content

Some organisations have seen a notable rise in organic traffic and shared their advice on achieving this:

• Be audience-driven — use the language that your audiences and service users use and are looking for
• Position SEO as a fundamental component of digital strategy — give search the attention it needs in your strategy, through investing in skills, training and tools that you need to ensure your content is getting seen by the people who need it the most
• New website briefs — ensure that any new website projects have SEO as a key deliverable as this is a huge opportunity to review and step-change your approach
• Take a content marketing approach — make sure your social media, SEO and content design are working together to deliver best search positioning, organic traffic and content impact
• Content design requires training — in a devolved content model, it’s critical that individuals have opportunities to learn best practice content production, SEO and approaches to writing for digital channels. As well as these skills, we also talked about people learning the why too, which builds understanding of platform behaviour, audience needs and digital performance.

We also talked a lot about GA4 and, whilst some are persevering with Google, others are exploring alternative providers such as Adobe, Plausible and Silktide. More on this in the next retro for sure!

Thanks for joining us Joe Freeman (NHS), Lucy Taylor (Natural History Museum), Andrew Durnin (ARUK) Anna Bullock (KSS), Miriam Zendle (NHS Providers), Rachel Misra (Hestia), Rachel Murphy (Met Office), Katharine Newbigging (Locality), Helen Jaques (GRAIL), Laura Thomas (CAP), Matthew Farrand (Maudsley Charity) and Clare Roebuck (Moorfields Eye Charity) 😊

We’d love to hear your thoughts on these opportunities and tips — please do give us a shout!