Charity Spotlight: Matt Collins, Managing Director of Digital Candle

Digital knowledge is becoming increasingly valued in the charity sector, with almost three quarters (72%) of charities actively working towards progressing with digital through tools, skills, infrastructure, service delivery, and more. It can be difficult for charities, each with vastly different circumstances, to know how to come into the digital world in the way that best delivers their impact.

 

Alongside Charity Digital, a fellow charity helping the sector progress with this challenge is Digital Candle, offering a free service where charity professionals can have a one-hour call with a volunteer digital expert. The charity has over 600 experts who have been matched to more than 1,000 charity professionals asking digital questions.

 

In this interview, we speak to Matt Collins, the Managing Director of Digital Candle, to gain his perspective on the importance of digital knowledge in the charity sector, the role of the internet in fostering collaboration, the challenges to digital literacy in the sector, how to ensure long-term impact using digital, and more.

 

 

Charity Digital (CD): Why do you think digital knowledge is important for charities in 2023?

 

Matt Collins (MC): It’s never been more important for charities to be properly on top of their digital marketing. For a bunch of reasons. The pandemic has led to an unprecedented increase in demand for hybrid working arrangements. That’s not possible if your IT infrastructure and policies aren’t up to scratch.

 

If you aren’t doing digital to a decent standard, attracting, and retaining staff who want to work for a forward-thinking organisation is going to be that much more difficult.

 

I recently heard a charity citing “business critical” reasons for a role being 100% office-based. I interpret that as meaning they haven’t bothered making remote work possible. So now they have a smaller potential talent pool.

 

People have massively relied on social media and Google to get all of their information, especially since the pandemic. If you aren’t reaching new supporters and partners online, then there’s a good chance you aren’t reaching enough people at all.

 

That means that your service needs to exist as much online as does is by phone and in person. Offline is still crucial though – digital has not killed that off, it would be a wild exaggeration to suggest that it has.

 

 

CD: The spark for Digital Candle came from a tweet you made in 2019. What is the role of the internet in fostering collaboration in the charity sector?

 

 

MC: I was blown away by the response to my initial tweet back in 2019. So many people put their hands up to help smaller charities who weren’t as digitally savvy as them. We now have over 600 people who’ve helped, and it’s just an amazing example of how collaborative the charity sector is.

 

I spoke to one former charity head of digital who now works in the corporate sector. She told me that the sense of collaboration that was there in the charity sector is completely absent from where she had moved to.

 

No way would competitors be getting together at informal events, sharing expertise on what worked and what didn’t in their campaigns, and having a chat over a drink. I’ve worked in the charity sector for a long time now and it really is a special culture.

 

The new challenge is creating the level of collaboration and commitment over digital channels. There’s still nothing like face-to-face for creating a really strong relationship with teams. Video calls are still quite transactional in that sense, and creating the right blend of the two is a unique challenge.

 

 

 

CD: How varied are the questions asked by charity professionals to your experts? Do you have some examples?

 

MC: Oh wow, you wouldn’t believe the variety of questions we get asked on Digital Candle!

 

When the first lockdown hit, it was all questions asking how small charities can make the transition to primarily working from home after working in the office for so many years. We don’t get so many questions like that anymore. Charities have just got their heads around that which is good to see.

 

The most common questions that come up again and again are how charities can identify the best customer relationship management (CRM) system for their particular needs, how they can make use of the free Google Ad Grant, and how they can get on top of their social media strategies.

 

We get really specific IT security questions, people asking how they can get their podcast funded (which was a question we were able to answer!), all sorts. One recent question asked how a charity could extract information from an online directory and submit it directly to Google Maps to create a customised map! I love how incredibly detailed some of the questions are. It shows real confidence in the quality of answers that people expect to get.

 

 

 

CD: What do you think are the main challenges to digital literacy in the charity sector?

 

MC: It’s just not knowing what you don’t know. I put out that tweet asking for expert help in response to a survey that said around half of charity leaders didn’t buy into the need for digital in their organisation. There was a lot of outrage at this stat. But it came from people who do know what they should know.

 

I think we need to have empathy with charities who are scrabbling around for funding, doing their absolute best to deliver a service to people who need them, all the while being troubled by a niggly feeling that they really should be doing more with this digital malarky. That’s where the Digital Candle experts come in. When the charities do identify an area that they need help with, an expert is there to guide them through, with non-judgmental support.

 

And like everything else, funding is a massive barrier to achieving more. If every charity just had the money, they could do a huge amount of work in digital.  Organisations like Catalyst are vital in solving this problem. They deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve managed to achieve.

 

 

CD: How can charities make sure their use of digital has long-term impact?

 

MC: Long-term funding!  We’re happy to be able to provide a free service at Digital Candle but there’s no way it’s going to be a long-term solution for anybody. Forget about that idea. Charities might like to know that they can always turn to our experts to answer their questions, but if they want to have a long-term digital impact, it’s going to cost megabucks.

 

They might be able to get that from dedicated funding sources like Catalyst and other funders. But more likely, they’re going to have to make a case to their knowledge-poor boards. They’ll need to ask them to spend unrestricted funds on improving their digital services, investing in digital marketing, and increasing the capacity of the organisation to manage their contacts through an all-singing all-dancing CRM.

 

 

CD: What’s your favourite example of a charity who has gone on to have a great impact after using Digital Candle’s advice service and why?

 

MC: I really love this example from The Together Project. They were struggling to work out how they could move their emails, a perfect example of a problem that you just don’t know you have until you have it.

 

They were matched to a volunteer expert. They didn’t only know how to solve this problem, but they managed to discover and solve a new problem too! I love the proactivity that the expert showed in solving this problem. What a legend for helping the charity in ways they didn’t even know existed.

 

But in the best possible way, I have no idea what the long-term impact of Digital Candle really is. So many matches have happened – over 1,000 so far. I know anecdotally that some volunteer experts have gone on to deliver paid work for the charity that they were doing the advice call for. We’re totally fine with this. Both people want it to happen. It delivers long-term value for the charity. Everyone wins.

 

We only get feedback from a relatively small portion of the people who use the service, just like any other service for anything really. That means you can be sure that the long-term impact of Digital Candle is way more than I’m ever going to know, which is absolutely awesome.