Does your charity need a digital strategy?

Charities need to embrace long-term thinking. The tendency toward myopia, the prioritisation of the present, renders charities ill-prepared for the future.

The Charity Digital Skills Report 2024 showed that only 50% of charities had a digital strategy in place, only a 1% increase since 2020. The reality is that, despite additional awareness of the importance of a digital strategy, charities are still failing to put plans into place.

In this article, we explain the risks of forgoing a digital strategy, the benefits that a digital strategy provides, and some of the top tips and tricks for optimising your digital strategy.

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The risks of ignoring digital strategy

A digital strategy allows charities to plan the application of tech to working practices. The strategy shows charities how to use tech across their operations, finding opportunities, mitigating key risks, highlighting potential weaknesses, and so on. Failing to implement a strategy may result in the neglect of serious risks and missed opportunities for streamlining and optimisation.

Data mismanagement

Missed opportunities include effective data management and analytics. Many organisations collect data without knowing how to analyse and utilise that data. A digital strategy will provide your charity with purpose and direction. It will help you find the best means for storing data, the best methods to analyse data, and the best way to utilise data.

Cyber security breaches

Charities lacking digital strategies have heightened security vulnerabilities. Robust cyber security depends, for example, on a thoughtful, planned approach that protects against breaches. Digital strategies should include elements that help mitigate risk, showing how tech implementation provides security against attacks and how charities should use digital in the instance of an attack.

Being uncompliant

Organisations without strategies often find themselves less capable of compliance with the latest regulations and standards. Strategies allow you to create greater transparency and visibility, attributing key responsibilities. In terms of compliance, that’s essential, as everyone will know how to keep up-to-date and who exactly is accountable for any legal changes.

The benefits of a digital strategy

Direction informs greater decision-making. Too many charities make decisions based on opinions and assumptions, which are too often subjective, uninformed, misinformed, or simply ill-advised. Strategies allow charities to make informed decisions, based on patterns, trends, research, and quantitative and qualitative data. And the decisions can involve the entire team.

Staff buy-in, retention, and productivity

Speaking of the team, digital strategies promote ownership and organisational buy-in. That’s because they typically assign roles and responsibilities, which allow all members of the team to feel part of the project and part of the wider objectives of your charity. That improves  staff retention, and ultimately increased productivity.

Greater transparency

By specifying roles, ensuring visibility over objectives, and setting targets for the future, charities promote transparency. And that’s vital.  According to research, for example, transparency is a core driver of employee engagement, performance, and trust. Transparency improves creativity and productivity, as people can chime in and provide support and knowledge at the right time, rather than people running around looking for support, not knowing how and where to find it.

Improving agility

Digital strategies, as touched upon above, promote compliance and bolster security. But they also make your charity more agile. Having an agreed-upon position, with awareness of how you will proceed, allows charities to respond quickly to changes in the market. That means no missed opportunities to streamline processes, increase donations, and support service users.

Tips and tricks for optimising your digital strategy

Understand where you are now

The first step for any strategy is to establish your starting position, finding out where you are with your digital use. To do that, you can use process mapping, a digital maturity assessment, a digital maturity framework, a digital skills audit, a SWOT analysis, or other helpful mechanisms. Remember, though, that such detail is not often required, especially for smaller organisations. Even just seeking feedback from staff can prove useful.

Specify service user needs

Define service user needs at an early stage. Perform quantitative research, which means checking out pre-existing data, scoping current market trends, and looking at reports, surveys, and other relevant information. You can use qualitative data to fill in gaps in your quantitative data. That might mean conducting a survey with users, perhaps through email, socials, or even face-to-face. Again, remember that you do not need to spend months performing the above. A quick review of your data, and a short survey, should not require too much effort.

Establish goals

You can use several strategies to set goals, including following one of the acronym goal-setting approaches, such as SMART, FAST, CLEAR, HARD, and WISE. You can also take the Five Ws approach to narrow down your objectives. The above are simply useful mechanisms to ensure your goals have more purpose and direction. They may not be necessary.

Use the right digital tools

The final tips are around actually writing the digital strategy. It’s important to remember that digital strategies will look entirely different depending on the organisation. There is no wrong way to write a good strategy. Some organisations may use Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint, and others may wish to present more visual options with the use of Canva or Smartsheet. Others still may opt for strategic planning software, which might feel like overkill for small charities. Pick the option that best suits your needs, your capacity, and your existing skills.

Keep it simple

Strategies should not be long, sweeping documents. They should be clear, succinct, and preferably easy-to-read. One page is often enough. A few pages should always do the trick. Just make sure that you are presenting informed and purposeful objectives, clearly assigning roles and responsibilities, and providing as much visibility as possible to all stakeholders. Minimising filler and unnecessary detail is always useful for any strategy – indeed, any writing – so stick to the essentials.

Move with the times

Finally, remember that digital strategies are ever evolving. They are moving targets. And you will need to move with them, taking into account the latest trends, environmental and economic shifts, organisational changes, patterns in your data, and so on. Ensure you regularly review, and revise, your strategy – and keep all stakeholders abreast of any changes that are made.

Introducing the Digital Strategy Accelerator

The Digital Strategy Accelerator, formed from the partnership between Dot Project and Charity Digital, with funding from identity solution experts Okta, is designed to help charities design an effective strategy. 

We will create a learning platform that provides practical lessons leading to long-lasting organisational change. The Accelerator will give you the tools to create and implement a robust digital strategy.

You can get involved today. For charities hoping to reap the benefits of the Accelerator, please register interest by subscribing to our newsletter. Or check out the content on the Digital Strategy Accelerator Hub in the coming days, weeks, and months. Or simply register your interest below.