How to create a digital strategy roadmap

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How best to use digital is a matter that charity sector has been grappling with since before the pandemic, but it has since become a far greater issue. Two in five charities were forced to cancel their services in 2020 because they did not have the digital skills or resources to deliver them, while more than half (51%) did not have a digital strategy in place. More than two thirds said that they would like their leadership to develop a clear vision of what digital could help them achieve.

In 2023, we’ve seen signs of digital growth, as well as worrying signs of strategic stagnation, particularly in the wake of the cost-of-living crisis. The 2023 Charity Digital Skills report shows that three in ten charities are spending less money on digital tools, while 17% are spending less on upskilling staff and volunteers, and 10% are shelving internal digital projects. Only around half (48%) say they have a strategic approach to digital, fewer than the 56% of charities who said they had this in 2022.

The above shows a correlation between the decline of digital strategy and the decline of tech investment. As the strategic direction falls, it seems, the tech investment seems to follow. But digital is undoubtedly a great source of support for charities, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis. Digital tools can boost fundraising, improve service delivery, and drastically increase productivity, at a time when resources are limited. The key is to use digital efficiently, which means building a strategy to support it.

In this article, we share tips on how charities can identify digital priorities and map out strategic direction for achieving success in the future.

You can sign up for Reason Digital’s free Digital Strategy for Charities e-learning course below.

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How to create a digital roadmap

Discovering what you need

According to Reason Digital, discovery is simply about exploring a problem in more detail. Charities must gather a variety of perspectives in order to broaden their understanding of the issue they face, with all teams bringing their challenges to the table.

User research is vital in the discovery stage. It gives you direct information, advice, and feedback from your target audience. User research can, among other things, pinpoint key needs and pain points, show areas of frustration, allows you to undermine pre-existing assumptions, validate your beliefs, and so much more. User research can come in a variety of forms, such as surveys, focus groups, or one-to-one meetings with the key audiences your digital project will affect, from volunteers to trustees.

Data analysis is also a key part of the discovery stage, helping you to identify pain points in your operations. Perhaps donations through your website are stalling or service users are repeatedly having trouble accessing your online systems.

In short, discovery helps you find out more about the problems you face. The next stage is mapping out how to solve them.

Establishing your priorities

Sometimes the hardest part of a project is getting started. That’s where roadmaps come in. With a project roadmap, charities can prioritise strategies for meeting their objectives, without feeling overwhelmed by the need to do everything at once.

The first place to start is with findings from the discovery process, outlined above – your user needs. There may be multiple ways to solve the problems you face, but keeping user needs in mind means you will be able to sort these solutions, determining how long it will take to deliver them, how long they will last, the resources you need to deliver them effectively, and are these resources available to you now.

Reason Digital suggests some helpful ways to prioritise these solutions effectively. Charities should start by asking themselves if the strategy aligns with their vision and goals? Then they can proceed in a number of ways. They could write down their different solutions and use a Dot Vote system to allow their teams to vote for the strategy they deem most helpful. This can be done on Post-It notes or via a digital collaboration tool such as Miro. Or charities could look at the Impact vs Ease matrix. The matrix helps charities to identify ‘quick wins’, which can be a great place to start, providing immediate value.

There are plenty of other prioritisation tactics listed in the digital strategy course here.

It is worth noting that, although the mapping process might seem daunting, Reason Digital also advises that charities start small and use a test and learn approach to avoid investing lots of time and money on a complex approach they then feel tied to later. Indeed, Reason Digital adds that charities don’t need to have all the answers, even in the roadmapping stage. Your direction may change according to circumstances – starting small ensures you can remain agile in the future.

Creating the final roadmap

Once you have established the projects or solutions that you are going to take forward to meet your user needs, it’s time to decide what you’re going to focus on and when.

This involves mapping out your direction, understanding the timelines of what needs to be done, and providing your team with a clear plan of action to keep all projects on track. Charities can use their roadmaps to document other projects that are happening at the same time, plan and allocate resources to each project accordingly, and identify quick wins that can speed the process up.

Reason Digital recommends using a Now, Next, Later style roadmap, which is more fluid than a traditional Gantt chart and can be added to most project management tools – such as Microsoft Planner, Trello, and so on – and therefore can be a shared, collaborative document to which everyone can refer.

Exploring MSI Reproductive Choices’ digital strategy

One charity that has tried and tested the roadmap approach to guide their digital transformation is MSI Reproductive Choices. MSI is an international, non-governmental organisation that provides contraception and safe abortion services to clients in 37 countries worldwide.

During the global pandemic, MSI were forced to make rapid changes to their service delivery pathways and saw this as an opportunity to kickstart a digital transformation across the entire organisation.

Together with Reason Digital, MSI embarked upon a Digital Transformation Discovery project which led to the creation of an achievable three-year digital strategy that leading technology firm Gartner described as being “one of the best digital strategies they’d ever seen”.

What’s even more impressive is that MSI successfully implemented their strategy on-time and to plan. Their secret to success? You guessed it – they set themselves up for a win by dedicating time and resources to user research, prioritising goals while keeping clients’ needs paramount, and created a realistic roadmap for what they needed to do now, next, and later, to achieve those goals within a three-year timeframe.

Let’s delve a little deeper into how the team at Reason Digital helped them do this.

Starting with in-depth data analysis and user research with clients and staff, Reason Digital were able to map out current user journeys through MSI services. Their findings helped them to spot opportunities for digital intervention but also placed the user journey front and centre of the organisation’s vision for digital transformation.

With the ideal future client experience mapped out, MSI were able to clearly visualise and communicate their digital goals (tip: visual assets, such as illustrations, are great for communicating user journeys to stakeholders). Reason Digital were there to advise MSI on which tools and processes could help them achieve these goals, hence creating a digital roadmap for implementing change across the organisation.

Over the past three years, MSI has launched a telemedicine service and chatbot, replaced their electronic patient record system, and implemented automation tools to improve data quality. There have been ongoing developments to their website, a client self-service portal has been introduced, and alternative digital support channels have been designed, built, and implemented.

Without a digital roadmap, MSI’s digital transformation could have veered off course very easily. To discover how to embark upon your own digital transformation with Reason Digital visit their website here.

Find out how to create a digital strategy with Reason Digital on their website here.