What should a digital strategy look like?

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A recent Charity Digital Skills report found that less than half of the charities responding had a digital strategy in place. By 2022, 56% of charities report having a digital strategy in place, which is significant progress.

Unlike marketing strategies, for example, there is no standard format for a digital strategy. Having a clear structure can help to keep the document focussed. Using a snappy and interesting format can help to make your strategy more engaging.

It’s one thing having a strategy and quite another actively using, reviewing, and re-shaping it regularly. Strategies that sit in binders, stacked neatly on shelves, gathering dust are unlikely to be powering digital transformation.

A digital strategy on one page can act as an easy reference point for leaders and teams across the organisation and the foundation for digital project plans.

Digital Strategy on one page

The difference between a strategy and a plan is that a strategy tells you where you’re going and a plan tells you how to get there. It’s the difference between a street sign and a street map.

Strategies don’t need to be lengthy, but they do need to give clear direction that can be understood and used by everyone in the organisation.

It is possible to produce a strategy or strategic summary on one page, but as there’s no standard format for digital strategies – what should be included? This might be different from charity to charity and will depend on how far down the journey of digital transformation you are.

What should be included?

Goals

The goals for your digital strategy are likely to stem from your organisational strategies. They could also arise from conversations or insight research with your audiences.

A digital strategy goal is basically an organisational goal that requires a digital transformation to achieve it or improve how efficiently and effectively it’s achieved.

Your goals should define what digital transformation success looks like for your charity and set out your digital vision and guiding principles.

Audiences

Which audiences do your goals relate to?

For example, if you want to design a service for people experiencing a particular problem, think about who is most likely to be experiencing this problem – where do they live, how old are they, do they work, do they have internet access and their own smartphone, device or computer?

Include short, snappy user personas to summarise the audiences you need to reach.

Trends

The digital world is evolving all the time. Take time to review the current trends and new developments. Which tools or combination of tools might provide some of the solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve for your audience?

Include a list of tools that you’re interested in exploring as part of the strategy, remembering that the digital tool won’t be the whole answer to the problem.

Stakeholder insight

Learnings from your conversations with internal and external stakeholders can be summarised as quotes.

The quotes should capture the essence of your internal and external research with stakeholders, including your audiences.

Include charts or graphs from any quantitative research or other data you have to help frame your approach around user needs.

Digital journeys

Map out the digital journeys that your users take to find and interact with your charity. Which existing or new journey points will be the focus for your digital strategy. Marking them on a map or listing them will help to think through who might need to be involved.

Digital roadmap

Is this the first strategy in your digital transformation roadmap, or are you onto your second or third iteration of this document. Mark this somewhere on the document.

There may also be ongoing digital initiatives from a previous strategic period that should be briefly referenced within the document.

Existing assets and technologies

Start to think through the existing digital tools and technologies you might be able to use in the same or different ways to help meet some of your goals.

Are there elements of your website CMS, social media management tool or database that aren’t being used and could be useful, for example?

How to present your strategy on a page

Reading through all the possible elements that could be included, you’d be forgiven for thinking that your strategy may not squeeze on to one page.

Consider presenting your strategy as a user journey map with notes and highlights to show where you are changing the journey, how and for whom.

Alternatively you could create a presentation slide and use a mix of lists, infographics and diagrams to share your digital vision.

Or what about a sketchnote? A visual sketch could be a fun and engaging way of distilling a strategy into an easy-to-follow document.