Charity Spotlight: James Elliot, Head of Digital Experience at Dogs Trust

If your charity has not yet mastered using digital tools effectively to maximise its impact, it’s not alone. The Charity Digital Skills Report found that half of charities (52%) see themselves as being at an “early” stage with digital in 2023, and only 48% have a strategy in place for digital.

 

Digital transformation is a way for charities to adapt to the changing needs of their service users and supporters over time by implementing the best available digital tools for the job. It can apply to any part of a charity’s work, from fundraising to service delivery to marketing. So where can charities start, what makes a successful transformation, and how can charities stay guided by their mission in this process?

 

We spoke to James Elliot, Head of Digital Experience at Dogs Trust, to find out about how the charity is transforming its digital sites and services to maximise its work for a better future for dogs and the people who love them.

 

 

Charity Digital (CD): Why is Dogs Trust transforming its digital sites and services?

 

James Elliot (JE): Dogs Trust’s investment in digital transformation is a response to the changing expectations of our users and supporters combined with the evolution of digital technologies.

 

Dogs Trust has long led the way with its digital innovations, but by 2019, it was clear that the multitude of disparate systems that comprised the technical infrastructure was becoming more of an unwieldy hindrance than an asset.

 

Recognising this, and through the release of a new transformation budget, we’ve since been able to invest more heavily in our Digital Experience and IT teams and allow for the development of a plan to effectively rebuild everything from scratch.

 

The transformation aims to enhance the user experience for all those accessing our sites and services. This includes our internal users, who’ll see the benefits in their working life, as further efficiencies are driven through the digitisation of old analogue processes. Ultimately, it will improve the lives of the dogs within our care and our ability to find them new homes with greater speed.

 

Dogs Trust also understands the critical role digital platforms play in reaching wider audiences – particularly younger demographics who see their interactions with organisations through a completely different lens and have different methods by which they prefer to be communicated with. So a big part of our transformation is also related to the content we produce along with where and how we deploy it.

 

CD: How is Dogs Trust transforming its digital sites and services?

 

JE: The Digital Transformation programme at Dogs Trust is highly complicated and involves all areas of the charity. Naturally it must be broken down into phases and be balanced with the day to day “business as usual” (BAU) which, at times, can be a challenge.

 

We can say broadly that the Digital Experience Team is leading on the transformation of any user-facing sites and services along with other digital communications and marketing channels, while the IT Directorate is focusing on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) migration and the upgrading of wider backend systems (e.g., finance systems, employee systems, and so on).

 

The examples below are representative of the work we’ve led on directly within the Digital Experience Team.

 

The Product Team led the migration from an older Content Management System (CMS) to a new Drupal-powered solution, while also integrating new payment methods like PayPal, ApplePay, and GooglePay into brand new donate, “Sponsor a Dog” and wider transactional products for the first time. The new donate product went live in late 2021 and the new website, along with the all-new Sponsor a Dog product was launched in late 2022.

 

We then adapted the new donation product for the Irish market in late 2022 and are now in the process of rebuilding their current website into the same new Drupal stack that we rolled out for the UK – the idea being that we have as streamlined a set of technology, templates, and agencies as possible – so when we roll out a new feature for the UK, it can easily be pushed to Ireland, or indeed our global websites, when we turn greater attention to their redevelopment in the future.

 

Similarly, the Digital Marketing Team moved away from a limited email marketing tool to a scalable, modern platform that, through a tight coupling with the new CRM, will open a world of marketing automation and supporter stewardship that’s until now been impossible.

 

Likewise, the Social Media Team transitioned in late 2019 to an improved platform for creating and scheduling posts, improving community engagement, allowing better reporting, and the ability for us to employ sophisticated social listening tools for the first time. Soon, we’re going to trial a new module that will allow us to better work with user-generated content around our brand.

 

The Content Team have delivered Dogs Trust’s first ever Digital Asset Management System, which we’ve affectionately called “Fetch”. This went live in late 2022 and since then we’ve added over 1,300 photos and other brand assets and guidelines.

 

Around all of this we wrap a tight tracking house and we’re doing some interesting work to make our dynamic dashboards available on the intranet, so that the organisation can easily see the performance of any part of the digital estate and self-serve for their own reporting needs. This will naturally cut down the many requests for data that we currently receive as a team.

 

CD: What has been most successful in this process?

 

JE: With the new UK website, new UK and Ireland donation products, new payment gateway, new “Sponsor a Dog”, we’ve have seen a great uplift in our income and conversion rates. This has had so much to do with taking a “mobile-first” approach and carefully planning the respective user journeys following a detailed discovery and design process. We’ve since run more optimisation tests as part of our “continuous enhancement” activities to further improve funnel throughput.

 

Our new social media management platform has been a real success and is a brilliantly feature-rich product for the team to use. Beyond the main accounts across Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, TikTok (and now Threads) which the Social Media Team manage directly, we’ve got the entirety of the Dogs Trust’s wider social media estate (circa 60+ other accounts) “plugged-in.”

 

So, for example, all our Rehoming Centres can easily publish content through this same platform which enables us to see performance at a granular post-level right up to how our core accounts, global, and local rehoming centre accounts are performing as a combined whole. This helps to run our social channels extremely efficiently and gives us the ability to push a message to all accounts at once – the only time we’ve had to do this was when our Patron, the Queen, passed away and it really proved its power for broadcasting a message to all our social media followers in one go.

 

We ensure brand consistency across our social channels by setting up templates in Canva and have provided training to the wider organisation on how to make their own graphics which relieves pressure on the in-house production team.

 

Fetch, our new and first ever Digital Asset Management system, has also been a real triumph and is such a pure piece of digital transformation in that it was totally unprecedented and did not replace an existing platform. We’re still onboarding the wider organisation, but of the initial 255 users we’ve set up and trained via our “Retrievers” (DAM/Fetch champions), we’ve had over 15,000 assets downloaded so far, driving all kinds of efficiencies in image selection and downloads for campaigns, appeals, internal presentations, workshops, and so on. Basically, it makes fetching brand assets a breeze.

 

Since we’ve migrated to our new email marketing platform, we’ve been able to drive up our email performance with income and traffic from email rising impressively over the years. We’ve also done a lot of work to drive up new prospects and our email marketing list has since grown considerably. We’ve set up our first automated journeys and have much more planned in this area as the CRM migration increases pace. Likewise, we’ve done tremendous work in paid search and social, with more and more users and conversions coming from these channels than ever before.

 

Digital Transformation is also about educating the wider charity on the best way to approach communications and marketing in the digital space and coming to talk to us at the beginning of any initiative so we may help them get the most out of it. For example, our Digital Marketing Team do a lot of work with the wider teams we support to ensure their campaigns are as successful as possible and through this collaboration everyone learns more about the different tactics and technologies available.

 

Likewise, our Social Media Team is there at the beginning of any new campaign while the Product Team is the destination when the organisation needs something website-related. Our Content Team support teams across the organisation to identify the right content for their activity and ensure assets are tailored to our audiences and optimised for digital channels.

 

CD: How have you overcome challenges in this process? 

 

JE: We’re lucky to work with some super-smart and experienced people at Dogs Trust. Together, we’ve laid down robust foundational elements designed to alleviate the usual challenges that you might expect when taking on the redevelopment of so many complicated components.

 

A crucial part of this proactive approach has been our setting up of and participation in various website or technical steering groups. These groups come with well-defined “Terms of References”, ensuring that both our technology procurement strategies and the technologies themselves are closely aligned with our goals and all parties agree on what’s best, while keeping user needs at the top of our minds.

 

As you’d expect, the journey hasn’t been bereft of a little turbulence. The main challenges usually arise from the need for precise alignment of development timelines across multiple teams and external agencies. The inherent risk here is that if one team lags or surges ahead, the entire project may face delays or other deployment issues. In the run up to the launch of the new website, the same team delivering it had to also deliver the regular BAU work and it placed an unreasonable demand on them, with many late nights and weekends being worked to meet the launch deadline.

 

Recognising these challenges led us to the important realisation that this approach was completely unsustainable. To counteract this, we’ve strengthened our Digital Experience Team with additional specialised resources which we calculate following a careful round of annual planning and budgeting. These newly onboarded team members are dedicated exclusively to one or two key transformational projects, effectively insulating them from daily operational demands and leaving a “core” team to take care of the BAU and ongoing enhancement of the new dogstrust.org.uk website.

 

One thing that’s really important to remember is that the faster we go building and launching new products, this then has an inevitable bearing on their ongoing maintenance and enhancement as well as a need for support from the Content Team and promotion from our Social Media and Digital Marketing Teams – so these teams need to also be adequately resourced when “receiving” a new product, as it were.

 

CD: How have you been able to make sure your digital transformation is guided by your charitable aims?

 

JE: We make sure that digital transformation at Dogs Trust is aligned with our charitable aims, from revolutionising the dog rehoming process to offering sector-leading behavioural training and advice, to expanding our international reach.

 

For example, one of our big aims is around our ability to successfully and speedily rehome dogs so our rehoming and relinquishment process is currently being redeveloped to allow those interested in adopting or relinquishing a dog to interface with us via brand new mobile-first forms and a new “account” area where they will later be able to see the status of their application.

 

Traffic to our help and advice content is significantly up year on year and this helps us with our aim of preventing problems an individual may have with their dog becoming a crisis.

 

We’re also hoping to do more to expand our international fundraising in 2024, and the work we’ve already done in laying foundations with the new UK and Ireland donation products will all be easily re-usable for this. Currently there is no decent mechanism to donate online to our USA office or Worldwide arm – but there will be!

 

CD: What advice do you have for managing a team to complete a digital transformation?

 

JE: Successfully managing a digital transformation in a UK charity demands that you take a multi-faceted approach.

 

Start with thorough planning; collaborate with your finance business partner and make sure all legalities like contracts and statements of work are in order before any work commences. Make sure you follow your organisation’s procurement processes properly before commissioning any work or purchasing a product or service.

 

Keep user needs at the forefront and align these with your charity’s objectives, whether it’s improving donor engagement or optimising online services.

 

Communication is naturally key and where most problems boil down to. Always be transparent with stakeholders including team members, volunteers, and beneficiaries as soon as problems arise. It’s much better to be open and up-front than raise the flag on a larger blaze later down the line. Don’t forget to communicate all the good news too!

 

Address setbacks openly and keep blame out of the game to help foster trust, reduce fear, and enable problem-solving. Given the diversity of digital skills within your team, invest in targeted training to ensure everyone is up to speed and I’d also recommend forming a common language when it comes to IT acronyms and other terminology that will be used across internal teams (technical and non-technical) and agencies.

 

Consider adopting an agile methodology, allowing for flexibility and adaptability as you implement new technologies – get the organisation used to terms like “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product) and the idea that it’s fine to build in smaller iterations. Identify internal “digital champions” around your new initiatives (for example, when we were rolling out Fetch, we called our champions “Retrievers”), who can help drive the transformation and blossom a mature digital culture.

 

Ethical considerations are crucial; make sure you uphold data privacy and security standards. Lastly, track progress using key performance metrics, learning from both successes and setbacks. Consider looking at objectives and key results to help with your planning.

 

By balancing the above, you set the stage for a successful and well-organised digital transformation.

 

CD: Do you have any recommendations for tools and resources charities can use when undergoing a similar process?

 

JE: Managing a digital transformation calls for the right tools and resources, particularly for charities with limited budgets and small teams. The Digital Experience Team at Dogs Trust are lucky to have access to a wide range of tools to help facilitate their activities.

 

For creative collaboration and idea visualisation, we highly recommend tools like Miro or Figma – all the more useful in the new world of hybrid working. These platforms are excellent for running remote meetings, enabling real-time contributions from multiple team members to a shared board. Their visual interfaces can also assist in complex problem-solving and planning sessions and are easy and intuitive to learn.

 

For project management, Monday.com has been the go-to solution for our team. We’ve found it so useful that we’re currently scaling its adoption across the wider Communications and Digital Directorate and this is helping tremendously with our Directorate level planning. The platform is highly customisable and has features that make it adaptable to various project timelines and scopes and we’re using it for a range of things from high-level roadmaps and budgeting to super-granular to-do lists. What I also love is its ability to create dashboards that summarise the status of multiple tasks, project budgets, and get a quick picture of the overall progress.

 

For technical documentation and seamless communication with digital agencies or IT departments, tools like Confluence, Jira, and Slack are used daily by our Product Team. They offer efficient ticket management and roadmap planning capabilities, in addition to facilitating internal communications.

 

For quick, on the go, good value online training, platforms like udemy.com have proved really helpful for the team. Also, look at tools like Hotjar and Optimal Workshop which you may find will be useful to you when conducting user research or seeing how people are using your website.

Also, it’s important to understand how you’re tracking against the competition so also take a look at tools like Moz to see how you’re faring in organic search – we also highly recommend signing up for different benchmarking initiatives such as Charity Digital Benchmark and M+R Benchmarks. You can also complete the NCVO Digital Maturity Matrix to get a sense of how far along your charity’s digital transformation journey you are.

Lastly, Pipdecks has been a really fun set of tools for planning and executing productive workshops, so I’d highly recommend you check them out.

 

And don’t forget, many companies offer non-profit discounts, so always inquire when purchasing new tools or services as the discounts can often be impressive!

 

If you’d like to get in touch, please drop me a note on Linkedin - I’d love to share more with you and learn about where you’re at on your digital journey.