How to boost your career with the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland

To begin the Accelerator, click on the link below and enter the code: CDSA for Scotland

Start the CDSA for Scotland

In May we launched the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland - a course designed to help charities build their digital strategy, with interactive lessons, best practice sector resources and useful templates you can download to use any time you need them.

Created by Charity Digital in partnership with Okta and the Connecting Scotland Digital Innovation Fund, The Digital Strategy Accelerator will provide you with valuable experience and skills, such as team building, effective communication, recognising and reducing risk, and developing strategic judgement through current digital and sector awareness – all of which can help you contribute towards a long-term vision for your organisation. And at the end of the course, you will receive a certificate, showcasing your strategic digital awareness and skills. 

Below we explore the experience and skills you can gain from the modules in this course and how these learnings can boost your charity career. 

Start the CDSA for Scotland

Gaining AI and data awareness  

A fast-evolving digital landscape brings lots of new opportunities, but also challenges and risks.  This course offers a deep dive into data security, including guidance on storing data securely, as well as how to avoid data bias and data harms, to build and maintain trust between your organisation and your organisation’s users. 

Another big (and growing) risk to public trust in the charity sector is artificial intelligence (AI). This course provides a wealth of information and resources to help you get to grips with this developing technology and successfully incorporate it into your digital projects. During the course you will get to explore the many benefits of AI, such as innovations in assistive technology and data analysis, while also examining the risks around privacy, bias, transparency and its environmental impact.  

These are all-important factors to consider when devising an AI policy, and in your day-to-day use of AI tools. AI and data skills are currently in high demand – and this course provides plenty of insights and recommended actions you can take (both small and large scale, informed by sector best practice resources) to help ensure you and your organisation are utilising AI effectively and responsibly. 

Building teamwork, leadership and communication skills 

To successfully develop and deliver a digital strategy, teams need to be on the same page. Whether you are a digital leader or part of a team looking to implement new digital products and processes in your work, this course can help you learn how to communicate openly and constructively with other team members, to organise and be clear on responsibilities, be able to share hopes and fears without judgement, and know how to approach any conflicts should they arise.  

It is important to bring as many people onboard with your digital projects as possible, and this course can teach you how to identify important stakeholders inside and outside of your organisation before deciding who to collaborate with and how to effectively communicate with them.  For example, you will learn the appropriate frequency, types of communication, and level of detail and technicality to include. You will also be provided with useful tools such as the People Mapping and Engagement Plan templates which can help you learn how to support your relationships with important people while creating your digital strategy and beyond. 

This course will help you develop your written communication skills - offering a range of ideas about what information you might want to include in your written strategy and the various different ways you could present it – with writing tips, a template, and examples of existing digital strategies in the charity sector.  

When it comes to presenting your ideas, the course provides tips on how to deliver an engaging presentation and improve your chances of gaining approval from senior leaders and trustees. 

Developing strategic judgement, identifying opportunities, and reducing risk 

This course will help you develop your strategic judgement - how to use data to drive decisions and evaluate your charity’s priorities with opportunities and risks in mind. To get a clearer picture of where you are starting from and what you would like to gain from your digital strategy, the course provides you with guidance and templates for carrying out both a digital technology audit and a digital skills audit, and signposts you to useful tools to help you benchmark your organisation against others in the sector. It will also teach you how to examine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to inform decision-making. 

During this course you will gain experience aligning digital usage with your organisational strategy. For example, you will explore and prioritise digital projects based on how they contribute to wider organisational goals, compliance, and positive impact for your cause. You will learn how to identify and prepare for future opportunities, risks, and innovation.  

In developing your digital strategy, the course will help you become a strategic thinker through a series of awareness and collaboration exercises. 

Conducting research and engaging with users 

The Charity Digital Skills Report 2025 found that 25% of charities reported being ‘poor’ at conducting and acting on user research, and a further 10% reported not doing it at all. This is a skills gap that urgently needs filling, to ensure that charities’ services and products remain relevant and helpful to those who use them, while giving service users the opportunity to "meaningfully participate in the processes that affect their own lives". Developing this skill could help you stand out from the crowd, and appeal particularly to charitable organisations looking to improve in this area. 

A digital strategy should also be designed with the needs of users in mind – and this course provides guidance on how you can gain insights into their needs and incorporate them into your strategies. This includes tips on how to conduct user research that is ethical, transparent, and inclusive, and advice on which research methods to use for different kinds of digital projects – for example, conducting user testing to identify problems with an existing piece of digital tech. You will learn how to conduct user interviews (as well as interviews with donors, staff, and volunteers) with example scripts and questions, resources on storing user data securely, and guidance on analysing findings to create user needs statements describing users’ problems and motivations.  

And to action these findings, you will learn how to develop services in partnership with users through co-design, production and creation, including guiding principles, with a webinar and other best practice resources from the sector. 

To begin the Accelerator in the learning platform, click on the link below and enter the code: CDSA for Scotland  

Start the CDSA for Scotland