Introducing the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator

Today, digital technology is part of the infrastructure that helps charities make a difference. Across functions as diverse as fundraising and service delivery, digital technology can enable us to work with agility, to punch above our weight, and make an impact at scale.

 

Appropriately, digital is a priority for 74% of charities, according to the ‘Charity Digital Skills Report 2025’. But at the same time, only 44% of charities have a digital strategy in place.

 

Using digital in an unsystematic way can lead to confusion, frustration, and wasted time, money, and effort. Charities often stay in this situation due to squeezed organisational finances, a lack of new funds for digital tech, and a lack of headspace and capacity.

 

With the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator, you can build towards an impactful digital strategy around these constraints. The course will help you use the available resources to become more effective and efficient in your work, achieving so much more for your cause.

 

This article explores everything you need to know about the new course and how you can become digitally strategic, starting today.

 

 

What is the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator?

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator, otherwise known as the CDSA, guides you through the process of creating a digital strategy from beginning to end. It is a free, online, self-paced course, made up of twelve modules, each helping you build towards an impactful digital strategy for your charity. The modules are as follows:

• Welcome
• What is a digital strategy?
• Team alignment
• Digital governance
• Understanding your current digital landscape
• Strategic alignment
• Horizon scanning
• Discovering user needs
• Embedding responsibility and ethics
• Planning your digital strategy
• Writing your digital strategy
• Delivering your digital strategy

Created by Charity Digital in partnership with Okta, the course shares years of diverse experience from across the charity and digital sectors.

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator is intended for teams to collaborate on creating their digital strategy. We have provided free templates throughout each module, each of which can directly improve your charity’s use of digital and help you work more strategically.

 

By following the course from beginning to end, you will create a complete digital strategy, gain approval by your charity’s leaders and trustees, and be ready to deliver impactful digital projects with confidence.

 

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How can the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator help your charity?

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator helps you make a bigger impact with digital technology by discovering your users’ needs and aligning projects to your charity’s strategic goals.

 

It helps you develop projects realistically, by understanding your current digital landscape, and factoring in budgetary and time constraints alongside your charity’s ambitions.

 

It helps you become resilient, forward-thinking and responsible in how you use digital technology as a charity, through exercises like horizon scanning and embedding responsibility and ethics in data and AI use.

 

And it helps you with the practical elements of building a strategy: how to work effectively as a team, how to lead on digital across an organisation, how to prioritise and plan projects, how to actually write the strategy, and how to deliver the best result against your plans.

 

In short, the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator can help you achieve more with digital technology, thereby making a greater difference to your cause.

 

 

What does the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator involve?

 

The Accelerator involves working collaboratively in your team to produce a digital strategy. We give guidance to support your collaboration, but ultimately how you approach the course is up to you: it depends on how your team works best.

 

We have been diligent in building the Accelerator in the most beneficial way for charities. While the guidance is thorough and extensive, we have made it interactive, with a variety of engaging ways to take in the information.

 

We have organised it in short bursts, so that you can easily read through and complete one module or page at a time. When you pause the course, it will remember where you left off. We have made it seamless to navigate through the course, giving you the ability to move freely through the modules in your own time.

 

We have explained every step of how to create a digital strategy in plain English, using direct and simple language that gets to the point of what you need to know. The design of the course is clean and colourful, using multimedia to make the experience enjoyable and motivating for you.

 

The course has undergone multiple rounds of user testing and is under constant review to help us best meet charity needs.

 

 

What skills can you learn through the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator?

 

The activities in the course will teach hard skills such as organising stakeholders, influencing change, building digital efficiency and effectiveness, conducting ethical user research, identifying future trends, making the most of opportunities, understanding ethical data and AI use, weighing value against cost, managing risk, resourcing projects, and planning for the long-term.

 

Soft skills you will learn through the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator include working effectively in a team, communicating with empathy, influencing change – and so much more.

 

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