The big digital challenges facing charities today

Charities have spent the past two years shifting processes, finding virtual fundraising solutions, developing digital strategies, implementing new working models, and generally embracing digital transformation. We’ve witnessed so many benefits that come from digital acceleration.

 

But there have been challenges, too. These challenges include budget constraints, capacity issues, digital inclusion, lack of information, issues around cyber security, and so much more.

 

In preparation for our Digital Transformation Week 2022, we reached out to our audience. We asked them to tell us about the digital challenges their organisations have faced and how they’ve managed to overcome them. Below we discuss some of the most interesting findings.

 

 

Creating content on a shoestring

 

Digital content has become more important in the last few years. Content helps charities expand their reach, improve their donations, raise awareness, build donor relationships, and much more.

 

One of the challenges of creating good content is time and money. Sorcha Dallas, Custodian at The Alasdair Gray Archive, summed up the obvious challenges: “[Lack of] capacity and skills in being able to develop ambitious content with limited resources.”

 

Nicki Hickman, Communications Manager at Cloverleaf Advocacy, echoed that sentiment. When asked about the biggest digital challenges, Hickman said: “Limited resources – both in time and monetary terms – to stay up to date with new tools and trends in digital…And how to best train our colleagues across social media and digital tools with such a diverse workforce and knowledge base.”

 

Social media is a particular challenge for content, primarily because there is so much to consider. You have so many different platforms, each with its own set of written (and unwritten) rules. And there are so many stages when it comes to dealing with social media content. There is the planning stage, the creating content stage, the publishing stage, and the post-publishing stage.

 

Tracking social media and other content can be a massive challenge. Rachel Lily, Communications and Design Manager at Dartington Service Design Lab, found that her charity has been dealing with that exact problem: “We are facing digital evaluation issues and struggling to monitor our socials and newsletter platforms. We’re not sure what’s best to measure, how best to categorise, and how to design an approach around what we know, but more so, what we don’t know!”

 

For support on what to measure, we have a couple of articles that might help. For a broad analysis of analytics – and a video – check out: Data analytics 101. For a specific look at metrics, see: Which metrics should charities measure?

 

 

The challenge of capacity

 

Limited capacity is almost a given in a sector dealing with increased demand and less budget. Digital broadly improves capacity through streamlined processes, automated admin, and other efficiencies, but charities still need the initial capacity to make those improvements.

 

Nicola Hinton, St Ann’s Allotments Manager at Renewal Trust, explains that her charity is working on incorporating a Geographic Information System (GIS) into their land management. The project requires work with volunteers and undergraduates to create a GIS platform that can capture data from their 75-acre heritage greenspace.

 

The use of digital allows The Renewal Trust to rise to the occasion. The objectives, Hinton says, are to support learning and development of volunteers. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. “The challenges,” according to Hinton, “have been capacity to project manage.”

 

Capacity around project management is also familiar to Carmen Barlow, who was previously Head of Communications and Engagement at Amnesty International UK, but has since moved to focus on digital transformation in a freelance capacity. When she joined Amnesty, Barlow had a team that were not meeting targets. She was tasked with turning their fortunes around.

 

“I decided as my first step I would meet every member of the team separately (and all of the key stakeholders across the org) and ask about their greatest challenges and ideas. Some troubling patterns emerged. Poor information sharing, with lots of people saying things like ‘I wasn’t aware of that until now’ or ‘that decision should have included me’.

 

"As a result, many team members felt simultaneously that they needed to be in every meeting to be up to date and that they didn’t have any time to do work, because they were always in meetings.”

 

Digital can free up capacity, if properly used. But it can also create issues with capacity, if charities decided to create more meetings, more management, more bureaucracy to deal with that digital. Charities should avoid creating meetings to discuss meetings, spreadsheets to track spreadsheets, and admin to reign in admin. Aim for streamlined processes to free up your capacity.

 

Long-term thinking can help, as Barlow suggests. “I found that the team were not acting strategically. Instead, they were almost exclusively reacting to ad hoc demands from across the organisation…We needed to work smarter. I read Jeff Sutherland’s book SCRUM: The art of doing twice the work in half the time and thought: Great, let’s work in scrum!”

 

Scrum is a working system of accountability, interaction, and constant iteration that is being used by companies all around the world. Barlow decided to apply Scrum to Amnesty: “I talked to some agile and scrum coaches…One of them, Eleanor Gibson, suggested she could have us working in this way from day one and working independently in agile in a few months…It was an enormous transformation. We smashed all our key targets in the same year and the empowerment, transparency, performance, clarity. and motivation of the team have been completely transformed.”

 

Amnesty’s transformation shows the importance of new thinking. Overcoming challenges, digital or otherwise, often requires charities to get rid of previous models and embrace a fresh approach.

 

Check out our podcast for more information:

 

 

 

Promoting digital inclusion

 

Another common challenge was digital inclusion. Margaret Kiloh, Chairperson of the Tyume Valley Schools Development Association, said: “Our main challenge is the digital divide between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped countries and rural and urban areas. Our charity works with rural schools in South Africa.

 

"Poor internet connectivity means that we cannot communicate with schools and teachers by email. Poverty means children and teachers do not have smart phones or tablets and those who do cannot afford the amount of data needed for educational purposes.”

 

Digital inclusion means bridging the gap between the people with access and the people without. During the pandemic, we saw lots of examples of charities tackling digital exclusion and championing digital inclusion, but it’s not always simple, especially when economics and broader development issues are at play.

 

“I would not say that we have overcome these challenges,” Kiloh claims. But they are taking steps where possible. “We donate data so that we can use WhatsApp for communication and sending materials, and [we] regulate communication so that we can use Zoom at specific times in specific places. We download as much lesson material as possible so that schools don’t have to work online.”

 

Digital inclusion was desirable before the pandemic. After COVID-19 struck, inclusion was necessary. Dan Townsend, Youth Work Manager at Youth Cymru, said: “[Our] ability to engage with young people had diminished significantly due to COVID-19, so we decided to support our members with digital spaces and places training that could be delivered remotely, created digital resources for youth workers on tackling loneliness and isolation that can be accessed via phone and printed out, and ran a number of sectoral events online using Zoom or Microsoft Teams.”

 

Townsend’s charity rose to the challenge of COVID-19 and had the resources to overcome that challenge. Youth Cymru had the skills, finances, and expertise to pivot, which meant they could continue their important work and provide a service to their community.

 

To understand more about digital inclusion, there is plenty of content available on the Charity Digital website. Here are just two, to get you started:

• How Man City tackled digital exclusion
• Working together to combat digital exclusion