Digital Strategy Development: Understanding organisational readiness

21 Jun

In this article we share recent learnings from the Delivering your Digital Strategy Accelerator, delivered in partnership with Charity Digital and funded by Okta for Good.

Towards the end of 2021 and the start of 2022 we noticed a shift in how organisations were thinking and talking about digital. Repeatedly organisations were expressing that they felt ready to put in place a digital strategy, but at the same time were acknowledging that they were unsure about what steps they needed to take.

For us this represented a glimmer of opportunity, a moment in time where organisations who felt ready could take stock, consider their direction and make a solid forward thinking plan.

Digital Strategy Accelerator Programme

Along with Charity Digital and through the support of Okta for Good we developed an accelerator programme which focused on Developing a Digital Strategy. We developed the Accelerator around the following goals:

Building skills ‘across’ an organisation by engaging 4–6 individuals from each organisation
Deepening connection and opportunities for collective action by providing space for organisations to reflect on the systemic challenges they are facing
Supporting organisations to develop a robust strategy which enables digital mindset, behaviours and skills within each organisation

We experienced a high level of interest with a total of 33 organisations applying for the Accelerator and ultimately 12 organisations and their teams were engaged as participants.

Assessing Digital Strategy Readiness

As we got going our curiosity peaked as we considered how to assess readiness to develop a digital strategy.

We leaned towards the idea that an organisation was ‘ready’ if:

they showed willingness to take steps to develop a plan of action and
could commit to at least 4 members of staff investing their time and participating in the programme.

One of our key provocations was ‘How can we assess readiness to develop a digital strategy?’ - we’ll cover that in more depth below. But first, we’ll discuss the outcomes that participating organisations achieved.

Participant Outcomes

The Accelerator began in May 2022 and over 9 months took organisations through a journey of:

understanding what a digital strategy is
gathering insights and user research from their teams and service users
putting in place practices and processes to organise together as a team
developing a digital strategy and
developing a practical roadmap to guide the implementation of the strategy.

Through this journey 62 individuals, from the 12 organisations, participated in the Accelerator and 8 organisations developed a draft digital strategy by the end of the programme, 5 of these developed a digital roadmap.

We had always anticipated that some organisations in the programme would not be able to develop a digital strategy fully signed off by their senior leadership due to conflicting priorities and lack of capacity. The cost of living crisis and slow down in funding for social sector organisations further contributed to the ability of some organisations to develop a digital strategy during the course of 2022.

So what does readiness look like?

For those who successfully developed a draft digital strategy we observed factors which point to an organisation being ‘ready’ to develop a digital strategy these are:

Organisational readiness
Team readiness
Individual readiness

Organisational readiness

An organisation is ‘ready’ to develop a digital strategy if they:

Have a clearly articulated organisational strategy with clear goals and objectives
Have buy-in and support of the senior leadership team (including Trustees) to develop a digital strategy
Have a dedicated budget to support the time and investment required of team members across the organisation to dedicate time and resources to develop a digital strategy. This included sourcing expert advice and inputs as needed from potential or existing digital partners.

In our experience these characteristics of organisational readiness are usually necessary to have in place before embarking on developing a digital strategy. With these foundations this is a good starting point to develop team and individual readiness.

Team readiness

A team is ‘ready’ to develop a digital strategy if they:

Have an aligned understanding of their organisational goals and objectives
Have an open mind to organising as a team — they may not have team ways of working practices in place but they should be open to working collaboratively together
Have an appetite to develop a holistic digital strategy — which cross cuts the organisation (rather than for example developing a standalone digital marketing strategy)
Feels they have the support of their senior leadership team

If a team does not have an aligned understanding of their organisational goals and objectives, we recommend that they take the time to develop this, as progressing with a digital strategy without overall alignment can be disruptive. For more on this, read our article on our approach to working with teams.

Individual readiness

An individual is ‘ready’ to develop a digital strategy if they:

Have the time and permission to contribute to digital strategy development
Support collaborative ways of working — for example being open to taking shared ownership of how the team self organise
Curiosity to learn and develop the necessary skills to contribute to the digital strategy process

Individuals may initially present themselves as feeling under confident or lacking in skills. A common misconception we often have to overcome is the idea that it’s possible to skill up in every area of digital. We encourage people to seek opportunities to build partnerships and relationships with digital providers who can ‘fill in’ skills and expertise gaps and become part of the organisations overall digital approach.

Digital Strategy readiness checklist

We’ve compiled this into a checklist:

In summary, if you’re feeling it’s time to get your digital house in order, consider whether your organisation, your team and you feel in a state of ‘readiness’. Consider this to be a state of willingness to take the next step and really invest the time it truly takes to set up a strategy which not only exists on paper but lives and breathes through the actions you take as an individual, a team and an organisation.

Feeling ready to get going on developing a digital strategy? Get in touch!