Our relational approach: How we work with teams
Our last blog reflected on why we work with the entire team, not just individuals. It looked at the collective confidence, collaboration and governance that underpin the way that teams embrace digital; this blog will build upon that, sharing how we have developed our products and a deeply relational approach when working with teams.
At the core of our work lies sense making. We deeply believe that by helping charities to see themselves, their strengths, their challenges and their potential we can create the conditions for teams to find their own answers.
Through discovery we learn a lot about the teams themselves. By observing the way they work with each other and the way they make decisions, we make sense of their strategy and culture. This enables us to then make practical suggestions on how the organisation could embed digital thinking and embrace being digital.
When supporting charities, we need to surface their needs quickly, undertaking productive analysis to offer the right recommendations for next steps. In order to make sense of their unique complexity and requirements we need a deep level of engagement and this can be challenging where the organisation has limited budget and capacity to engage in the process.
DIGITAL HEALTH CHECK
In the early days of Dot Project we were keen not to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and made use of a number of existing digital maturity and skills assessment tools in our analyses. Since then, we have been constantly iterating how to gather and assess organisational needs, always insisting that teams respond to our discovery surveys together, enabling a sharing of perspectives.
Nissa Ramsey’s work in this space hugely influenced our approach; the ‘curious’, ‘starting out’ and ‘advancing’ stages identified in these digital journeys particularly resonated with our experience. We incorporated elements of this language into our discovery surveys, however, we found that most existing tools failed to incorporate digital governance holistically. This led us to develop a bespoke Digital Health Check to identify:
Where an organisation is on their digital journey
Their digital capabilities
Their digital confidence
Our Digital Health Check was essentially the MVP to our current Technology Discovery Survey tool, a holistic diagnostic that charities complete ahead of our engagement together. This survey helps us to swiftly make sense of an organisation’s core challenges and build a framework for how we will work together and which technical and organisational change mentors would be most suited to supporting the work.
LEARNING PROGRAMMES
There is no standardised training approach to building digital resilience and our learning design has really evolved over time. We have always championed a deeper learning process which builds awareness and acquisition of skills across humans and teams.
We deeply believe a resilient organisation is one that embodies the mindset of ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’ digital. This means shaping their culture, skills, processes and practices to thrive in a digital world, so, when we work with organisations we support them to:
Set their direction by identifying digital priorities and assessing existing digital capabilities
Lay their foundations by developing a mid-term digital strategy alongside a roadmap and baseline budget
Implement their change by using the strategy as a guide to their digital investment and evolution
Our first digital strategy learning programme ran as a pilot in partnership with Charity Digital in 2020; this 6-week IT Strategy training “Digital Strategy for Resilience Charities” provided a virtual community space for learners, small homework groups, and cohort learning sessions. We have always championed learning circles and this programme reinforced that community and collective exchange are vital to building digital confidence. Here, cohorts of organisations with shared characteristics (sector, size, level of digital experience, confidence etc.) have the space to come together to learn from each other’s journeys and build collective wisdom.
We iterated from this model to develop our approach for Beyond, a 6 month design and digital learning programme in partnership with Shift which aimed to support civil society organisations to build the skills they need to adapt and respond in times of crisis. We asked charities to share their biggest challenges and what they felt they needed to respond to the pandemic; then we created learning “huddles" which brought smaller groups of organisations together to share their experiences. We learnt through multiple iterations of this programme that learning from peers is as rich (sometimes richer) than learning from a digital expert, and that this should be combined with the need for learning fundamental principles and skills.
We have prioritised Dot Project investment in working with learning designers, in particular Sara Ramos, Erica Neve and Pedram Parasmand - to consistently review, acknowledge and take forward the very best of our learning content, resources and style of delivery.
Our support is shaped around two distinct methods of support, direct support to an organisation through our tech and teams programme and digital strategy accelerator programmes designed for cohorts of organisations.
TECH AND TEAMS
Our direct support to charities focuses on a technology and teams approach, supporting them to examine and assess their core organisational infrastructure. We believe this is a critical step to understanding how their existing digital estate, processes and behaviours aligns to organisational goals and where enhancements can be made.
The technology side looks to the strategy, systems and data that underpin an organisation’s services and ways of working. We work with teams to understand their digital requirements, what tools they use and why digital may enable their team to thrive, so we can guide them in developing stronger technology infrastructure. The team side then looks to the collective confidence, collaboration and governance that underpin the way that teams embraces technology and the shift to becoming a digital organisation.
Our alignment practice first ensures that organisations are collectively clear on their digital ambitions and their expectations of working with us. Following that, tech mentors carry out a series of collaborative workshops, auditing the gaps in an organisation’s technology foundations and identifying the opportunities to streamline technology infrastructure. Team mentors then coach teams on the roles, relationships, and structures needed to build digital resilience. At the end of the engagement, mentors map and prioritise the areas of organisational and technological change with the team, enabling them to build a longer term roadmap toward digital resilience.
DIGITAL STRATEGY ACCELERATOR
These developments have all shaped our current delivery of the Digital Strategy Accelerator (2022-23), funded by Okta for Good, and delivered in partnership with Charity Digital. Year 1 of the programme (2022-23) has focused on supporting organisations to develop a digital strategy, and now continued funding for a Year 2 programme (2023) will support the teams to embed their strategy.
This learning design has been structured in such a way that charities can learn from those inside and outside of their organisation. Over a period of 9 months, peer learning cohorts provide the space for charity teams to come together, reflect and learn from one another. Individual one-to-one mentor support then provides space for teams to work individually on their specific organisation’s priorities and to access a variety of skills and technical expertise.
To support deep sustainable digital change, we believe accelerator models are by far the preferred approach for the sector. The Okta Digital Strategy programme has been designed from all of our work with individual teams and cohorts of grantees and the programme is built on our own 3-year Digital Resilience Programme which we have yet to find a model of funding for.
Are you a funder looking to build digital resilience in the social sector? If so, get in touch if you’d like to co-design a digital accelerator programme with us.
