How do we get the culture right for digital transformation at charities?

05 Mar 2019 Voices

What is the best way to create a culture that will enable digital to flourish? Last month’s Charity Tech Breakfast Briefing, hosted by Civil Society Media, sought to explore the issue. Kirsty Weakley was there.  

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This quote from the management consultant and writer Peter Drucker often feels overused, but the message has never been more important. If you don’t get organisational culture right, you cannot get anywhere. 

For charities grappling with digital transformation projects, getting the right tools in place is sometimes the easy bit. Convincing staff and volunteers to adapt to new ways of working is often the real challenge. 

Last month delegates at Civil Society Media’s Charity Technology Breakfast Briefing, titled Digital transformation - a question of culture?, heard from digital leaders from Cancer Research UK, Age UK, Parkinson's UK and CLIC Sargent about their experiences of forging a culture that supports their digital objectives. 

Here are some of the key messages. 

Elevate digital 

For digital teams to be taken seriously within their organisations, it’s helpful if the department’s significance is recognised at the top level. 

Anne Bienia, senior strategy manager and change lead at Cancer Research UK, said that creating a chief information officer role at her charity to oversee both the IT and digital team and represent them at executive board level, “elevated” the function. 

“For us it has made a big difference,” she said. 

Similarly, Age UK created the role of chief digital and technology officer. Lara Burns holds the post, and said it came about in part because the charity had set up a digital advisory board which gave the leadership team some difficult messages.

“There was a massive change in our investment because of that challenge,” she said. 

For Polly Cook, digital service transformation lead at Parkinson's UK, being able to work collaboratively with colleagues is important.

“I am not sat in a digital team,” she said. This makes it easier to “really understand and help them transform as their peer and colleague”. 

The Trojan horse approach 

Very few jobs these days are in a digital-free zone and many digital teams are not just there to do digital projects, but to help people in other departments understand how they can do it for themselves. However, sometimes digital professionals can be guilty of bamboozling colleagues with jargon and demanding that everyone changes existing processes. 

Bienia said it is really important to listen to colleagues and understand what their challenges are to find the best way to work together. 

“Listen to colleagues. What do they need? If they are complaining you have to listen to them and make them part of your story,” she said. 

She said there have been times when she’s adopted a “Trojan horse” approach when working with other teams and introduced things like working in an agile way without making a big deal out of it. 

“Teams buddy up with people from the digital team” to work on a project, she said. This means that “people from the business teams are upskilled so next time around they do maybe a bit more on their own”.
  
Burns added that reaching out to people in other departments to get them excited about the digital team's work had been effective for her charity. 

She said that her team identified people in other functions who were interested and “made a real effort to cultivate them”. 

CLIC Sargent has taken a similar approach. Michael Wilkinson, head of digital change, said that when the charity was redesigning its website, the digital team found people in other teams to help, including people with very little prior experience. 

One is “now a tsar at creating web forms”, he revealed. 

Focus on delivering services

Having a focus on how the digital team's activity is supporting the charity’s overall aim is another way to foster the right attitude. 

At Action for Children, digital tools have meant the charity is able to continue to support children after funding cuts forced the closure of many early intervention services. 

Lynn Roberts, head of digital and innovation at Action for Children, said that the risk of “more children in crisis” meant the whole organisation was “really motivated to stop that from happening”. Everyone backed the charity's digital services which “take a lot of what we used to do in children’s centres online”. 

And at CLIC Sargent, Wilkinson said that digital communication platforms can be a way for the charity to find out what challenges its service users have and help the charity to prioritise. 

“What the challenges were five years ago might not be the same thing now,” he said. 

Recruitment challenge

One of the challenges facing digital leaders in charities is recruiting enough of the right people. Burns said it has taken over a year to fill some of the digital roles at Age UK. 

But she added that the sector should be proud of what it has to offer digital professionals seeking to switch from the corporate sector, as she did a few years ago. 

“Really amazing people who are overqualified [will be interested in working for charities] because they want to come and do some good.”

She advised that charities should “make the most of that. Really amazing people want to come and work for you.”

But a general dearth of talent also means that it is harder to retain people. 

“As you train people and give them new skills, they become more marketable,” Bienia said. “People leave, which is great for them, but it feels like we are constantly back to square one.” 

More mature conversations 

While there may still be things that charities can improve, speakers said that progress has been made. 

Biena said: “We are having a very different conversation to what we were having a few years ago.” 

This essentially boils down to having “more mature” discussions with colleagues. As part of this she advocated being transparent about costs so that colleagues in other teams are more aware of what they are asking for. 

She said she’s also exploring “what can we do in terms of working with finance - not moving to rolling budgets, but some sort of hybrid that we can look at”.

A companion event, Digital transformation - a question of technology? takes place later this month.
For more information, and to book, click here.

 

 

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