Marie Curie set out to improve its use of digital after realising that it was “limiting its future” by neglecting it, and increased online donors and time visitors spent on the site by a quarter, its head of digital said yesterday.
Claire Hazle (pictured) told the CharityComms digital transformation conference yesterday that after carrying out of a review of its digital capability the charity found that it was “significantly behind charities of a similar size and scope”.
“The impact of this was that we were limiting our future,” she said. And that “what really scared our trustees was the risk of not doing something”.
New website
Marie Curie launched a new website at the same time as its rebrand.
Hazle said that the old site was geared towards the charity’s internal priorities and that “now we are taking a user-centred approach” by looking at “how people wanted to find information”.
Since launching the new site the charity has seen the amount of time people spend on its site increase by 24 per cent and the number of people who completed the process of making a one-off donation has gone up by 25 per cent.
Daffodil Appeal
Previously the manual process used to sign up volunteer fundraisers for the annual Daffodil Appeal collection was “time intensive” but now much of the process of communicating with volunteers has automated.
Co-ordinators also had access to a dashboard so that they see instantly how full collections were.
Hazle said that this meant “fundraisers could spend more time out raising money”.
The charity also introduced a ‘gamification’ element this year with fundraisers who were close to reaching a certain target were encouraged to sign up for more to be entered into a prize draw to win John Lewis vouchers.
Next steps
Marie Curie is currently looking for ways to use technology to improve its services. It has given its some nurses handheld devices to record patient data. And is also looking at how it can pull its internal data sets together with third party data sets, such as Twitter followers.
Hazle said that Marie Curie was aiming to embed digital across all aspects of its work.
“We should be getting to the point where there is not a digital strategy but a business strategy with digital running through it,” she said.
How the relaunch worked
One challenge the digital team faced was allowing trustees to understand what a digital transformation would look like.
“We had an animation to show them what it looked like” Hazle said, because digital transformation “can be quite intangible”.
Another factor was a significant growth in the number of digital workers. Before embarking on the digital transformation programme there were five people and now there are around 25, mostly based in a central digital department.
Hazle reports to the chief information officer, and her team sits within IT team department. She said that this “allows us to be neutral” although they do work closely with marketing and fundraising.
She said that having support from senior management was key to getting wider support within the organisation and that having a new chief executive and chief information officer who were “very supportive” helped.
“It is really important to ground everything in evidence – if you have got data it is hard to argue against,” she told delegates.
She warned that the “transformation process can be quite scary – people think we are trying to replace them with a machine” and that the time it takes for culture change “cannot be overestimated”.
"Digital transformation should not be driven by the technology - it should be driven by the end user," she said.
High expectations
Tim Cockle, head of digital services at Eduserv, a charity that provides IT services to other charities, also speaking at the conference, warned that the public now has “really high expectations”.
“People work very differently now and if we don’t understand that we are not going to survive,” he said.
He urged charities to “focus on the customer” when thinking about digital transformation projects to make sure that they are “at the heart” of new systems.
