Charities should stop looking for a “big bang” moment in digital transformation and instead focus on long term change, Breast Cancer Care’s assistant director of digital said last week. 

Jo Wolfe (pictured) was speaking at an event organised by the Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology (CAST), and suggested that there is now enough literature on the subject of digital transformation. 

“I have loved many of those reports [about digital transformation],” she said. But that we “may have reached peak transformation.” 

She said: “Digital is more essential than ever before.” And after highlighting the example of Kodak collapsing at around same time as Instagram became popular, said there is a “real risk for charities who don’t take heed”. 

Wolfe said that change “can be more gradual, meaningful and long lasting” and suggested charities think in terms of digital maturity instead of digital transformation. 

“Rather than that ‘big bang’ we need something that talks about maturing along a continuum,” she said. 

To help it assess its own digital maturity Breast Cancer Care developed a digital maturity matrix to help it assess how well it was doing and plot where it wanted to be. 

Earlier this year it made the spreadsheet available for other organisations to use and has just turned this into a free-to-use web app.