Boards must engage with digital services or their organisation may be left behind, says Chris Sherwood.
Technology is transforming the way we live our lives – this is something I am acutely aware of through my work at Relate. Our counsellors hear of affairs websites and sexting damaging relationships, but we also see how Skype and social media helps people to feel more connected.
While technology presents both risks and benefits to relationships, the same can be said about its potential impact on charities. Digital services and social media enable the sector to reach more people in more ways that work for them but there is also the risk of investing in products that never get off the ground or of a Twitter blunder that leaves your organisation’s reputation in tatters.
Executive leaders can reduce such risks by recruiting the right staff, providing adequate training and piloting new ideas first, but there are also other barriers to digital transformation that they face.
A recent report by Eduserv with input from CharityComms suggested that digital teams find it challenging to get departments other than marketing and fundraising to engage with digital transformation. There was a time when even having a ‘digital team’ seemed forward-thinking, but the concept of digital not being anyone else’s concern now feels outdated.
Instead, digital should be the golden thread that runs through everything from the organisational strategy to plans of each department and every member of staff. As Kay Boycott, chief executive of Asthma UK, has commented: “Having a digital strategy will soon seem as ridiculous as having an electricity strategy.”
Relate’s board and executive leadership team knew that with advances in technology the ways our clients want to gain access to our services were changing. We know that the two main routes into our services are word of mouth and Google search. Our leadership team is committed to embrace digital as part of our journey to engage with our clients, moving from a ‘Yellow Pages’ model to ‘Google-first’ model.
When I started at Relate four years ago as director of policy, communications and digital services, our website didn’t properly represent our brand and our range of services – it was a missed opportunity and not a good shop-window for Relate – but this wasn’t recognised internally. Now we have embraced the culture shift that technology is critical, which enables us to give our clients what they want.
We have made huge strides, investing in a new, more accessible and responsive website and growing our diagnostic and self-help tools. We’re striving to produce and market content that moves beyond problem-solving and into actually transforming relationships. And it’s working. Engagement has increased significantly.
Our strategy is to work with technical partners and use their platforms when developing online products and services, which removes the risk of trying to be a tech business, and allows us to focus on our core business; to be the relationship specialist. For example, using funding from the Google Impact Challenge, our team has been working with partners, Modria and HiiL, to develop, test and soft-launch the first online family dispute resolution service in England and Wales.
Technology presents endless opportunities for charities, and chief executives and trustees need to take a leap of faith, putting digital at the centre of the corporate strategy and everything that feeds from it. Charities which fail to engage with digital risk not keeping up with the expectations and needs of those they are there to support. Digital is our world now and the demand for online services will only increase in the future.
Chris Sherwood is chief executive at Relate.
