Adaptability

Overall success looks like:

Charities and their leaders take an agile approach, regularly reviewing the key trends in digital (and the accompanying opportunities and risks) and their own data and insights about their audience. They continually fine tune and develop their digital activities and include these insights in wider organisational strategy and planning where necessary.

Improving current practices

• Charities should aim to make their platforms, systems and services accessible to staff from as wide a range of devices and locations as is appropriate.
• Charities’ systems should work with each other internally and with external systems.
• Data should be captured through all interactions where appropriate, creating a single customer view that improves services along with stakeholders’ experiences.
• Digital should work in close partnership with those responsible for IT infrastructure. We see IT infrastructure as an enabler of digital.

Looking to the future

• A member of staff or team should be responsible for monitoring emerging digital trends and reporting the opportunities and risks regularly, ensuring that the charity’s leaders are made aware of key issues.
• Charities should review at consistent intervals how their use of digital benchmarks against relevant organisations working in a similar field, learning from the findings.
• Charities could aim to solve problems they identify by developing new ideas, products and services and testing them, using free and existing digital platforms if resources are limited.
• Charities should develop a ‘fail fast, fail forward’ mentality where they pilot new ideas and learn quickly from failure as well as success. Digital creates opportunities for innovating and testing relatively cheaply.
• Insights from users and wider digital trends should be applied to the charity’s work, creating a process of continuous improvement.
• Charities should consider the implications of emerging technology, such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, for their business models.