Leadership

Overall success looks like:

Leaders feel confident and motivated about using digital to achieve their organisation’s charitable purpose and goals and to improve its sustainability.

Governance

• Charity leadership teams and boards understand how digital can help their charity achieve its objectives, and have the skills to make informed, data driven decisions in this area, and to develop the relevant plans. This may require the leadership team and boards to develop digital skills.
• CEOs will need to play a critical role in initiating and spearheading digital change.
• Digital skills should be represented on all charity boards, with the aim of every trustee understanding how digital could increase their charity’s impact. For example, if the charity aims to reach more beneficiaries in its local community, how could digital help?
• Trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the relevant policies and procedures are in place for digital (e.g. social media and IT policies).
• Leaders need to be aware what level of investment in digital is required to achieve their charity’s goals (such as a new, mobile friendly website). What will this deliver, how will they know if it offers value for money, and how will they know if it has been a success?
• As charities increase their digital presences, trustees and leadership teams should take ownership of increasing cyber security risks and put in place proportionate measures to protect their funds, data, supporters and reputation.

Skills

• Digital can help small charities be even more efficient and productive. Leaders and boards should explore the new ways of working and communicating that digital offers (e.g. collaborating through platforms such as Slack, WhatsApp and other social media), looking at how peers and similar organisations are using these tools.

Overall success looks like:

Leaders feel confident and motivated about using digital to achieve their organisation’s charitable purpose and goals and to improve its sustainability.

Governance

• Charity leadership teams and boards take responsibility for owning and driving digital, rather than delegating it entirely to other staff (e.g. digital teams), suppliers or volunteers. This may require the leadership team and boards to develop digital skills.
• CEOs will need to play a critical role in initiating and spearheading digital change.
• Digital issues need to be considered regularly at board and leadership team meetings. Executive teams and trustees must be confident that they have the requisite skills to make informed, data driven decisions about how digital can help achieve their charity’s objectives.
• Trustees should support and enable senior staff to feel confident in taking a more innovative approach to digital, such as piloting ideas for new services.
• Trustees are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the relevant strategies, policies (e.g. social media and IT policies) and procedures for digital are in place and that everyone is clear on the authority they have to act.
• Boards could review whether digital could help make the functions, administration and key principles of governance more effective (e.g. using digital channels to make decisions, provided it doesn’t remove the need for trustees to consider them properly).
• Digital skills should be represented on all charity boards, with the aim of every trustee, whether new or already in post, developing a working knowledge of how digital could increase their charity’s impact.
• Leaders need to understand what level of investment in digital is required to achieve their charity’s objectives, what this will deliver, and how to evaluate it, ensuring that it represents value for money. They should consider what is appropriate to invest in products and services as well as improving capacity (e.g. digital skills training) and infrastructure (e.g. good systems that improve productivity and efficiency).
• As charities increase their digital presences, trustees and leadership teams should take ownership of increasing cyber security risks and put in place proportionate measures to protect their funds, data, supporters and reputation.
• Digital experts on staff teams at large charities could consider offering their skills to be trustees of other charities, capacity permitting.

Leading by example

• Whilst leaders and boards do not need to be digital experts, they must commit to leading by example as a sustained effort, growing their own skills, championing digital, understanding trends and best practice, understanding digital opportunities and risks for their charities, and how their organisation benchmarks against others. They should support and motivate colleagues to do the same. Large charities with a devolved structure should ensure that leaders at a regional or local level have the confidence, skills and mindset to lead digital change.

Skills

• Where leaders have identified digital skills gaps, they should aim to close them through training, recruiting staff or volunteers or other means of support (e.g. non-executive roles on digital steering groups or advisory boards). This could include making digital part of new and existing job descriptions.
• Leaders should consider how to ensure their boards and charities can attract and retain people with good levels of digital skills. This may involve thinking creatively about the recruitment process or offering short term, high impact opportunities to staff or volunteers.
• Leaders and boards need to invest in developing the right mindset, such as being open to new ideas (e.g. learning from peers and regularly reviewing best digital practice from comparable organisations in other sectors) and being willing to adapt to the new ways of working and communicating that digital offers (e.g. collaborating through platforms such as Slack, WhatsApp and other social media).