Back in wintry January we wrote our first
blog post about how we’re building the digital skills and knowledge of people
at CRUK through our hub and spoke model. We’re doing this to become a more
digital organisation and to keep moving towards 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by
2034.
When our digital team works with another team at CRUK in a
‘spoke’, we help them deliver a digital outcome. Like increase their
digital presence or the performance of their pages. And just as importantly we help them learn
new digital skills and ways of working. This way we’re developing our staff and
becoming a more digital organisation at the same time.
But we haven’t stopped there. We’ve provided lots of other ways for people to build their digital skills and confidence.
But we haven’t stopped there. We’ve provided lots of other ways for people to build their digital skills and confidence.
Digital Talent
Development
Through our Digital Champions scheme, we’re giving more
digital responsibility to teams across the charity. Following some introductory
awareness building workshops with each of our digital Practice Leads (UX,
Agile, content, SEO, analytics, production and proposition management), we’ve
matched each of our 16 champions with a digital mentor. The mentors help the
champions work out an individual digital personal development plan. And offer
face to face training to build their confidence.
Senior marketers can attend our Modern Marketing Academy.
Over 8 weekly sessions we’ve challenged our marketers to diversify their
channels and test more ideas. We've used internal and external inspiration. Including
a trip to our UX lab to observe some live usability testing, a speed meeting
session with a range of media owners and an analytics and measurement workshop
with the help of our in house analytics team. And we saw a big increase in
participants' confidence levels. The group reported a commitment to making a
change in their area of responsibility of 4.7/5. And they’ve made some
important changes. Like setting digital development objectives, building test
and learn strategies and introducing UX tools for marketing.
We also run a regular programme of training on everything
from agile to UX. We support this with twice weekly ‘Digital Hour’ drop-in
sessions. Anyone can come and chat to a generalist producer or a specialist in
content, SEO, agile, UX or analytics. It’s working well as a training
refresher, a way to get advice on a new idea or a way to get a quick digital
task done to a high standard.
Some success stories
Many of the talented people whose digital skills we’ve
helped build are creating real change. Several teams have reviewed their
structures to make digital more prominent. And to encourage more innovative,
‘test and learn’ ways of working. A member of our internal communications team,
Joe, learnt lots about digital while on a spoke. His team have now reshaped his
role to make the most of his new skills. He’ll now be leading a review of all
of our internal digital platforms and developing a strategy to ensure we’re
gaining maximum value from them.
Freya, in our research innovation team, has also been on a
spoke. Her team recognised the need to retain and challenge her, to harness her
new digital skill and awareness. She’s recently gained a Head role, from which
she can encourage digital ideas and ways of working.
Our goal? 3 in 4…
Our digital talent development strategy allows people to get things done quicker and with less support from digital. We’re building
the digital capability of our great people so that we can move at pace and make
sure that we reach 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.
Are you doing something similar? Taking a different approach
to building digital skills where you work? It would be great to hear from you!
Ed Willis
Learning and Development Manager, Digital team
This is a very good read. This is a piece of work we're getting started on at the charity I'm at, and my thoughts about how to go about this are very much in line with what you've written about here. What's really been helpful from reading this is the bit about measuring people's digital confidence as an outcome. It's a really good way of tackling this and showing the value of all this work.
ReplyDeleteHi Joseph, thanks for the comment, glad you enjoyed it! Yes we've found the confidence mapping a quick and easy way to show progress. Really happy to chat further if it would be helpful.
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