BIMA Digital Day ’18

Aged 14, I think we can both honestly say that it’d never crossed our minds that one day we’d grow up to work in a digital role. The internet was still in its dial-up phase. And our knowledge of what jobs were out there was limited to the traditional roles we’d seen around us in our day to day lives or on TV. Jobs like doctor, lawyer, teacher.

BIMA Digital Day is all about inspiring the next generation by giving them an insight into the work and careers that are available in the digital sector.

It’s a great chance to make students aware of how much technology already impacts them. And provides an opportunity to show them how they can be a part of it. By creating their own digital solutions, it breaks down the barriers they may see in getting involved in the sector.

So, when BIMA got in touch asking for volunteers to get involved in the community and help mentor pupils at a local school, our colleagues from across the technology team jumped at the chance.

Our team of 7 mentors was formed from a wide range of representatives from different disciplines within digital and technology:

• Christina Hirst – Senior Content Strategist
• Catherine Malpass – User Experience (UX) Designer
• Becca Sharplin-Hughes – Associate Product Manager
• Leanne Griffin – Service Designer
• Katie Foster – Digital Producer
• Simeron Taak – Developer
• Caroline Kavanagh – Digital Production Intern

We were lucky enough to be paired with Rooks Heath College, Harrow and 60 of their year 9 students, who're currently studying either ICT or Computer Science.

Across the day, education and inspiration was shared both ways. We came away feeling we’d learnt just as much from the young adults we met, about their perceptions of technology and from their ideas, as they learnt from us.

Here’s a breakdown of the day:

Digital surrounds younger generations now more than ever

To get started, first we wanted to know what the students understanding of ‘digital’ really was.

It was crucial to get students in the mindset of how much they use technology fluently every day. It really set the groundwork for later in the day, empowering them with the confidence to complete their challenges. (And even to help them consider it as a career option later in life.)

From the offset it was clear that the students were very aware of how much digital surrounded and impacted their everyday lives.

The students told us about their interactions with digital, with things like:

• Oyster cards to tap on the bus
• watching YouTube videos (plus the ads)
• morning alarms on their phones
• playing games
• their profiles on various social media sites

– all things they interact with before even getting to school in the morning!

We also learnt about the student’s perception of certain digital features (it turns out they hate YouTube ads just as much as us). And their perception of us as a charity. Reassuringly, they’d mostly heard of Stand Up to Cancer and Race for Life, and were quite excited by what we had to show them!

Students already have an interest in what career opportunities are available to them

The rest of the morning involved us explaining who we were, what we did and what it means to work in digital. After talking to the students, it was time to hand over to them and give them the chance to ask us the questions they wanted answers to.

Handing over the reins to a room of 60 14-year-olds we feared may elicit some less than admissible responses.

But the questions we received were insightful. The most common questions we were asked were:

• How did you get into your careers?
• How old were you when you got your job?
•  Do you enjoy your job?
•  What made you want to work at Cancer Research UK?
• What subjects did you study at GCSE?
• How much can I earn working in digital?
• What grades did you get at GCSE
• What’s fun about your job?
• Do you get to work from home?
• Is your job stressful?

It was uplifting to see the students so focused on areas like wellbeing in work and their determination to enter a career that they were passionate about, for a cause that they could care about.

Answering the questions honestly, our team were transparent about our career paths. It soon became clear that most of us had no idea what we wanted to be when we were younger. When we asked the room if they knew what they wanted to be when they were older, it became clear that the majority of them didn’t either.

Hopefully we’ve given them a message of reassurance for when they get a bit older and feel the pressure that comes with deciding what GCSE’s to study, whether to go to university and what career path to go down.

Taking on some challenging briefs with some inspirational outcomes

Next, the students got into groups and decided which of the 3 inspiring challenges, set by this year’s sponsors, they were going to take on.

Working through materials provided by BIMA, we provided the students with a framework to approach their challenges:

The 4 D’s:

·         Discovery - to gather research for their tasks

·         Decide – to choose an idea

·         Design – to elaborate on this idea

·         Deliver - present it to us and their classmates

All 10 teams pitched their ideas Dragon Den style to us, the panel, and we were left to pick our winners.

It was a tough deliberation but the results were inspiring.

BBC Studios challenge

Promote a new digital-only programme, getting people to tune in every week by developing a new marketing idea

With this challenge, it wasn’t just the marketing ideas that stood out, but their knowledge of social media platforms.

The students carefully considered which social media platforms they were going to target, with Snapchat filters to reach the younger target audience of the programme, to Facebook ads to target parents.

Teams even discussed the advantages that would come with tapping into the popular gaming market by previewing snippets of the show each week on the latest gaming releases (such as Fortnight) with an understanding that the reach would be phenomenal.

Winning idea: Promoting the new show with preview snippets via major gaming releases  

Our winner because: they really thought about their target audience, and what channels would best reach them. In-game advertising via a console isn’t something that is widely known about, and we felt it was an innovative solution to their problem. 

Vodaphone challenge

Broaden the appeal of the UK high street to change the way we shop, using either AR or VR technology

This challenge saw the students really think outside the box.

Ideas varied from helping elderly and disabled people to shop using VR headsets (which had extra  room so you could keep your glasses on) from the comfort of their own home, to mirrors that allowed you to see yourself wearing an item of clothing before buying it.

Teams also considered the problems the UK high street currently faces, solving the problem of closing stores. One team created a design that allowed recently closed high street shops to continue to sell their goods via AR technology. The tech would allow customers to see the items they’re buying in front of them, as if they were in a real shop

Winning idea: A VR headset to help elderly people access the high street from their homes

Our winner because: they really thought about the brief and their target market. They also ensured they were combating accessibility issues in our high street stores by bringing the retail experience to people in their homes.

The Football Association challenge

Increase the number of people following the England Women’s Football team during next year’s FIFA World Cup and encourage girls aged 8-16 to give football a try through using digital

The Football Association challenge saw some truly innovate ideas. Students pitched ideas such as an app, that features videos to teach different football skills. Where other teams thought about celebrity endorsements and giving away tickets to people who tuned into World Cup matches

Winning idea: an app that teaches young girls football skills via video. Users are encouraged to try the skills for themselves, videoing their progress and sharing on their social networks to earn points for the chance to reach the leaderboard.  

Our winner because: we really felt this idea got to the heart of the issue – that girls may be under-confident or discouraged to play football. Incentivising playing and making it collaborative would help young girls to overcome these barriers and inspire them to play football.

It was great to see the challenges bring so much confidence to the students and see how much faith they had in their ideas.

The winning teams were delighted, and some team members couldn’t quite believe they’d won!

The winners from each challenge have now been entered as part of a nationwide competition. 

Winning schools will receive cash prizes, with winning team members getting inspirational prizes from the sponsors.

An inspirational day for everyone 

BIMA Digital Day ‘18 was hopefully a day that inspired the children we met to pursue a career in digital. But crucially, it was an inspiring day for all of us who work in digital. We all certainly learnt a lot as well.

The students we met came up with some truly impressive and outstanding ideas. These students are the potential digital champions of the future. Days like this allow us to inspire, inform and connect with a new generation who might never have considered a future career in digital until now.

It got us thinking. Just imagine if in the future, any of the students we meet decide to work at Cancer Research UK. Well, if that ever does happen, we’ll be more than lucky to have them.

Christina Hirst & Catherine Malpass

The Cancer Research UK Design Principles

We've adopted a set of design principles to help us describe how we want to work at Cancer Research UK.

We've written another blog post that explains a bit more about design principles, and why we think they're important. So give that a read if you're interested in learning more. And we've also included the agenda for the workshop that helped us get to these design principles at the bottom of this post.

Our Design Principles

 

We focus on outcomes, not outputs

We start with a problem, and work out the best way of solving that problem. By focusing on solving a problem over delivering a list of features, we make sure we provide the right things, for the right people, at the right time.

We treat our data as a critical asset, and make decisions based on evidence

How our products and services collect, manage and query data is vital to the everyday operations of the charity. And we believe using that data is the best way to make the things we deliver better. We always test our assumptions before making decisions, and we’re not afraid to stop working on things that aren’t backed up with evidence proving their value.

We partner with the people in the charity who use our services, encouraging co-creation and empowerment

We put power into the hands of people so they can manage their work with autonomy. Governance is light touch, we recognise that good ideas can come from anywhere, and a self-service approach is encouraged in everything we do.

We disagree without being disagreeable

Disagreement isn’t something to be scared of, as long as it’s done in the right way. If we don’t agree with something we speak up, but once a decision has been made we commit wholeheartedly to its success.

We start small and develop iteratively towards our goals

The best products, solutions and services start small, test early with users and iterate from there. We’re comfortable with experimentation and testing, since it’s the best way to keep things simple, future-friendly and usable by everyone.

We always think about delivery end-to-end

Although we start small, we know a Minimum Viable Product (an MVP) is not a final deliverable. We make sure that whatever we deliver is robust enough to scale. And that security, quality and resilience are designed into everything we do.

We don’t rest on our laurels

We celebrate success, but we also avoid complacency. We recognise that inspiration can come from anywhere, and we know that however well we’re doing, there’s always an opportunity to be better.

We work ethically, honestly and deliver things that act in our users’ best interests

We start with user needs and provide products, solutions and services that treat people with respect. We do what’s right for our users, even when it’s difficult or controversial. And we never trade in their goodwill for a quick win.

We work in the open

We’re open and transparent about the things we deliver, the way we work and the challenges we face. This means we share as much as we can as often as we can, and we’re comfortable with ambiguity.

The workshop that helped us decide our principles

• Introduction - what are these principles for, why should we use them  + questions (15 mins) 
• Talk through existing 'example principles' and where we've gathered them from
• How is today’s session going to work?  (5 mins )
• Warm up -... thinking about how we do things in our directorate  (15 mins)
• Individually brainstorm what we're good and not so good that make us different from other directorates (5 mins)
• Discuss with your group (10 mins)
•  Design your own  (post it notes/sharpies on table) (40 mins)
• Think about the best project you’ve worked on here (15 mins)
• What made it so good? What behaviours did people exhibit? How did you go about things?
• Add one post-it note per ‘thing’
• Share with your table group and discuss similarities/differences (20 mins)
• Stick post-its against one of the example principles on the wall – or in its own space if it doesn’t fit any
• Coffee break (15 mins)
• Review the example principles/new principles individually (10 mins)
• Discuss as a room together, stress testing with ‘anti-principles’  (30 mins)
• Dot vote with 5 dots – on existing principles, or individual post-it notes (10 mins)
• Play back principles with most dots (5 mins)
• Hopes and fears post-it exercise (25 mins)
• Any worries, concerns, doubts about what we have? Share on post-its, then let’s discuss
• Wrap up and cover what happens next (5 mins)
• Flag that any disagreements or contradictions will be discussed at SLT level
• Flag that we'll collate, wordsmith and recirculate what we have

Designing our design principles

Why do we need design principles?

It’s always tricky bringing 2 teams together, and it was no exception when our old IT and digital teams came together to form a new Technology directorate. Back when we were 2 separate teams we had different cultures, ways of working and delivery methods. And we knew these differences wouldn’t magically disappear after we’d restructured.

So, alongside our new strategy, we had an assumption that a set of design principles could help everyone to commit to one way of working to solve problems. And give us a way of describing how our newly formed team would work with the wider organisation.

What are design principles?

There’s a bunch of definitions out there, but I think the best way of summarising design principles is by thinking of the place where your culture meets your design process. So imagine a mix of “the way we do things round here” and “the things that are important to us when we deliver work”.

How did we build them?

Combining teams had left us with a jumble of visions and behaviours from different parts of the directorate, that weren’t as aligned with each other as they could have been. This left us with a couple of challenges; ‘how do we make sure we’re not starting from scratch unnecessarily?’ and ‘how do we motivate people into sitting through yet another vision setting away day?’.

So rather than re-invent the wheel, we pulled people in to a workshop to try and bring our existing outputs together to form our new principles (more on this later).

And, since the idea of design principles is to inform a behaviour, we decided there’s no point in a design principle that’s self evident. For example, ‘be user-led’ could be a design principle, because some organisations would take an approach of ‘our users don’t know what they want until we build it’. But ‘do good work’ couldn’t be a design principle, since there isn’t a (serious) organisation out there that would describe one of their principles as ‘doing bad work’. So we also made sure to stress test the principles we came up with by reversing their meaning and seeing if they still made sense.  

What did we learn?

Don’t make them sad bits of laminated paper

Our Director said this early on in the process and it stuck with me. We’ve all seen office motivational posters of jargon encouraging us to ‘cross fertilize high value corporate deliverables’ or to ‘develop a best in class service led ecosystem’. Design principles shouldn’t fit into the category of meaningless phrases that are laminated, stuck on a wall, and then forgotten about by the people actually delivering work.  For design principles to work they need to be used and referenced regularly.

Power to the people

The easiest way to make sure something’s used regularly is for the people using it to feel a shared sense of ownership on the thing that’s been created. So we invited representatives from every team in our 300+ person directorate to attend the workshop. Not everyone could make it, but those who couldn’t were given the opportunity to feedback on the draft principles. So everyone had the chance to contribute.

One group we did exclude from the workshop was our directorate senior leadership team (SLT). The main reason we did this was so that the principles were created by the people who would use them the most. And were closer to the reality of the day-to-day challenges of delivering work at Cancer Research UK.

Use them or lose them

Although they weren’t at the workshop, we made sure to share our outputs with the SLT afterwards, and take the time to listen to any comments or suggestions they had. This was important to prevent the opposite of the ‘laminated pieces of paper’ effect. Since we knew that if that group didn’t stand behind them and defend them to the wider charity they’d never take off.

It also helped create a contract between delivery teams and leadership. By endorsing the principles created by the team there’s some clear expectations around the behaviours the SLT expect from us. And around the behaviours we expect from the SLT.

This helped position our design principles as something that sits outside of our organisational hierarchy. So everyone is held to account for the same standards of behavior, not matter how junior or senior they are.

Build your design principles, not someone else’s

There’s a bunch of existing work out there that influenced our design principles. From the new digital design principles for charities to the how to guide by Protoypr and the work GDS have done. We definitely didn’t want to create our own principles just for the sake of it.

But at the same time, we knew that just copying and pasting the GDS principles wouldn’t work for us. Because we’re not GDS, we’re Cancer Research UK. It sounds obvious, but when you’re thinking about what organisation you want to be, you also need to take into account what organisation you are right now.

So while we weren’t afraid to use existing templates and research to influence our thinking, we tried to make sure we weren’t just taking a cookie cutter approach. Since if they weren’t relevant to our situation we knew they wouldn’t be used.

What’s next?

At the moment we’re taking our design principles on a mini-roadshow to the different teams in our directorate through a pretty simple workshop exercise where people:

•  Pick a principle they’re great at, and another principle they think they could be better at
•  Pair off with someone else
• Guess what the other person picked for their 2 principles, then swap over and discuss

It takes about 15 minutes, but we found it’s a great way of getting the discussion moving. It also forces people to actually read and reflect on the principles, rather than just reading them and ignoring them completely.

And what have we got planned for the future? Well, the honest answer is “We’re not sure”. We’re still finding our feet with our strategy and our place in the organisation.  So we’re positioning our principles as an ‘open beta’ that we’ll be testing out as our team becomes more mature. We’ll only really see how successful they are by seeing the quality of work they help us deliver when we use them.

Of course, there is a danger we won’t use them. But if that’s the case, then either our behaviours aren’t right, or the principles aren’t. At the moment we’re planning on doing a strategy check-in in around 6 months’ time, so once we’ve done that we’ll do another post to share how we’re getting on.

So what are they?

If you’re interested you’ll find our design principles and a full outline of the workshop we ran to get them here. Hopefully our principles will change and evolve as our team does, so we’ll keep them updated. In the meantime we’d love to hear any thoughts or ideas on how we can make them even better.

Chris Flood

Content and Search Lead

Cancer Research UK

3 things I learnt from working in a more digital way

Just over a year ago my team and I were set the challenge of cracking cold acquisition for mid value supporters. We were asked to figure out how to get in front of people who had never interacted with Cancer Research UK and persuade them to give to us at £25 a month or above.

Most people start giving to charity at the lower end of the scale, around £2 or £5 a month, and traditional methods of acquisition (telemarketing, door to door) are in decline. We knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

However, in our team we’ve always championed an entrepreneurial spirit and have aligned ourselves with the words of Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

So, we decided to try a different approach.

There are many benefits to working at Cancer Research UK, with one being our infrastructure and support network. I started speaking to colleagues about the problem we were trying to solve and was quickly put in touch with various people in our Technology directorate. I was grateful for the help, but I must admit, at first this direction confused me. I didn’t know if what I needed was a technical or digital solution. But working with these teams soon opened my eyes to a new way of working, a culture and confidence to explore problems that don’t always find their answer in the shape of an app or a website.

Our approach came in the form of a spoke. A spoke is a dedicated project team made up of experts from a range of tech teams, here to upskill me and my team to help us move forwards and fix the problem ourselves. The old ‘give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime’ adage.

There were highs and lows, and many bumps in the road. However, we were in it together and when times got tough there was humour, the pub and Beyoncé...

Here are the 3 main things I learnt working in this way:

1.       Words matter

Our team are now well versed in agile language and have embraced Slack, Trello, demos and retros. However, it has left some of our colleagues a little bewildered to say the least.

Our project relies on collaborating with a number of teams, gaining their buy in and ensuring they’re as excited as we are about what we’re trying to deliver. This is dependant on communication. Since working in the spoke we’ve tried to reach a balance of intrigue with our language as well as clarity. It’s easy to get sucked into the agile world and wax lyrical about ideation, stretching and building, Kanban and scrum, retros and demos. But if people don’t understand you they won’t back you. They won’t be able to get excited about something that doesn’t have meaning to them.

We now have a Kanban board which allows us to work in the open – giving our colleagues a visual representation of our work that goes beyond the jargon.

Think about how you tell your story and look outside of your own team. Ask how you can phrase what you’re doing in a way that others will understand – and get excited about.

 2.       It’s hard. But that’s ok.

The innovation/design/new product development, or whatever you want to call it, process is hard. Things don’t happen in a nice straight linear way. You go over stuff again, and again. People disagree on how to do stuff, when to do it, and why we should do it. But this is all part of the process and if it was easy then we wouldn’t be being as creative as possible. The boundaries wouldn’t have been pushed, and we’d end up with what we’ve always got.

My top tips for when things feel hard is be honest with each other. Use retros constructively to openly and bravely voice your frustrations in a way that will better the group, not harm it. In one retro we used pictures of Beyoncé showing different emotions to illustrate how we’d felt over the past 2 weeks. This softened us giving difficult feedback to others and made it more comfortable to share.

         

Use team members where they are needed. We didn’t all have to be in the room all the time. Carefully selecting who was needed for what allowed us to be leaner and get things done quicker.

As a team manager, be there for your team, let them know that it’s ok if it feels slow, difficult or frustrating. Let them know that we will get there. But look after yourself. Make sure that you have a support network, so you can lead when it gets tough.

3. Talk to others who have been through it and share your story – pass it on.

One thing that I found super helpful was being put in touch with someone who had already been through the process. She could let me know honestly how much of my time would be taken up, where and when I would be needed for decision making, and the challenges to expect. As well as the advantages I, and my team, would gain by being a part of the process.

I now feel a duty to pass this on to others and will happily do so. Since I know how important and helpful it is.

We’ve been on a journey with this spoke and it’s transformed our team culture. We now have the skills and confidence to pursue our work in a lean way, testing and iterating our ideas and continually putting the supporter at the centre of what we do.

Spokes have a bright future but listening to people that have been on one will be key to ensuring they’re useful for others, both within and outside the spoke. And making sure they bring as much value as possible to Cancer Research UK and the incredible life-saving work we do.

Alice Larden
Senior Fundraising Manager (Mid Value)

It’s time to throw out your ‘digital’ strategy

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed that we’ve recently changed its title to the CRUK Technology Team Blog. We’re no longer called the Digital team which is a pretty big deal for us.

In 2017, Cancer Research UK brought together the Digital team with the IT function. For the first time, the organisation hired a CIO with a seat at the board table, recognising how important technology had become in achieving our organisational goals and mission to beat cancer sooner. We now have one Technology team, and have just published our new strategy – but more about that in another post.

Becoming ‘Digital Masters’

So let’s rewind a bit. In 2014, we established our digital strategy, which was about becoming ‘Digital Masters’. What did we mean by that?

For us, this was about adopting a digital mindset across the organisation. We wanted to integrate digital across everything we do at Cancer Research UK. And we specifically set ourselves a goal of digital no longer being a job title, but part of everyone’s job.

We’ve made an enormous amount of progress, and the creation of one Technology team presented the perfect opportunity to live our goal and drop the digital label from our own jobs.

But digital isn’t dead

This doesn’t mean that we’re done. (Is digital transformation ever done?) Or that digital is dead at Cancer Research UK. We’ve still got lots of work to do and will continue to embed digital skills across the organisation and improve the experience for our supporters, patients and other audiences.

Helping the charity see the benefits of user-centric, agile and lean ways of working is absolutely core to our mission. We’ve just made the conscious decision to not call these ways of working ‘digital’ anymore, as that often implies they’re only suitable for projects that have something to do with the internet, when in fact they are useful for all kinds of work. We’re also working to make our Technology strategy a key part of our organisational strategy, rather than a strategy for just the Technology team.

Helping CRUK become an adaptive organisation

I’ll write a separate post on our new strategy and how we got there, but in short we spoke to lots of colleagues across Cancer Research UK, and in our team, and came up with a new vision:

We will make Cancer Research UK the most adaptive, resilient and innovative organisation it can be.
We’ll help Cancer Research UK transform its technology, embrace new ways of working and maximise its impact, accelerating our progress towards 3 in 4.

We see ourselves as driving this change, in partnership with other teams across the charity. And we’ve consciously not used the word ‘digital’ in our vision or strategy.

Some things we learnt along the way

 

1. Don’t talk about digital (transformation)

Image credit: 20th Century Fox

‘Digital’ means different things to different people and different organisations, and that’s okay. You could spend time looking for a single definition for your organisation, which a lot of people recommend, but I’m not sure it’s possible, especially if you work in a complex business which serves lots of different users in different ways. Have the conversation, spend the time to listen to the different points of view, but don’t get hung up about finding a single truth about what digital, or digital transformation, means to your organisation. There are lots of truths!

And in my opinion, digital transformation as a term is just a bit ‘meh’. If you said that word to the average user of your website, would they get it without a lengthy explanation from you? Probably not.

2. Be clear on your purpose

We spent a lot of time thinking about our purpose as a team, and how we help the charity. This feels slow and maybe not a good use of time if you could be getting on with improving services, fixing stuff, and building things. But it was really important for us to redefine our role and give people a chance to reflect on why we exist as a department.

Think about your organisation, what it’s there to do, and how you need to position yourself in that. That should be the core of your strategy. Not doing digital, or technology, for technology’s sake.

3. Everything is awesome … or not

Image credit: LEGO^®

When we started thinking about our new vision, we wanted to create something that everyone in our large Technology team of over 300 people can get behind, but that also doesn’t feel too broad, diluted and vague.

We were acutely aware we needed something to really inspire the team. But, bringing two very different parts of an organisation together is really hard and sometimes everything is not awesome. People had very different backgrounds and experiences, skills, ways of working, and ideas of what good feels like in terms of culture.

While reforming as a new team and living through some of the day-to-day tensions, other teams in the charity were looking for us to get on with the work and do everything, faster, better, and cheaper all the time. And although we want to do more and support Cancer Research UK better, it felt like we were being stretched ever thinner, which was hard on everyone and affected our resilience.

My learning has been that it’s okay to acknowledge this, and in fact people probably want to hear it. We’re hearing from colleagues that they want us to be open and honest about the things we’ve not done so well in the past, what we’re learning from that and what we’re going to do about it.

It’s okay to be vulnerable, people will most often open up and ask you how they can help you out.

4. Structure drives behaviour

Image credit: The Minimum Viable Organisation, Agileshpere

I certainly don’t believe that structure is the answer to everything, but it can be a barrier to collaboration.

Think about how the hierarchies and rituals you have in place accelerate or slow down progress, and make it harder for people to get behind your purpose.

Sometimes structures can enforce some undesired behaviours, so think about what you can do to get around that. Maybe it’s building virtual teams that are made up from people from across your organisation, creating communities of practice, or doing things outside of work to bring people together.

It may not be within your control to change structure, but think about how you can help your people out by unblocking some of the things that your structure is putting in their way.

“Having a digital strategy will soon be ridiculous”

Image credit: The New Reality report

I’ll leave you with this quote, which is from 2015. In her report “The New Reality”, Julie Dodd interviewed a bunch of leaders from inside and outside the non-profit sector about the social impact of digital. Kay Boycott, CEO Asthma UK said at the time: “Having a digital strategy will soon look as ridiculous as having an electricity strategy.”

This was 3 years ago and I’d say we’ve reached that point now. I’m pretty chuffed about coming true on our promise and ditching our digital strategy. I’d love to hear where other organisations are on this journey, and how you’re positioning digital in your organisation.

Do you have a separate strategy or are you able to infuse your organisational strategy with digital thinking? Let us know in the comments or connect on Twitter or LinkedIn. 

Anne Bienia
Senior Strategy Manager