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