Category Archives: management

will digital teams continue to exist?

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My recent posts have sparked some real world discussions around two questions:

  • If everyone in the future is ‘just doing digital’ what will digital teams be doing?
  • And, as best posed by Alison Daniels, “the nirvana where everyone is ‘just doing digital’ may come, but what’s the ideal transition digital team?”

I’m going to explore the first question here and dedicate a separate post to the other one (watch this space!).

The easiest way to explore this question is with a definition of what everyone in an organisation ‘just doing digital’ could look like, and identifying some of the questions this creates.

Everyone is ‘just’:

  • creating web content – they’re writing web pages, creating short videos, and posting pictures.
  • using social media – through networks like facebook they’re servicing and attracting customers / supporters, through networks like linkedIn they’re making business connections, and they’re using all types of social media to co-create strategies and products.
  • building websites – they’re using drag and drop online tools to create simple web pages that ‘do stuff’.
  • doing digital marketing – they’re creating (or commissioning) search, affiliate and display advertising campaigns.

So here are the questions:

  • How do you manage the quantity Vs quality balance?
  • How do you prioritise for the greater good rather than individual interests?
  • How do you avoid duplication and cannibalisation where it matters?
  • How do you avoid fragmentation and make integration happen?
  • What if existing off-the-shelf tools don’t do what you need them to do?
  • How do you stop your digital activity looking identikit if you’re ‘just doing’ what everyone is ‘just doing’?
  • How do you keep on top of the next new thing if you’re busy doing the day job?

I see the role of future (and perhaps existing) digital teams is to answer these questions. In fact, stepping back, these questions are not too different from those that marketing teams have worked with for a while. So a logical conclusion might be that digital teams will become the marketing teams of the future.

And so we see the rise of creative marketing technologists – this presentation summarises it nicely.

Rise of the Marketing Technologist

 

So what do you think? Are you a future creative marketing technologist?

who owns digital in charities?

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If I had a penny for every time someone asked me where a digital team should sit within an organisation I’d have a lot of pennies. The debate has changed over the years as digital has become more important but the core consideration remains the same.

So I always find it useful to start with my own personal context. As someone who has worked in digital for my entire career I’ve been ‘all over the shop’:

  • At the Multiple Sclerosis Society digital was part of the Services directorate, a sub-team of Research and Information.
  • At RNID (now Action on Hearing Loss) digital was a sub-team of the Marketing and Brand team, and after I left the team moved into an External affairs also within the Comms directorate.
  • At the British Heart Foundation digital was in the Policy and Communications division, at one point as a sub-team with Marketing and Brand, another point just a separate Digital team, and then a part of a Multimedia team that includes traditional media officers who were spreading out into digital PR.
  • At UNICEF UK the Digital hub sits in the Fundraising division, following the merge of a Digital Marketing team from Fundraising and a New Media Resources team from Comms.

But in my experience the digital team have always been a cross organisational team no matter where the line management happens. So back to that core consideration I mentioned; “Where will the team have the influence and resources it needs?”. A question you could ask about any team in any organisation, but it’s the need that might be different.

A digital team needs to be more than just a service team during this time of transition between traditional and digital mediums and ways of working. A digital team which is only about direct delivery misses the opportunity to catalyse the skills and behaviour change that is needed for the whole organisation to embed digital.

As I alluded to in my post which mentioned the hub and spoke model, there will be a time when everyone needs to ‘do’ digital and it’s not far off. I often use two analogies to explain this:

  • When electricity was first around every business had an electricity manager. Now they just call in the electrician (experts) every so often.
  • Businesses used to have typist pools, now everyone (ok – almost everyone) does their own word processing. It’s only when you need to do something complex or special that you get expert help in.

Any organisation which isn’t leveraging the expertise of its digital team to change the ways of working and spread digital skills across the organisation is, in my opinion, going to be left behind. So the team should sit wherever in the organisation it’s possible for this to happen, and that depends on the organisation.

building female leaders of tomorrow

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Another video to share from the UCLA course I attended. If you’re male I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this. If you’re female then this is practically compulsory viewing 😉

bringing your best self to work

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I haven’t really written very much about my UCLA course. But someone asked me about it recently so I thought I’d give a taster of some of the content.

The following video was part of the session on bringing your best self to work. It’s typically american and quite cheesy but some good take-out thoughts and themes if you make it to the end. Enjoy…

http://youtu.be/aM2-1qOp-_A

tales of single sign on

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SSO sounds like some sort of distress call. For a time I’m sure a few at BHF probably thought it was. A recent project to develop a single sign on (SSO) approach took quite some time and had it’s up’s and a large number of down’s. But the new BHF community is a testament to collaborative working to overcome issues, it’s also a testament to the value SSO brings.

It all started as a seedling of an idea in 2009 when it became clear to me that a toolbox made up of many different technology platforms was the ideal situation if only we could integrate the user journeys and the data behind the scenes. Why did I think this?

  • Avoiding over reliance on a single partner or platform.
  • Using the best tool for the job (by the time I left BHF we had; Magento for the shop, Drupal for the community and Alterian WCMS for the main site plus many other supporting tools).
  • Cost efficiencies of using out of the box functionality that might exist in one platform but not another.
  • Streamlining user journeys across sites – lessening confusion and drop off.

The first opportunity to use SSO was with Vielife who provided a lifestyle check tool. We implemented a SOAP based one-way sign-in to allow people to take the lifestyle check without having to re-type all their personal details. It took about 10 – 15 working days effort to put in place as Vielife had already built SSO connectivity into their platform – so we only had to create the Alterian WCMS end. It all worked very nicely!

Around a year later we decided to implement a Drupal platform for the new BHF community, with the plan that we would use this as an opportunity to build a standard two-way SSO layer to our technical architecture. This layer being the key to delivering on the ideal multi-platform approach in the future.

Following investigation by the two delivery partners (Sift and Positive Technology) and BHF IT it was decided to use SAML this time around. The core reason for this was the wider compatibility offered that would allow for future integrations (eg Magento). It was a challenging project for many reasons; multiple agencies, open source vs proprietary platforms, differing understanding of requirements, internal team changes and more. But we all learnt a lot along the way and came out with something that is beautifully simple as a product.

Would I do it again? Yes, and whenever I run a tender exercise in future I’ll always ask about examples of the platform in use with SSO (plus API‘s and Web Services) even if I don’t intend to make use of these at first.

I’ve only heard of one other UK charity making use of two-way SSO in their digital work. So if you have any SSO tales please do leave a comment – I’m sure there’s more I could learn!

getting more digital resources

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Let me get to the point – you will never have enough people in your digital team to do everything your charity needs to do digitally. There will always be something you don’t know and something that blows your ‘to do’ list out of the water.

So how do you get enough digital resource?

I completely advocate a hub and spoke model where shared ownership for delivery of digital activity sits across the entire organisation. This is enabled by a central digital team who develop and oversee a framework (tools, guides, training, processes etc) that empowers the whole organisation, a team who are able to drive a digital strategy and also trend spot for the next big thing. At times of course the central team will still have to knuckle down and deliver too.

So it’s rather convenient that my new role of Head of Digital Engagement for UNICEF UK comes with a recently formed and aptly named Digital hub team!

What are the benefits?

Spreading the work is of course the most obvious benefit but there’s a few others worth highlighting:

  • Subject matter experts become closer to the audience meaning more authenticity, more accuracy and more timeliness.
  • The whole organisation starts to think about digital as an embedded need, rather than an add-on which is rushed at the last moment.
  • Career development, lets face it everyone will need to know their digital stuff or risk being overtaken by digital natives who are joining the workforce.
  • Ideas, ideas, ideas. Fresh perspectives are the melting pot that generates new ideas. The more ‘spokes’ the more perspectives.
  • Cost efficiencies. Firstly there will be fewer middle men, less briefing more doing, a shorter chain of requests for delivery. Secondly, technology is addictive, once someone knows how make something easier with technology they’ll look for other things they can do this with, the digital bug can spread to internal working practices.

How do you achieve this model?

It can take a while to get this mindset and way of working spread through an organisation. After my three years at British Heart Foundation I think we were there with some teams and activities but still had work to do in to do in some areas. Getting there was a mixture of tactical development of the framework/s and individual confidence and skills, accompanied with strategic re-enforcement, sharing successes, learning and painting a picture of the future.

Of course there are pitfalls of this model. But I’m not sure any is significant enough to persuade me that the hub and spoke model isn’t what every organisation should be striving for. If you think I’m wrong – you know where the comments box is 🙂

when should you use a microsite?

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Microsites aren’t bad intrinsically – they’ve just often been a lazy (sometimes expensive) way to avoid integration considerations when delivering a campaign. Fortunately it seems the needless spawning of microsites has very much slowed as many brands have realised the same aims through social media and better use of their main sites. In fact it feels a bit old school to write about them but a recent experience has made it quite fresh for me.

While at BHF I worked very hard to streamline a vast number of microsites during my three years working there ( I think we went from around 30 sites to 6). I was really quite chuffed to have shifted the culture so much and saved vast amounts of money in doing so. But before I left we broke my no microsite policy for a campaign. So why did we break the rule?

Here’s a summary of the questions that made it happen. They might be useful as a decision discussion tool if you find yourself in a similar situation.

  • How distinct is the audience we’re trying to reach when compared to the main site?
  • Would the audience be distracted by other main site ‘furniture’ so much that the activity effectiveness is at threat?
  • Would the standard brand risk the effectiveness? i.e. put the target audience off? Or not fit with a big reveal tactic?
  • Is it jointly branded and not solely owned by the organisation?
  • Do we want to distance ourselves? And not get our existing audience engaged?
  • Do we foresee selling / passing on the activity to an outside agency / organisation in future?
  • Would the technology or messaging compromise the main site?
  • Would it be more cost-effective to use a different platform but stop being cost-effective when integration is considered?
  • How long will the website need to be available?
  • Are we prepared to accept the following impacts:
    • Burden of build and maintenance
    • Potentially less exposure over longer term
    • Establishing search footprint from scratch
    • Fragmentation and potential for confused user journeys
    • Potential reduced capitalisation of existing ambassadors.

So what happened after the campaign?

Exactly as expected, the microsite traffic plummeted, but we’d planned ahead and had our exit strategy ready. We’d purposely had assets designed with the main site in mind too – so we migrated the useful stuff to the main site, redirected the domain and called it a day.

What charities can learn from Twestival

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It’s been a little while since Twestival in March so I thought it was about time I penned a short blog piece on it.

I’d been aware of Twestival for a while and so when Amanda, Twestival’s founder, called out for volunteers with social media skills I jumped right in and offered my time.

I was one of around 15 people on the worldwide social media team- a few working in each country. We were there to take the pressure off the regional co-ordinators so they could work with each of the local cities in their region. It was a new role/team for Twestival and so it started off a little loose and ready to be shaped by everyone. But it was clear from the start that we were bubbling with ideas.

Harnessing it was harder as we were lacking definition and all looking to each other to make the first move. So it was great when one of the global Twestival team stepped in to give direction – he gave shape to our responsibilities and we agreed who was taking the lead on different things.

So how did it work?

  • Each channel was divided up to be led by a different person- the local city volunteers already run their own profiles while the UK national ones were covered by the social media team.
  • Each city received guidance and support from the rest of the Twestival collective through huddle.
  • We crowd sourced various strategies and documents amongst the social media team on huddle and skype chat. For example:
    • Our first skype chat resulted in the creation of incentives for cities for the first time – this being a tactic to get the most of social media chatter and produce great content eg best team photo and best logo.
    • A quick social media tips guide that covered comms, persuasion and bribery for attention- and social media fundraising tools
  • We continued to have regular skype or gotomeeting calls to keep in touch with what the next focus area should be and any things that need sorting out.

Learnings

What Twestival really demonstrates is the power of a loosely formed network connected together through social media. Success in this can only come from an organisation trusting the network and letting the network shape the activity rather than having a top down approach.

Completely unconnected to Twestival I’ve been reading some of the free MIT course notes and this quote really struck me:

“The rise of networks… means that conflicts may increasingly be waged by ‘networks’ perhaps more than by ‘heirachies’. It also means that whoever masters the network form stands to gain the advantage” – John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars (Rand 2001).

This quote was in the context of Al Queda and conflict – but turning it on it’s head and thinking about it in the context of doing good works just as well, and Twestival proves it.

So I absolutely and totally agree with Cian’s blog post which has some great references on networks. This digest of how the Plymouth City Twestival engaged volunteers is also pretty insightful too.

trends in digital charity teams

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In the last day or so I’ve finally published my digital charity job archive page. I’ve only gone back as far as 2008 but I’ve been an avid watcher of the charity job market ever since I started in the sector. It’s a useful indicator of charity digital team structures and roles.

Looking back over the almost four years worth of salaries and job adverts a few things stood out to me:

  • Salary rates haven’t changed that dramatically – surprising given that anyone who works in digital knows that there is probably more to your job now than a few years ago.
  • Charities have more digital content related roles than other types – most charities outsource a lot of their digital marketing, production or development. I personally can see this changing as digital skills become more native with each generation, and tools become more intuitive too.
  • Social Media and Community roles are starting to appear across more charities. I believe you need an internal champion to help spread adoption and integration across an organisation – and so you need someone with the time to do this work either a dedicated post or otherwise.
  • There is an absence of analytics and insight related roles. We’ve got a dedicated post in the British Heart Foundation Digital team, as well as broader roles in other teams – an Insight Manager, Evaluation Manager and Knowledge Manager. My guess is that analytics and insight is part of the remit of some other digital roles and / or other teams. But on the surface I can only assume some charities are underinvesting in this – I’m hoping to be proved wrong!

Be really interested to hear your observations, additions or thoughts…

building the business case for digital in your charity

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I’ve pulled together stats for a presentation on why investing in digital, and in particular the new trend for mobile, is important. There’s lots of information out there if you’re prepared to do some digging. But I thought I’d share some of my own research to potentially save you the effort. Feel free to take anything useful.

Mobile

  • Vodafone say 70% of new customers signing up in the UK demand a smart phone compared with just four in 10 in Europe. [http://bit.ly/fHLCjL]
  • Mobile commerce experienced an 8% growth this Christmas [http://bit.ly/e2rA97]
  • In April 2010, 19% of UK consumers were already participating in mobile commerce [http://bit.ly/h9GLjE]
  • Mobile commerce rises to 29% when you look just at the 18- to 34-year-old market [http://bit.ly/h9GLjE]

Social media

  • This is still a rapidly growing area, with over half of the UK population being on Facebook [http://bit.ly/elAq4L].
  • Social commerce is a particular trend which is on the up – Amazon and other only retailers are taking their checkouts to Facebook. (couldn’t find a link for this one)

Increasing cost efficiencies while building scalability

  • Online fundraising raises around £10 for every £1 spent on direct costs and the average donation is double that given offline (£30 compared to £15).  [http://bit.ly/gJ7CAP]
  • When targeted, the average online donation is £54. [http://bit.ly/gJ7CAP]

Charity examples

  • Oxfam Created a YouTube video after the Haitian Earthquake, a media spoke person simply talking to camera, explaining what the situation was and asking for donations. It was picked up by YouTube’s homepage where it got nearly 700,000 views, and generated £30,000. [March 2011 http://bit.ly/gTIgRR]
  • Save the Children Created an SMS petition in 2009 and won an NMA award – as well as building awareness it reportedly boost donations at a low-cost per acquisition (just pence per SMS) [http://bit.ly/fh56bM ]
  • Disasters Emergency Committee For the Haiti Earthquake Appeal they encouraged people to text donations to a special short number. Despite being promoted almost exclusively on Twitter more than £161,000 was raised [http://bit.ly/gJ7CAP]
  • Depaul UK Had the most high-profile charity mobile app to date, more than 400,000 downloads May – July 2010. The free interactive game offers users the chance to make decisions on behalf of a young man facing homelessness. “We didn’t spend a penny on marketing,” iHobo has also raised £7,000 in small donations from 3,100 people [http://bit.ly/9KuHOT]
  • British Heart Foundation The 50th anniversary year we launched a cross-channel campaign to build brand relationships and long-term prospects. As a result of Facebook Adverts and the natural ripple effect we recruited over 32,000 new Facebook fans within February. These individuals were acquired at a cost of 25p each and will be developed through the ongoing social media activity.
  • Zynga (social gaming production company) Not really a charity – instead a charity appeal. Farmville with its 20 million users a day raised $3m for Haiti from by donating 50% of the cost of special virtual Sweet Seeds, bought by players for their virtual farms. An initial promotion generated a donation of more than $575,000. This was repeated three times to raise the total. [http://bit.ly/gJ7CAP]

Please leave a comment with any more fantastic results and stats I should be including!