A conversation with Linda McBain of Save the Children

Photo by Francesco Califano on Unsplash.

Brani: Hi, Linda. You've been leading digital transformation at Save the Children for a while now. Tell us more about your role.

Linda: I’ve been leading digital transformation at Save the Children since 2015. We set ourselves an ambitious digital vision bringing a more user-centred approach to supporter experiences and making them more relevant and personalised. The changes needed to deliver that vision were across people, process and technology. We initially focused on implementing a new MarTech stack along with specialist skills and capabilities across digital and data.

The next stage was to look at our wider mass marketing model. We moved the teams to an agile marketing approach – focusing squads on each stage of the supporter experience (awareness, acquisition and loyalty) along with some specific campaign areas such as Christmas Jumper Day and emergencies. These squads were multi-disciplinary teams, made up of all the skills and capabilities needed to deliver each stage of the experience. This has helped to break down silos as now the team looks across the whole experience rather than only focusing on brand/fundraising/campaigning etc.

Where previously I focused mainly on public engagement and supporter-focused activity, now it’s about making ourselves more digital and data-enabled across the organisation and thinking about how we can be better fit for the future by empowering staff with the right skills and access to the right tools, along with ensuring that data-driven decision making can be better built in to how we operate.

What are the achievements you’re most proud of?

Nothing to do with digital, data and tech, actually! I’m most proud of my work in people and culture. In all the work I’ve done, I’m most proud of making the case for bringing in new skills and capabilities that we didn’t have. 

Prior to 2015 we had just one person delivering digital content for the organisation and managing the website. Now we have a whole team, plus an embedded model where we’ve given people the tools and abilities to make their own updates and changes in their business areas. 

In terms of culture, the move to agile has meant that we work in a more collaborative way. For example, an analyst will work with creatives and marketeers, which has led to better understanding and collaboration across teams. 

The biggest culture shift I’ve seen is people feel more psychologically safe. This is really built into agile working through retrospectives where teams can regularly discuss what worked well and didn’t work so well and be open about opportunities and challenges. Staff are living and breathing the idea that every day can be a little bit better. That’s helped them to feel less frustrated and more empowered. There’s acceptance that this is a journey and not everything needs to be perfect all at once.

Tell us about your leadership style – how would you define it?

I’m aspiring to be collaborative, empowering teams and unblocking things for them. When I first started my career, leadership meant something different to how I see it evolving today.

In previous leadership roles, I’ve been the unblocker, at other times the resolver. In my current role I’ve been acting more as a consultant to partly educate and also to support in shaping strategy. Ideally, when I lead teams I want them to set the direction for themselves. So it’s very context-dependent!

You and I have talked a lot about agile in the past couple of years.

A few organisations tried and failed to become agile. I think the reason was that they tried to use stringent agile methodology in a communications team.  No agile scrum master would ever suggest doing that!

I’m keen for you to share how you think about agile in the context of the work most charities do. How does agile inform your everyday approach to work?

Save the Children is not fully agile, in terms of methodology, but we are aiming to adopt more and more of the principles. There are areas of our work where it really works and where it doesn’t. Agile isn’t an end in itself, it’s a means to an end.

The agile toolkit is meant to help you respond better and become more productive. The language – sprints, kanbans – can be very off-putting and seem like a cool kids’ thing. But I think it’s about boiling it down to the key principles. No one should disagree with being data-driven and user-centred. The more interesting one for charities is about working in a very open way: sharing, learning, sharing pain points.

Collaboration over documentation is another important factor. In the charity sector I’ve seen a lot of very boring PowerPoints and decks that are valued above the outcomes and collaboration. That doesn’t mean doing no documentation, just having a lighter touch.

Charities can be quite bureaucratic. Agile can clarify expectations, or the “what”, so that people aren’t always having to send things up the hierarchy chain to get agreement on the “how”.

There are often too many cooks in charities. Some of it is a misplaced sense of inclusivity. 

Yes. In agile, we have review meetings where anyone can give an opinion, and everyone's opinion is valid, but it's for the squad to decide what to carry forward.

Have opinions, be curious, but let the right people make the decisions. That’s a nice principle!

I know you’ve been thinking about data-driven decision making and continuous improvement at Save the Children. People talk about them a lot in charities but what do they mean? 

On the negative side, you often either have organisations with no access to data, or organisations who are trying to use every single piece of data but don't know why.

We’ve been guilty of this in the past. Now we’re trying to build a shared approach where we set, say, one objective and five KPIs, and so if we see shifts in performance we know what led to those improvements. This focused approach on the metrics that matter helps us avoid crushing the data team with too many requests.

One piece of work I've done this year is looking at some of the challenges our acquisition team were facing in reporting. We recommended much clearer, more structured reporting that helped them identify what was working and what wasn’t. 

Role modelling is important; executive teams need to show they’re looking at and responding to data. But it can be much harder to know what metrics to measure in the short term to know you’re on the right track for a win. People are worried about measuring a metric and telling the wrong story. 

Do you have more examples of this? Charities are different to the corporate sector in this way. Most of the KPIs around advocacy and campaigning are X number of meetings, because the process can sometimes take ten years. 

We haven’t cracked that, but we should recognise that in the charity sector, some things are harder to measure. That’s why working with data experts and experts from the different business areas such as campaigners and fundraisers to define those metrics is so important. People are scared to even start this.

What relationship does this have to accountability? 

These measures need to serve you as a team. This is about psychological safety. It’s not about being measured to see if you’re good or bad, but to further your performance as a team. In reality, it’s messy. As long as today is better than yesterday, that’s good! 

We’ve gone through a period of time where everyone was talking about transformation. People thought a big bang would solve lots of problems and it hasn’t. The big sector disruptor still hasn’t appeared. There’s more value in a culture of continuous improvement. Of course, you need an innovation mindset too, but it’s about having the balance.

Thanks to Anya Pearson of Contentious for writing up this conversation.