How to meet the challenges of the latest trend in digital, just like we’ve done before
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash.
During my time in the nonprofit sector, I’ve seen many waves of digital change. Often, charities embrace change long before the commercial sector because it aligns with their values and beliefs.
As I write, a new shift is emerging, and the tech industry and entrepreneurs are leading the way. It concerns the way teams and organisations work. And just like with previous digital changes, we need to adapt to this shift for our continued success.
So, what’s changing?
COVID-19 had an important cultural impact on organisations. Working from home highlighted people’s discomfort in their jobs and working lives. And with more jobs than people, companies had no choice but to acknowledge this dissatisfaction and make working life more appealing.
Agile manifesto, psychological safety at work and dismantling hierarchical decision-making became hot topics. It meant giving people more agency in their jobs. It meant acknowledging their thinking and their experience. It represented a huge step-change from business management logic, where focus is on roles and outputs. Where people are just a means of getting there. Instead, it’s about putting people front and centre, because a happy workforce equals good business.
How is this relevant to nonprofits?
COVID-19 has also highlighted the need for digitisation of services and internal processes, delivered by 21st Century technological solutions. That’s why today, most nonprofits are in the midst of a major CRM project. Though most already know that new technology cannot solve their problems alone. To truly reap the benefits, they must also evolve people and processes.
But it’s not quite as simple as matching your new technology with a new process, training the relevant team member in that process and considering the job done. This is certainly one aspect of digital change, but for successful transformation, we need to take a broader approach.
How to assimilate this change?
Don’t silo digital
Digital tasks need to be trained and shared across departments and disciplines rather than expecting the digital team to take on more and more. With automation, teams can offload repetitive tasks leaving time for growth opportunities such as optimisation, journey design and content creation.
De-hierarchise processes
Hierarchical structures and long winded decision-making processes stagnate progress and prevent growth. Recent developments in the tech industry show that multi-skilled, self-organising teams deliver results.
Change management
Such teams call for a new management style and leadership skillset. Consider how your top-level team can adapt to facilitate change. Consult with HR and Learning and Development to make sure they’re hiring, training and promoting to support the transition.
Only then, can we deliver truly efficient digital maturity and a resilient approach to change. Not to mention the high quality, personalised and responsive experience supporters and service users expect.
We can do this, but let’s do it properly
The move towards self-organising, multi-skilled, cross-organisational teams and empowered employees beautifully match the values and drivers of nonprofits. And we have made these kinds of changes before:
In 2005, the Make Poverty History campaign used digital tools to help unprecedented numbers of people contact their local politician digitally. The charity and nonprofit sectors were streets ahead of what we now see as mainstream digital marketing, inspired by their beliefs and values around mass activism and lowering barriers to engagement.
The shift towards Agile project management was another change which nonprofits adopted early. Decades before banks discovered Agile, charities were buying into it because of the values match: flat non-hierarchical structures and empowered teams.
So we took up these challenges, even pioneered them, because they matched our values. But, often, we didn’t really go for it. We stopped too early, or as soon as it became complicated.
For example, Agile’s success has been hindered by complex decision-making hierarchies, a lack of investment in digital – in particular in digitally skilled roles – and an inability to see that audience centricity requires culture and mindset change.
Or, in another example, COVID-19 spotlighted remote working to enable organisations’ activities to continue uninterrupted. But, in most cases this is where the changes stopped. The opportunity was missed to shake up the skillset, culture, ways of working and planning to support this change towards digitised operations and audience centricity.
So, let’s do it properly this time!
Breaking it down
Far from being straightforward, digital change is – and should be – all encompassing. The challenge is overcoming the initial fear and overwhelm to get the job done.
Luckily, we can look to the tech sector to inspire us here too. Instead of delivering monumental change at once, better to drive small, incremental change, targeting one project or team at a time, learning and improving as we go. But while the focus area is small, look broadly at team skills, people management, team collaboration, culture and behaviours, how disagreements and feedback are handled. Allow for mistakes, learn from experience and continue to iterate and improve. Which I know we can do because we’ve done it many times before.
If you need a hand assessing your digital maturity or preparing your teams for this latest change, get in touch.
