Making the case for maturity

Rachel Bhageerutty has spent the last year or so undertaking a successful digital maturity project at Brooke. I spoke to her about her experiences.

What was your starting point?

We had an undaunted drive towards digital engagement and we were learning from previous mistakes. The organisation had attempted a strategic initiative about digital transformation, involving broad brushstrokes and shallow understanding. And it had ground to a halt.

So our new digital maturity project started with goodwill, and agreement that digital was critical, but also with concerns about money, time and failure.

How did you get senior buy-in?

The real winner on the business case was scaling back and being more defined, focusing on the area where I wanted to make a difference. I took that to senior management using the narrative that here was a contained, measurable way. It was a proof of concept with lots of learning baked in.

Another winning strategy was focusing on user needs. I particularly concentrated on email engagement and looked at all of Brooke's audiences: supporters and also technical audiences in the animal health and international development sectors.

For example, there was a consistent myth that older people weren't engaging online. This was being used as a reason to maintain the status quo. But of course they are. I found lots of published data about that, which I flagged. That evidence was useful.

Brooke addresses just one element of the complexities for animals and people in developing countries. Using digital to get to our niche audiences spread around the world made sense. Digital represented value for money: scale, reach and targeting were important.

The project was also timely. GDPR had just come in and with it, concerns about systems and data. Brooke had very much used best practice on consented data, so subscriber numbers had gone down. That added to the impetus for senior people to say yes to the project.

What about others in the organisation?

One of the keys to getting people on board was to redefine the problem as an opportunity.

Brooke was about 25% into a CRM project. And the idea of having another project wasn't universally popular. So it was important to focus on something that would give a quicker fix without disrupting the CRM project.

I ran workshops with staff across the whole organisation. Championing staff engagement helped lift the project out of being a tech solution in everyone's minds and allowed people to talk about their users' needs.

We created a vision about what we wanted to achieve and what we wanted to achieve for supporters. That built ambition and enthusiasm. For both fundraising and comms the project became about a change that was effected by staff; a people-change programme. Technology was there but it was about tech that enabled them to do their jobs better, and with cheaper results.

People could see themselves and their business objectives coming to fruition through the project.

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

Through the lens of hindsight, we focused at the outset mostly on colleagues in comms and fundraising. I wish now that I'd brought in the IT team too. I probably didn't look enough at the broader ecosystem implications.

Another issue was that people started to throw other projects into the mix. It was great that everyone wanted in, but also important that the scope didn't spread too wide. To preclude scope-creep being a blocker I met with people, discussed their needs and gave them a rough timetable for when their non-core project would be done.

That process surfaced all the other digital projects that were bubbling away in the organisation, which was in itself useful. And Brooke’s senior leadership team were able to develop a longer-term view about bringing things together. From there we broke things into bite-sized pieces and continued to move iteratively.

Have staff stayed engaged throughout?

Mostly, we've managed to keep people on board and enthused, but there have inevitably been some overlaps and friction. And a lull while attention needed to be shifted elsewhere.

If I were starting again now, I'd allow another 30% for staff engagement, which takes time but is important. For example, when taking senior leadership through the process of email journeys, they cottoned onto the detail and got really stuck in. Which was great, but which meant it took longer than planned.

Who else has been useful?

My director has really owned and championed the project. The chief executive has also got involved, for example delivering staff updates. When you really need senior managers, it's good to be able to pull them out. You don't want to have to use them all the time but it's good for ambition and pep talks. Your top people are a top comms channel.

It also helped that we got a business analyst in. They were a bridge between fundraising and comms and IT. They translated the language so that everyone understood.

Have attitudes to digital changed?

We started with average levels of digital maturity. Attitudes, skills and understanding have improved but we still have some way to go. Some of it has been painful. But at the very least we've reduced the number of unknown unknowns!

The Digital Maturity Framework has been really helpful; it breaks it down. It adds achievable detail to an otherwise rather nebulous thing. The framework has really helped staff's understanding and motivation.

The framework is also helpful because it gives the organisation footholds. As we reach one point we can see where the next point is on the scale, and how it's achievable. That's incredibly helpful.

To start with we had so many diverse opinions about where we were. The Digital Maturity framework holds up a mirror and to have something consistent that you can measure yourself against is very useful. We weren't terrible, but we were pretty average. Using the framework we can continue to measure ourselves, both against others and our past.

Digital at Brooke needs to seep deeper into every aspect of our business. But now we have the language to talk about digital maturity in an informed and proactive way.