Preparing the ground: what to do before you start a digital maturity initiative

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash.

If you’re considering embarking on a digital maturity initiative at your nonprofit, you’ll need a solid setup, involving the right people, robust processes and clear communications.

A successful digital maturity initiative is an organisation-wide activity. So it’s important to prepare the ground with your colleagues and provide clarity about the journey. If you jump straight in, you may run into difficulties later on.  

To get you and your organisation ready, here are four crucial things to do. You can also apply these to a digital strategy process, or to any change process. You’ll just need to tailor the setup to fit your organisation. 

1. Gather the right people and assign roles

When a client approaches me about working on a strategy or a transformation programme, I always ask who else from the organisation is involved.

If crucial stakeholders have not been brought in yet, I know that the project needs setting up from scratch. 

Every change process means bringing people with you on a journey from the very beginning. These need to be the people who will be most affected, most interested and most influential or knowledgable.

Initiative sponsor

This is your CEO, executive director or another member of the senior management team. Their input is vital. You’ll need to agree with them on how much of a say they want to have, what they want to be informed about, and what they want to sign off on.

How often you meet with your sponsor depends on their preferences, the size of your organisation and who else is involved. For example, one client held weekly meetings with the CEO. Another held monthly meetings due to the size of the organisation and the number of senior people involved in a steering committee (another structure you may want to put in place).

Working group

This should be a group of colleagues that is representative of your entire organisation. For most nonprofits I work with, this will cover IT, fundraising, campaigning, communications, digital, programmes or service delivery work, policy, research, supporter care and HR.

It’s essential to emphasise that this is a working group – members will attend regular meetings, deliver tasks and contribute to strategy and discussions. 

Choose people with the right capabilities who can make decisions and have the expertise to make a positive contribution. 

2. Tell people how it will work

Once you start setting up your digital maturity initiative and inviting stakeholders to get involved you’ll get asked a lot of questions, so you need to be prepared! 

The usual questions are: “Why are we doing this?”, “What’s my role in this group?” and “How will this affect my area of work, my team, and my plans?”

So, take a step back and create terms of reference which specify: 

• The story of your initiative and why it’s happening.

• What structures and groups exist within the initiative.

• The responsibilities of different people involved. 

• The process; how the people involved will work together.

• The outcomes that will be delivered.

• The top level timeline.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt in the past two years is that people have different ways of talking about and understanding digital maturity and digital transformation. Introduce definitions of these concepts to your colleagues and keep them accessible and visible.

3. Establish systems and processes

Once the structure of the initiative is in place, outline how the process is going to work. 

On a practical level, I’ve found that facilitated workshops work best. Get stuck in using a shared document or a Miro board, or, if you are meeting in real life, a flip chart and Post-it notes. If this is relevant to you, your consultancy intel or the results of your Digital Maturity Assessment can be used as prompts. Group the conclusions and recommendations and then discuss what is behind them. What is working well and what is holding the organisation back? Have an agenda, but allow enough flexibility so you can spend time on common themes that emerge in discussions.

I find this approach fruitful because it gives people agency. They own the problems and work together to find solutions. 

Usually, final decisions will be made by senior managers and this needs to be reiterated throughout the process. That’s why it’s important to keep everyone updated. When people can see how discussions developed and why they led to certain outcomes, there are fewer surprises for the stakeholders involved. 

And that’s the ideal to strive for.

4. Communicate about your project

When a digital maturity initiative is underway, things can get very buzzy and exciting. Colleagues that are not directly involved will notice this, but they won’t know what’s going on, which can lead to confusion and and fear. 

So it’s vital to communicate.

Make sure that information is accessible. This doesn’t mean giving people links to a folder with heaps of documents; it means summarising and structuring information so that someone who is outside the project can engage with it.

For example, one of my clients had a document called “The journey so far”, which was updated every week or so during their project with a paragraph on what had happened that week and what was coming up. It was a useful reference for all staff, who could always have a look in their own time and get the latest. 

Talking about next steps is an essential part of running a change project. Always think a few steps ahead and communicate as much as you can. Even if there isn’t yet a concrete plan in place, you can still tell people that there will be one and by when. 

I hope these tips are useful. If there’s something you’d add, let me know!