Thank you so much to all who came to our Charities and Digital meetup last night - Alex Wells, Neil Fairbrother, Isla Pullinger, Makeda Durant, Ben Araya Larrain, Elena Plaiter, Michelle Okwudiafor, Rares Hasmasan, Ros Czarnowska, Russell Benson, Clare Lucas & Yvonne Jeffery - it was lovely to see and meet you all! 😀

Also a big thank you to Ellie Budd from William Joseph for helping to facilitate a really brilliant discussion. It was SO interesting to learn about all of your digital experiences; the good and the bad!

It would be great to continue the conversation here on CharityConnect so that the wider community can get involved too. So, I've shared some of the key points we discussed last night. If you have any questions or points to add, please get involved below!

-  Digital transformation at small and big charities can look really different. At small charities, Alex Wells from Small Charities Coalition spoke about how digital transformation can mean moving from paperwork at kitchen tables, to shared online workplaces, or simply compiling data and surveys with the help of a useful tool like Survey Monkey.

- For Yvonne Jeffery, digital transformation means investing in the future!

- Elena Plaiter noted the difference between digital transformation within service delivery and within internal communications.  

- Michelle Okwudiafor spoke about her challenges with social media, and how gathering content from less developed countries or people in busy roles, like law, can be tough. User-generated content can also come from groups you wouldn't expect!

This question was an interesting one as we were a really mixed group of people from large national charities and tiny ones with less than 10 staff. Here is some of what we discussed:

- For Isla Pullinger at AfriKids and Yvonne Jeffery at MacMillan Cancer Support, digital is at two completely different extremes!

- Neil Fairbrother discussed how we should all be 'doing digital' like we are doing reading and writing. Neil shared how he believes digital is the face of the charity; it is not a tick box exercise, and if you do digital in a tick box way, it will be a lot less authentic. ''Authenticity trumps everything!''

- Clare Lucas gave the wonderful comparison of digital transformation at her charity as the butterfly life cycle; she thought they were breaking out from the ugly caterpillar stage and she hoped a beautiful butterfly would emerge, not a weird creepy moth! 🦋

As you can imagine, this question really got us all talking. Here are some of the key barriers, all of which came up numerous times in the group:

- Money

- Trustees

- Getting buy-in

- Capacity: if you don't have the capacity, do you have the funding to get it externally?

- Demographics

- Structure

- Skills and funding

- Time

- Social media backlash - how do you get the right balance of educating your audience and sharing your message?

- Salesforce! Particularly, Salesforce with no handover from the previous staff 😨

- High turnover rates in charities can mean continuity of information is a real struggle and that we must, therefore, implement digital systems to be sustainable!

- At bigger charities, there are so many priorities, which means it can take a while to get things done

- Using tools like Hotjar to watch how your audiences use your website

- Russell Benson shared how he views an event sign-up process successful if it's easy and quick enough to do within the time it takes to drink a pint! 🍺(we love this analogy!)

- Alex Wells explained when it comes to measuring, it's baby steps. Start by measuring one thing. Ellie added how for product managers, they often refer to the 'one key metric', and this can be a great place to start.

- Neil Fairbrother said that we shouldn't focus too much on the numbers, we need to remember that qualitative feedback is very important too!

 

As you can tell, we had so much to talk about around all aspects of charities and digital last night. If you weren't at the meetup, we'd love to hear your answers to the four questions above too, so please get involved and share them below!

P.S. Keep your eyes peeled for our next meetup 👀

Thanks again,

Robin Freya 💜