A digital strategy is an often talked about and rarely well executed item on many people’s lists.

Don’t worry, writing your digital strategy doesn’t need to be an epic task, we don’t need to use an entire tree to print it on.  These kinds of things are meant to be accessible and referenced, writing war and peace will not encourage your team to engage with your strategic thoughts.

I do lots of work with people who need a digital strategy and so my approach in this area is constantly evolving, so I’m going to commit to keeping this article up to date as I learn my and my approach as a consultant changes.

Depending on your specific line of work in the digital space a “digital strategy” may mean different things to different people, for example to the digital marketer, a digital marketing strategy will focus largely on marketing channels, whereas a digital product manager is likely to be more concerned with product development and meeting customer requirements as both customers and the business evolve.

Ideally a “digital strategy” will cover both product and marketing aspects of the business/organisation as both areas are intrinsically linked.

Whether you’ve been tasked with the often unwanted task of “writing the digital strategy” or whether you’re keen to pull together the strategy before bringing the rest of the team on board lets start with  the basics.

What’s a strategy? Sorry if this is teaching you to suck eggs but often people ask for a strategy when what they want is a plan to deliver on the organisation’s existing strategy. The best explanation I ever heard what a strategy is was from when I used to work at Marks & Spencer Money (sorry the person’s name escapes me but they were some senior strategy bod), it has stuck with me as one of the clearest articulations of how to differentiate a strategy from the often confused with tactical plan:

When asked, ‘give me an example of a strategy that you might use to get from London to Edinburgh’, people will often respond with ‘oh, I wouldn’t drive, it takes too long’ or ‘you could get the train’ or ‘ride your bike, it’ll take you a while but there are some nice fields en route for you to look at’.  I say to these people no. An example of a strategy that you might use to get from London to Edinburgh would be ‘to take the cheapest route’ or ‘to take the fastest route’.

– Famous words from a strategy person at M&S

Ok with the definition cleared up, what’s the best way to get started writing your digital strategy?

Firstly, make sure  you consider any existing strategies that might have an impact on your plans – the business strategy, the marketing strategy and so on. Make sure you understand any references to digital. There’s a strong argument that there soon won’t be a need for a seperate digital strategy since digital will become (if it isn’t already) the focal point for most areas of your business or organisation. In fact, I strongly believe that in the not too distant future digital teams won’t necessarily be viewed as “digital specialists” – they will just be part of your team. Of course, there’ll always be the need for those people with deep vertical expertise in specific digital niches, the chances are they probably won’t be that unique anymore.

Consider why you need a digital strategy

With the above in mind there are still lots of reason why it might be valuable for you to create a digital strategy. Here are some of the reasons we often come across:

1. Stakeholder focus – a digital strategy can increase the focus of all stakeholders on what needs to be delivered from digital channels in order to deliver on wider organisational goals.
2. Budget commitment – without a clear digital strategy, it might be difficult to secure the required budget to deliver on objectives. This is especially the case if your board has sign-off of budgets or if you’re funded by a central department or section of your organisation.
3. Team clarity – within the digital team and people who are immediately involved in what you’re delivering (across communications, marketing and finance) a clear, well-articulated strategy will give people clarity of purpose and keep the team on track.
4. Accountability – having a clear strategic roadmap ensures that the people responsible for its delivery are accountable for how they spend their time and focus, this isn’t to say that a strategy is there to lock people into a specific outcome or way of working, rather it provides the framework through which work should be conducted. If something isn’t directly contributing to your strategic goals then the question should always be asked “why are we doing it”, perhaps the strategy needs to be adjusted or more likely, perhaps the item you’re focused on is “lower priority” or even the wrong item altogether.
5. Stay competitive –  it’s clear to see that people are shifting more and more of their time online.  Businesses who don’t adopt digital in some form are finding that they get left behind. Either because their customers expect them to be there or because new customers simply cannot find them.
6. Improve customer service and retention rates – This ties into point 5 above in that more and more customers are expecting 24/7, always-on service.  Digital is one of the tools that will help you improve levels of service and result in better customer retention rates.

The point I’m getting at is to make sure you have a clear understanding of why you’re spending time formulating a strategy, where it adds value and whether it’s a true articulation of where you intend to go.

Often an outside stakeholder in the firm provokes the need for strategy. The firm’s bankers, corporate HQ, or stock market analysts demand some explicit articulation of the firm’s intentions. A common response to these stakeholders can be to provide a strategic plan of some description, which may include a vision or mission statement, a “statement of strategic intent”, a list of “shared values” and strategic objectives, which may be “stretching” or, indeed, “big hairy audacious goals”. But this document is an artefact, no more. Can we expect that the intentions set out in the document will be translated into action, or “implemented”? Often, the very people that drew up the plan recognise themselves that the plan plays more of a political role; it may not be a “real” statement of their intentions.

– Taken from Bowman, C. (2003) ‘Formulating Strategy’, in D. O. Faulkner and A. Campbell (eds.) ‘The Oxford Handbook of Strategy – Volume 1: A Strategy Overview and Competitive Strategy ’, Oxford University Press.

Get a strategy for your strategy

Ok, so you’ve decided why you need a digital strategy, now it’s time to think about how you’re going to pull one together and what it’s going to look like.

From years of devising and working with digital teams one key realisation is that the last thing you want is for your digital strategy to look a bit like this:

Yes, that’s right, you’re writing a digital strategy, at least put it in a Word document or even better a Google Doc so people can read and share it. The real point here though is that you don’t want your digital strategy to become a dusty old book that nobody ever picks up, let alone takes the time to read. Keep it short and sweet and digital – ok, if you’ve got a luddite in the office that you need to get on board then printing a copy or two might not be such a bad thing either.

Template for Your Digital Strategy

So you’re diving in and getting started. Like anything in life it’s always a bit easier if you reference a framework or at least have an idea of what headings you want to include in your strategy. Three key areas all strategy documents should cover off are:

1. Where are we now?
2. Where are we going?
3. How will we get there?

Where are we now

A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis is always a good exercise to help you discover where you are now. Remember that strengths and weaknesses are things that your organisation has whilst opportunities and threats refer to the external marketplace.

You should also summarise your current business mission statement (if you have one) along with where you’re up to with key areas of the business including:

1. Product – has the product gained traction (particularly if you’re launching a new product), if it hasn’t then your strategy may have to change lots whilst you find product/market fit.
2. People – are your people happy, what skills do you believe you might be short of now.
3. Customers – (what, you didn’t think we were just going to list out the 4 P’s of marketing did you) – customers is obviously a really important area.
4. Financial – has your business being over/underperforming in terms of expectations, what does the contribution from digital vs other channels look like (it can be good to put digital’s contribution in % terms, e.g. 30% of our customers are acquired through digital channels with digital accounting for 60% of revenue).

Where are we going

This is where you need to look to the future. Asking yourself questions like:

1. Do we have a sustainable competitive advantage? If so what is it? Will it remain over time or is there a threat to this competitive advantage (competition, change in customer needs, etc.)
   

   Running around with your pants on fire is not a good look, unless you’re a performing artist.

2. What do I our customers love about us now? Will they continue to be customers because of this reason in the future?
3. Why have customers left us recently? Is this something that we could have prevented or were we simply not the right fit for where the organisation was going? (winning customers for the sake of it isn’t necessarily good for strategic focus if all you’re doing is running around with your pants on fire trying to make everybody happy)
4. What is the future I want to create for my business/organisation and how does digital fit into it?

Looking into the future like this is often referred to as creating your vision. You might want to look to outside commentators to get some inspiration for creating your vision. One of the most extreme examples of a vision statement we’ve seen is that of Tesla Motors:

…to create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles.

It’s clear when you read this that Tesla arguably care more about changing the fuel we use to power our cars than they do about creating a hugely profitable business. Although it’s probably also fair to argue that profits are going to be needed in great abundance to feed into the vision of changing the way entire societies buy and fuel their vehicles.

How will we get there

This will usually account for the bulk of your digital strategy and will likely take you some time to research and prepare. Don’t let the process consume you, remember that business must go on whilst you’re working on this. Some key points to think about are:

1. Strategic objectives. Without objectives all your actions from here are pointless. It’s important to be clear about your objectives as they’ll provide a key basis for measuring the success of your strategy. Strategic objectives will usually be long-term in nature, so it’s not a case of saying you want to generate $x in profit from your latest marketing campaign or product development. These objectives will help you and your team to draw a clear relationship between your mission and your vision. There are four key areas to think about when formulating your objectives: financial, customer, operational, and people.
   Using these objectives you should have a clear basis from which to work form to make sure you’re on track to achieve your mission.
2. Strategy. By matching your organisations strengths with customer needs and market conditions you can identify a path to achieve your objectives.
3. Short-term goals.   This is where you can convert your longer-term strategic objectives to more bite-sized easier to digest goals with really clear, measurable outputs (remember SMART objectives). A solid set of goals will clearly state what you want to achieve, when you want to accomplish it by, how you’re going to do it, it’ll also talk about which person in the team will be responsible. It’s good to make sure there’s a specific individual “goal owner” even if a team of people are ultimately responsible for delivering on the goal.  It will then be possible to start thinking about actions required to reach these goals.
4. Scorecard. This is a common approach used by businesses across the world. By picking some key performance indicators you can plug them into your scorecard and regularly revisit actual performance against what was planned. This will give you and your team a clear understand of whether you’re ahead or behind and enable you to take early action to keep things on track.
5. Execution. When executing your strategic plan make sure your team are as focused on the plan as you are. A lack of commitment and/or understanding of the plan will ultimately lead to failure so it’s important to constantly evaluate things as the plan is executed.

By constantly referencing your organisational and digital strategy you can keep your teams on track and ensure that you’re all delivering the maximum possible value in the right areas of your organisation.

Delivering your digital strategy

The size of your team will play a large part in how you deliver your strategy.  The crucial area with any kind of strategic direction is to ensure that your employees and partners are “on board”. Early in this article I spoke about the fact that a huge document is probably not going to be the best way to articulate your strategy – senior people won’t have time to read it and those that do have time will likely read it once and then never reference it again.

Try to make your strategy a living, breathing point of reference.

It doesn’t need to be a document.

It could be articulated through a PowerPoint presentation, Word document or even a Trello board. I would strongly recommend keeping a written record, just remember to make it engaging.

The best way to socialise a strategy is to involve your people in compiling it, capture their thoughts and then go away and figure out how which bits of input are valuable and which bits you need to disregard for now.

Ready to write?

Digital Ninjas are experts at helping organisations evaluate and deploy digital strategy and would be happy to talk to you about your requirements. Our rigorous digital strategy workshops help you and your team to clarify organisational objectives and break these down into areas of key strategic focus.

Don’t worry we won’t leave you high and dry with a really high level, non-actionable strategy, we can also help you through defining the tactical actions that you, your team and your suppliers need to work towards.

Digital Strategy Template

If you’re looking for a digital marketing strategy template then we’ve got several documents that could help. Some key tools we use as part of our process:

• Digital Strategy Master Template – this document acts as a central source of all information relating to your organisation’s digital presence
• Digital Planning Framework – this document is a framework to help you translate your strategic goals into actionable steps that you and your team can complete on a month-to-month basis
• Digital Monitoring, Measuring and Reporting Documentation – these documents will help ease the burden of keeping track of and reporting on your digital activity across all channels. Whether you’re using Google Analytics or some other tool.

To get hold of these templates simply get in touch using the template emergency button above and we’ll get them mailed out to you today.

Over the last seven years I’ve been really lucky to work with some amazing organisations that do incredible work across the world. My work in digital fundraising has been interesting, exciting and sometimes frustrating, more on that later!

I feel privileged to work with lots of different types of organisations. Whether they’re focused on helping children get off to the best possible start in life. Or working to protect animals across the world. There’s a certain satisfaction working with not-for-profits that you just can’t get working for a corporate.

I’m proud to be involved in digital fundraising and look forward to continuing to be involved in one way or another for many years to come.

Whilst much of my work is focused on digital fundraising, I’m also involved in lots of other exciting projects from advocacy campaigns to helping organisations reach the very people that they’re looking to assist.

Where Did My Digital Fundraising Journey Begin?

My journey into the land of fundraising started in 2010 when I took my first digital fundraising job for UNICEF Australia.

Before this I’d was working for a range of businesses, both large and small.  In these roles I was involved in digital marketing to help these businesses sell everything from fridges, to CDs (remember them) and credit cards.  My role at UNICEF saw me charged with helping one of the world’s best known organisations raise money to help protect the rights of children across the world.

One thing’s for sure, working with organisations in the not-for-profit sector is super motivating. How many other digital jobs let you feel like you’re making some kind of positive impact on people’s lives, no matter how small a part of a big machine you might be?

I’ve seen digital fundraising flourish at a number of organisations and seen others who have got off to a really rocky start, sometimes achieving little to nothing. The aim of this article is to try and share some of the factors that have been critical to the success of digital fundraising in organisations that I’ve worked with.

CDs, a blast from the past, nothing to do with digital fundraising but I learnt some neat digital tricks whilst marketing them

Digital Fundraising People

The frustrating thing with lots of organisations (both not-for-profits and corporates) when they go out to market to find people to work in digital they often only look at people who’ve already worked in their industry.

At UNICEF, I was lucky, the senior leader was ready to take on people who had the general digital skill set in place who didn’t necessarily already have solid experience in digital fundraising.  This meant that the skills that I had learned to market CDs and video games online could be tweaked and reapplied to life in a not-for-profit.

This is key.

You don’t need people who have lots of experience in fundraising.

You need people who have lots of experience in digital and who have the ability to learn fundraising quickly.

This means that you need people in your organisation, or at least who are close to your organisation, who can get the new digital recruit up to speed on fundraising best practice but you really don’t need to limit your search to only those people who have worked for charities before.

You’ll need somebody who has the knowledge and character to be able to build robust business cases and convince senior people within your organisation that success in the digital world needs investment in digital channels.

When I talk about investment in digital, I don’t mean simply build a new website, the investment you’ll need to make in order to see success comes in many forms.

If you’ve recruited a digital expert then you’ve already taken the first step to investing in digital. If you haven’t then you should start considering whether you need to hire internally or whether you can start with support from external partners before building an internal team.  Remember that managing external consultants and agencies still takes time and if you’ve got internal expertise to lean on you can drive your external partners to deliver better results!

Investing In Digital

Getting the right person is often viewed as the first step to digital success.

This isn’t technically correct.

The first step is that senior leadership, must understand the scale and nature of the digital opportunity. You need to sell it to your board and the other senior directors within your organisation.

Often organisations will fail because digital is treated in one of the ways below:

1. Do it on the cheap from a people perspective – “oh those young folk know all about Facebook, we’ll just get somebody who is used to playing with it all day and they’ll be able to get us going”. Wrong. Digital fundraising requires the same skillset as any digital marketing job. You need people who “get” digital, to start with you’ll need somebody who has a keen eye for numbers and understand web analytics, this person will be able to help you identify the opportunities and prove that any investment you do make is measured (see point 2 below).
2. Do it on the cheap when it comes to media investment – “digital is such a cheap channel to acquire new supporters, we only really need $1-2k this year and we’ll be able to save the world”. Wrong. You’ll need to invest much more than this to get any kind of decent result from digital.  You might need to start with a new website, or at least some revamped landing pages, then you’ll need to get people to the site/landing page and start testing/measuring results.  $1-2k of media might get you some initial results but it probably won’t be enough to pay for a new agency or contractor to help your digital person manage the activity.
3. Not understanding the lifetime value of people who are acquired through digital – when compared to other fundraising channels many people often expect digital to be the “cheap solution”, it’s usually not.  Whilst digital might not be the channel with the lowest cost per acquisition for your organisation it will often provide a better long-term return on investment because digitally acquired supporters will usually stay with your organisation for longer and quite often donate more than those that have been acquired through other channels.

To summarise the need for investment comes in three forms:

1. People – digital fundraising takes time so you’re going to incur some kind of people cost even if you don’t hire a new person to handle everything.
2. Infrastructure – you’ll likely need to get changes made to your website (you’ve got a website, right?) and even if you’re happy with your website if you’re just getting started you’ll need to allow for time to implement analytics solutions to help you measure results.
3. Media and external management – to get people to your website you’ll need to invest in media.  Even if your strategy is largely earned media focused (PR, social sharing etc.) you’ll still likely need to pay an agency or freelancer to help you along the way.

Digital Fundraising Priorities

When you’ve got your digital team in place, it’s important to make sure that their work is structured and prioritised accordingly.

I’ve broken this down into 3 key areas for simplicity.

1. The Basics
2. Growth Kick-Starters
3. Scaling & Testing

Digital Fundraising Basics

Before you invest. Make sure you’ve got these digital fundraising basics in place:

• You can measure results – as a minimum you should have Google Analytics in place with some goal tracking to measure the number of donations you receive.  These goals should be broken down into monthly vs one-off donations (because the value of each of  these is usually very different).  Ideally you would have eCommerce tracking in place and have deployed Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager so you can measure lots of other micro-conversions and really get into the detail on how your supporters are using your website.
• Your users can easily navigate your site – with more people than ever before using mobile phones to access the internet it’s crucial that you test how your site behaves on mobile devices – can people easily scroll and view content? Can they view the site without having to pinch and rotate the screen? Are call to action buttons (and text links) easy to press with a fat finger?
• Your content is compelling – if you’re going to be asking people to donate to your cause, then you really need to make sure that your content is amazing.  On a basic level you need to tell people why you need their money and what you’re going to do with it, in an ideal scenario you’re going to tell them a story in a really easy to read and digest format that compels them to give to your cause.

Only when these basics are in place are you ready to start on step 2. Investing for growth through digital channels.

Growing Fundraising Through Digital

To start seeing some results from digital, I’d recommend starting with some of the items below.

• Use paid search – no matter what your cause, there are bound to be people out there looking for information on it. You need to make sure these people know you exist. Thankfully Google offer their Google Grant programme (apply here), which offers $10k of free AdWords ads per month, it does come with some restrictions, which can make it tricky to raise funds directly from it but you should definitely be using the Google Grant.
• Pay for paid search – you can’t rely on the Google Grant alone to help you generate funds. You’ll find that other organisations might be bidding on some of the most profitable keywords on Google and so often running a separate paid account is the only way to reach people using these keywords. Plus smaller players like Bing don’t offer an equivalent to the Google Grant but may still have people who you really want to reach using their service.
• Social media – using social well can be really powerful. Unfortunately it’s no longer enough to just post something on Facebook and expect it to get shared widely, even if you’ve got a lot of page likes.  Because social channels are so crowded, you’ll need to invest in boosting your posts or a dedicated ads campaign to really start seeing some results.
• Collect data – using things like Facebook lead ads, or incentivised lead generation pages on your website can be a great way to collect the contact details of those people who are interested in hearing more about your work. You can then take these people on an amazing ride through automated email and potentially even text messaging to encourage them to learn more about your cause and the people that you’re helping before encouraging them to become financial supporters.

So far in this article I’ve been quite acquisition focused, purely because it’s often a good way to start justifying initial investment in digital channels. i.e. invest $XX and get $XXX back.

However, don’t take your eye off the retention ball. I know I’m not offering anything groundbreaking when I say it’s often easier (and more cost effective) to ask existing supporters to donate more than it is to try and find new ones.  Customer and supporter acquisition is expensive, no matter what industry sector you work in!

I’m not going to go into lots of detail on retention campaigns as many organisations are doing the basics already.

Suffice to say that digital communications can be a super effective channel for keeping your supporters coming back for more. Try some of the following techniques to give your retention programme a boost (each of which can also be used as part of your acquisition campaigns):

• Email – it’s an oldie, but email is still super powerful! Be mindful that open rates and click through rates will start to dwindle if you’re using stale or old lists. Through carefully planned messaging and execution it’s possible to keep your email lists delivering solid results over time.
• Remarketing – there’s no need to only use this when you’re acquiring new supporters.  Make sure you’ve got a clearly defined remarketing strategy to keep your existing supporters interested and your cause at the front of their minds.

Scaling & Testing

Testing should really be embedded in your approach from day one. Whether you’re A/B testing creative or running full blown landing page tests (not as hard as I’m making it sound).

Key points when it comes to testing:

• Always test – whenever you’re running activity make sure you’ve got some kind of test in place.
• Don’t overdo it – it is possible to have too many test variations. Too many variations can limit your likelihood of finding a statistically significant test winner.
• Structure your tests – make sure you’ve got a clear testing priority matrix.  If you need help with this get in contact with us and we can provide you with a template to work with.

When you find an activity or a test that works, make sure you’re ready to scale. By scale we mean, make it bigger, this usually involves upping your investment.

You’ll need to do this quickly, the digital landscape changes quickly. Depending on the type of cause you’re fundraising for you risk missing opportunities if you’re not ready to pull the trigger when it comes to upping your investment in digital.