Does your organisation have a written digital strategy?
According to a 2020 Digital Outlook Report, 34.63% of nonprofits have succeeded in developing a written digital strategy. However, more than half of the respondents (52.38%) still need support. The findings of this 2020 report are the result of a survey sent out on behalf of the three survey-partner organizations – hjc, Care2, and NTEN.
What is worth noting is that nonprofits are clueless when it comes to digital strategy and has hardly improved in the last few years.
So the obvious question - What is stopping nonprofits to give importance to digital strategy?
More than 60% have highlighted ‘Budget Constraints’ as the biggest challenge in 2020, followed by ‘Technology Shortcomings’ (43%), ‘Lack of Implementation Skills’ (31%), and ‘Lack of training on new digital strategies and signals’ (32%). (Please open the image in another tab for better viewing.)
The challenges of 2020 are more or less consistent from 2015. Budget and lack of training on new digital strategies have been common challenges for nonprofit.
The report states:
In every year of our report, more than 60% of organizations consistently consider that they are underfunded. This tendency may influence the increase in technology shortcomings, 42.86% in 2020 compared to 34.71% in 2017 — especially as we see the rise of more and more digital solutions for marketing automation, analytics, personalization, AI, and more.
Interestingly ‘Staff Shortage’ has been a challenge for nonprofits from 2015 but it completely vanished in the last two years. That should be good news?
It is kind of.
Does your organization have any staff dedicated solely to online/digital strategy?
During the last five years of the Digital Outlook Report, there’s been a steady growth in staff dedicated solely to online/digital strategy. The number of organizations that have a digital strategy team has increased from 43% in 2015 to 54% in 2020.
However, if you see in the last four years nonprofits have not shown interest in having a dedicated staff. So the majority of them are clueless about having a written digital strategy for their organization. Now some of them are relying on interns or volunteers to get their digital strategy in place.
Whether it is a good or bad strategy I will leave for the organization to decide.
The report states:
“If there is no digital strategy, then there is no activity with a clear purpose, there may not be enough dedicated staff, and there may not be clear goals and measurement for success.
Without a digital strategy, the role and place of digital can be overstated or understated.”
Now would you leave your digital strategy to interns?
(Okay it is not a hard sell, just because I am a digital strategy consultant for nonprofits ;))
In my experience, the majority of brands or nonprofits don’t give importance to digital strategy because digital has always looked as a medium of engagement. So it as always been about execution and not about strategy.
There is a difference between digital strategy vs execution.
With my fare bit of knowledge and experience, digital strategy is not defined by technology and tools. The majority of marketers including myself get orgasms by a new fancy gadget or tool. But digital strategy like your brand strategy is defined by keeping your business objectives in mind.
The nonprofit goal is simple - keep raising money and digital becomes one more channel like others.
For a nonprofit that is looking to invest in online fundraising, the strategy bit starts from the very beginning i.e defining your online target audience. Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics and Audience Manager comes into play here.
This leads to the second very important step which is defining and creating identical Personas based on your target audience.
In 2020, 31.65% of organizations have developed personas, a healthy increase from 18.47% in 2015. Persona development has helped organizations become more supporter centric using personas to more accurately and precisely market in the digital world, increasing response rates, and ROIs.
Personas force organizations to become supporter or constituent-centric — to stand in the shoes of the individual who interacts with them — whether it’s visiting a website, receiving an automated welcome series, or making a donation on a website.
Your personas play a huge role in defining your communications and targeting. So your digital strategy is incomplete if you don’t have your personas (male+female) for all age groups. The blue bar in the above image is growing in a steady fashion which is encouraging. It shows the understanding of digital is evolving for nonprofits beyond social media updates and promotions.
The report also talks about the new vs old tactics that nonprofits are considering. I will cover in a later post.
Whether you build a digital strategy or not is an organisation or decision-makers call. But make sure you define your objectives before you execute your campaigns. Otherwise, you will be breaking your head, blaming internal teams, and finally wondering why digital isn’t working.
Thankfully more and more nonprofits realise that fundraising and communications can’t be two different teams. But this can be debated by minds who believe that they are different departments who can operate cross-functionally. The size of your nonprofit also plays a huge role here.
Hmmm… humans and cross-functionally? Anyways as long as the organisation objectives are met.