Having trustees with digital skills
How charities tackle the current skills gap that digitalisation has brought will be key to their future success and also to the survival of many charities. Finding more employees, volunteers and trustees who are both IT literate and digitally competent, and embracing digitalisation across all charity operations will therefore play a key role in this success and survival.
Looking firstly at the bigger picture beyond just the skills gap which many charities face, the Charity Digital Skills Report 2019, published by the Workforce Development Trust, highlights where charities currently are with their overall digital strategy and includes the findings that:
- 52% of the charities surveyed don’t have a digital strategy.
- 35% of charities are using digital but don’t have a strategic approach.
- 14% of charities are thinking about developing a digital strategy, whilst 3% are struggling to access basic digital tools.
However, the actual use of digital compared to the future ambitions of charities and their digital priorities for the next 12 months is very different and this is the key to understanding where the skills gap is.
- 67% want to use it to increase their impact and 59% want to use data more effectively.
- 48% want to use digital to improve service delivery.
- 42% would like to deploy digital to increase income.
- 41% want to create a strategy.
Board and leadership team
Importantly charities want to improve digital skills, with 41% prioritising development of their colleagues’ skills and 23% keen to support their board and leadership team in developing theirs.
Would appointing trustees with greater digital skills as well as other core skills therefore be the key to helping these charities achieve their objectives? The answer is certainly yes it will help, but there is much work to be done to make your charity more attractive to this type of trustee and that means focusing on the basics first.
Existing trustees need to consider whether “going digital” would help their charities to operate more efficiently by:
- Improving the services provided to their beneficiaries.
- Increasing income and using existing resources in a better way.
- Better use of data.
- Growing your network of contacts.
- Having a greater influence with policy makers and the media.
- Helping to recruit and coordinate staff and volunteers.
There is the obvious importance of ensuring accounts are accurate in respect of disclosure and charities should use the Trustees’ Report to explain and “sell” their activities, but it could also be a useful tool in helping to meet the digital skills gap.
This isn’t just an opportunity to be compliant with your financial obligations because you can use it as a showcase for your future goals and ambitions (including your digital goals and ambitions) and within that the sort of individuals you want to work with – employees, volunteers and trustees as well as attracting new funders.
A report published on 3 September 2018 by the Charity Commission states that “64% of small charities provided sets of accounts of acceptable quality”. The review was undertaken to look at both the accounts and the Trustees’ Reports. However, 36% of small charities accounts were not acceptable.
Fantastic opportunity
The Trustees’ Report is therefore a fantastic opportunity for a charity to showcase what it does and how it benefits the public, and also to show it is committed to making the most of digital technology.
This will raise awareness of the charity and give comfort to the stakeholders of the charity that the funds are being well managed. The Trustees’ Report should also help the charity to be completely transparent as to how it has met its charitable objects.
The Trustees’ Report should give the reader a good understanding of what the charity does to benefit the public. Make it interesting and inviting. Include pictures and graphs but don’t make it too long. Stories of how the charity has helped its beneficiaries are perfect, as they meet both the public benefit and charity objectives reporting requirements. You can also show how digital has contributed to your charity’s achievements.
Indeed, the commitment to a digital strategy and descriptions of its implementation should increasingly feature in your Trustees’ Report over time. A perception of their being no role for digital in your charity will lead not only to eyebrows being raised but eventually hard questions. We live in a digital age where the appropriate application of digital to the running of organisations is expected, albeit no one is suggesting its use for the sake of it, which unfortunately can be the case.
There are other ways to reach a wider pool of trustees with different skills including identifying organisations and possibly individuals that you would like to work with and seeing if they can initially offer informal peer to peer support or mentoring, perhaps on a particular project or ad hoc advice on a specific issue or challenge. This helps you to get to know them before making the leap to asking them to be a new trustee and it may help to clarify exactly what it is you need for your charity.
Particular digital experience
This is particularly important when you are looking for a trustee with digital skills as the areas of activity or processes you may wish to digitalise may require particular experience or skills. It may also depend on whether you are in the planning or implementation stage of a digitalisation project.
There is a significant amount of advice available from organisations such as Reach Volunteering where you can directly engage with people who are interested in becoming a trustee as well as posting an advert for you own requirements.
Understanding exactly what digital issues need to be tackled and in what order is essential for a charity and a top down, leadership approach to this is important. It also helps to tackle issues around confidence within the charity as it sends a clear message to all.
Having a clear digital strategy is also increasingly important in dealing with other organisational issues such as around staff recruitment and retention, so it needs to be visible to all as it will impact on all areas of a charity’s operations. It would be remiss not to mention the importance of the Charity Digital Code of Practice at this point and that it should be used to assess a charity’s own existing policies and procedures and to highlight where improvements can be made.
Having a clear digital vision and developing a digital strategy to enable you to achieve it do require the senior team to be experienced, but it also goes beyond that and the team needs to also be prepared to make changes where they are required and to ensure staff and volunteers are on board for this journey.
As well as recruiting new trustees with digital experience it will be necessary to review and potentially provide training for existing trustees, to ensure they also have a good level of knowledge and understanding. You also want to ensure that you keep good trustees on board as they will have many other qualities which are needed to ensure the broad success of the charity.
Going digital in practice
As we touched on earlier in this article, one of the key benefits of embracing digitalisation should be to make improvements to the charity’s service delivery. This really is possible. Let us look at the example of how local charity Age UK Medway, which has grown rapidly in the past six years, is delivering an increased number of services to older people in the Medway towns.
Here JOHN NORLEY, chief executive of AGE UK MEDWAY, explains how embracing digitalisation has not just helped achieve the charity’s original cost saving objectives, but also how it has improved the charity’s service quality:
Growth in service provision is dependent on a couple of key things, the demand for the service, and the ability to offer that service at an attractive/affordable price point. Our charity delivers contracts for the local authority, as well as paid for services amongst our portfolio of services and this means we need to continually seek out efficiencies in the operation, in order to maintain costs at a rate that is sustainable.
We first looked at digitalisation to help us find greater financial efficiencies. Holding down the costs to deliver services was the main aim, but the transformation of our business post the introduction of new systems has been far more profound. For instance, once we embraced new digital processes and began to eliminate clunky paper-based systems, we discovered that the quality of the services we provide, in the most part relating to care, was dramatically improved.
It was obvious really, and I suppose it was slightly anecdotal at the planning stages, but the actual time saved in important processes following implementation meant that carers based in the community got to spend more, and higher quality time with the people we care for.
Saving time by eliminating time sheets for example, cutting out cumbersome scheduling and introducing a digital time management system mean that each call can be delivered to its full potential, so that carers, once in the home, could relax into the call and take that little bit of extra time to provide the social contact that many of our customers crave.
So rather than rushing in, quickly preparing a meal, or quickly bathing a customer and dashing off to the next call, our carers can arrive on time, not rushed from the previous call, take time to say hello, chat about whatever they feel is relevant to the customer and take time to create a quality caring environment for the duration of the call.
The feedback we have had from carers really supports the notion that quality takes time and compassion to deliver in a care setting, and embracing digitalisation has given our carers exactly that. Our charity has been truly transformed. For us, going digital has been the way forward.
