A digital strategy unlocks new growth for a leading not for profit

The customer need

While our client already has demonstrated capability in the digital space (skilled people, a social media presence and use of metrics for digital channel performance), they felt their strategic settings for digital weren’t strong.  The senior management understood the need to be more flexible in how they built and maintained relationships with their supporter base.  This was especially relevant given that NGO also wanted to “pivot” their focus from traditional sponsorship products to more contemporary ones which are proving to be more relevant to younger, digitally aware sponsors.  How the organisation leveraged digital to achieve this would be the key to their future success.    

Our approach

Our client initially requested a review of its IT strategy, with a focus on how it supported the organisation’s business strategy.  As a result of the successful delivery of this assignment, they requested an additional deliverable: the development of a digital strategy, including benefits, costs, implementation considerations as well as organisational structure options. 

In the first stage of the review, DFP demonstrated that our client’s ICT strategy and capabilities were “fit for purpose”.  We made a number of recommendations concerning digital strategy, as follows: 

• They develop a “goal orientated whole of organisation” digital strategy, which directly supported the NGO’s business aims,
• They bolster their analytics capability to measure and guide progress on the organisation’s digital and non-digital business goals and  
• They prepare an organisational model change informed by the digital strategy, covering capabilities, roles and responsibilities, structure / reporting lines, collaboration processes as well as short term and strategic KPIs.

In our second stage of the review, we developed an organisation-wide digital strategy that supported our client’s strategic business goals.  The strategy was enabled by 5 key objectives designed to deliver both short term and strategic success.  We also designed an implementation strategy that documented the high-level initiatives, priorities, timeframes, investment and benefits, as well as organisational structure options. 

The outcome 

Our client achieved the following key outcomes:

• A clear strategic focus of where digital will add demonstrable value to the organisation,
• Clarity on the key initiatives needed to achieve that value (with associated time, effort and cost requirements),
• More targeted use of its current digital analytics and the areas needed to build out “fit for purpose” capability, and
• Ways to leverage their investment in Customer Relationship Management and Content Management infrastructure plus ways to be “driven by data”, making data analysis core to business.