By Maureen Procopio

A sophisticated advancement services organization goes hand-in-hand with striving to be a digital maturing organization. Digital transformation can be such an overwhelming concept, but it’s really what your organization is ready to take on, and more importantly, where your leadership will actively plugin and support.

“Digital Maturity goes far beyond simply implementing new technology by aligning the company’s strategy, workforce, culture, technology, and structure to meet the digital expectations of customers, employees, and partners. Digital maturity is, therefore, a continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape.”

Similarly, as I tried to understand digital transformations in advancement, I learned that these also occurred in many spaces and on various spectrums.

• Large scale database conversions in tangent with organizational restructures are on one end of the digital transformation spectrum. For example, a wholesale assessment of an entire advancement services organization and its relationship with data and its database, as it simultaneously embarks on a CRM replacement.
• Incremental changes happening around the organization but not at a large scale are at the opposite end of the spectrum. Examples of these can be a gift services team moving toward a paperless implementation; a development analytics team providing business intelligence reporting for campaign assessment; the creation of cross-functional teams to create successful digital engagement outcomes.

Perhaps you recognize your organization in some of these examples?

Active leaders and other success characteristics

Any organizational transformation is more successful with leadership buy-in (or leaders who drive the transformation themselves) and their accompanying financial investments. With that, here are three resources that help underscore or jump start your own organization’s move toward digital transformation. All of these studies highlight the importance of leaders in any digitally maturing organization.

The Survey of Digital Media in Advancement, conducted by CASE and mStoner, Inc.

This research team talked with advancement leaders who set out to digitally transform their organizations. These are leaders who are “actively working to put in place people, practices, processes, and systems that would enable their offices [differently].” They found that a digital advancement operation:

• Attempts to reach people where they are
• Innovates in programming by using new approaches involving digital tools
• Relies on digital analytics in decision making
• Emphasizes digital communications internally and with stakeholders
• Operates from the perspective of a single institution rather than a siloed department
• Empowers staff to experiment, innovate, communicate

 

Achieving Digital Maturity, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Deloitte.Digital

Likewise, this study doesn’t assume that digital maturity is a destination; rather it’s a “continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape.” After surveying 3,500 leaders, vendors, and industry experts, they were able to narrow down the attributes of a digitally maturing organization. These are:

• Organizing teams cross-functionally;
• Looking out 5 or more years in strategic planning;
• Scale small digital experiments to enterprise-wide initiatives;
• Attract, retain and develop digital talent at all levels of the organization; and
• Secure the right leadership with the vision necessary to lead digital strategy

Unlocking Success in Digital Transformations, McKinsey & Company

This study “points to 21 best practices which make a digital transformation likely to succeed.” These characteristics fall into five categories:

1. Leadership (having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place),
2. capability building (building capabilities for the workforce of the future),
3. empowering workers,
4. upgrading tools (giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade), and
5. communication (frequently via traditional and digital methods).

With a dire warning that less than 30% of transformations succeed (yikes!), this framework will be important for change-makers at all levels of advancement to digest.

There are many questions for advancement organizations to consider regarding digital transformations. Not all organizations can enter this process in a large-scale process due to budget, timing, leadership buy-in, etc. But many teams can move the organization toward critical, incremental changes to become a digitally maturing organization.

 

Questions and ideas to consider

1. Determine where your leadership fits in. With whom should you start conversations?
2. What does a 5-year road map look like for your organization? Who’s involved?
3. Inventory your technology tools and vendors. What’s their purpose? Did you find any redundancies or gaps? What are they meant to achieve?
4. Where are your teams organically partnering? Are there cross-functional teams that need support, or silos that need disruption?
5. What does the talent pipeline look like in your organization? Remember DEI as you assess your next steps.
6. How does your advancement team build new institutional partnerships and capitalize on fresh information hubs and sources?

External resources

Talk to people! There are vendors, consultants, and experts ready to help. Oregon State University Foundation and the University of Colorado are farther along the spectrum of digital transformation and they’ve always answered my calls for help.

EAB has excellent research on the topic of Preparing for Advancement’s Digital Future. BWF’s Digital Fundraising Model highlights nine steps to identify, cultivate, engage, and steward donors.

The evertrue platform is used by many advancement shops, including the UO and OSU (read about their DXO pilot program), to create digital engagement officers to accelerate a personal engagement experience.

Sure, this takes time and money. But start talking to folks to inform what these next 5 years could look like for your advancement organization. Post your ideas and tools in the comments.

By Maureen Procopio
Senior Director, Campaign Strategy and Institutional Benchmarking
University of Oregon Advancement
541-346-2061