In the ever-evolving digital landscape, it is critical that charities harness technology to deliver more impactful services. However, the 2023 Charity Digital Skills Survey sheds light on some significant trends and areas for improvement within the sector.

Decreased digital service provision

This year’s survey reveals a notable decline in digital service provision by charities, with only 46% delivering services either in-house or through third-party platforms. This is a significant drop from the 73% reported in 2022. The decline could be attributed to a potential shift towards face-to-face delivery since the pandemic or reduced funding for digital services. It is also possible that distinguishing between digital and non-digital services has become more challenging.

The need for improvement

Charities recognise the need to improve and scale their digital services, with 39% expressing this as a priority. This level of prioritisation has remained consistent since the previous year. However, there is room for improvement, as nearly a third of charities (28%) rate their own use of digital service delivery as poor. This indicates a pressing need to enhance digital capabilities within the sector.

Focus on agile ways of working and evaluation

According to the survey, agile ways of working and evaluating digital services emerge as the biggest skills gaps within charities. Only 24% of charities consider themselves excellent at product management, while 38% rate their agility as fair and 35% as poor. Similarly, 41% rate their adherence to service design approaches as fair, and 30% as poor. These findings emphasise the necessity for charities to develop and embed agile practices and service design approaches to optimise their digital services.

Opportunities and missed potential

The survey also highlights areas where charities are making progress. Almost a third (31%) frequently employ existing tools and no-code platforms for service development, indicating an inclination towards accessible and efficient solutions. However, there is still work to be done, as 44% of charities never make their digital solutions available to others, missing an opportunity for broader impact. Additionally, 24% do not openly share their digital work learnings, limiting the potential for collective growth and knowledge sharing.

The gaps we need to address – and what we’re doing at RNID

Charities need to address gaps in three key areas. It’s something we are doing at RNID and here I’ve given you an overview of what we’re trying. I’ll try to write more about these if they are of interest to people.

Agile ways of working and product management

Developing and iterating on digital services in an agile way is vital if charities are to achieve their goals in a rapidly changing environment. We already do this for some of our most important work at RNID but we want to scale up our approach. We’ve identified five key products that we want to establish a strong model of product ownership for. We hope this will allow sponsors to take more accountability for the performance of our products and give the product teams more certainty over how their work contributes to the product’s objectives.

We’re also looking at how we can upskill people to give them greater confidence to work in this way. We’ve already provided basic agile training for more than 90 staff members and now we’re looking at building on this training programme.

Service design approaches

We already have an established service design team who find great solutions to user problems that we’re trying to solve. We want to build on this strong foundation with more work on our design system, patterns and processes for creating content. We think this will help us to create a more consistent experience across everything we do. To support more colleagues to adopt a service design mindset, we’re also thinking of running webinars to show what service design is and how it can affect change at the charity.

Effective evaluation to enhance their digital services

One of my biggest observations about charities is that whilst it is really important that they are able to demonstrate their impact on users’ lives, they can often struggle to articulate that value – despite a vast array of metrics being available to them when it comes to digital products. The Charity Digital Skills report reveals that the cause of this is that many charities lack the skills to collect, manage and analyse data. 59% rate themselves as fair at this and 28% poor. These data points have barely changed since 2020, showing how charities need support in this area.

The biggest challenge, faced by 48% of charities, is to use data to inform strategy and decision making.

With all that in mind, and with RNID’s commitment to being driven by insights, we’re introducing a new data analyst role into the team, on top of other investments such as moving to a single CRM and hiring top talent to help us drive our data and insights agenda forward. We are also planning to carry out a data maturity assessment to understand how different teams feel about data.

For each of our top five products we want to have more of a focus on agreeing their key goals and, in turn, how we will measure our success. I think we’ve already cracked this when it comes to measuring the success of our online hearing check, which an incredible 300,000 people have now taken. So, there’s definitely a lot of learning we can apply to our other products.

Collaboration and support networks

Collaborating across charities is an excellent way of advancing. One way in which we can do this is through Shared Digital Guides, from Catalyst, which is a platform that collects practical examples of services charities have delivered digitally, which other charities can reuse and learn from. Some 36 organisations have shared 46 guides to how they use digital tools to run their services and operations. You are free to copy and learn from what they’ve done.

Building support networks so that we can learn from each other is also critical. I’ve been trying to do this through my 100 virtual coffees, where I’m aiming to meet 100 people from the sector to share ideas and problems. If you fancy a one-to-one half-hour virtual coffee break with me, book one today. At the time of writing this I’ve done 44 and it’s been a great experience.

By embracing these advancements, charities can maximise their impact and better serve their users.