Is your organisation really ready for new technology and AI?

There’s lots of focus on shiny new things in the non-profit space right now. But just like Lynn Roberts says in her recent LinkedIn post, we need to build the “boring stuff” before we get excited by the shiny new stuff. In other words, to build a house, you need to start with solid foundations. 

AI, agile marketing, human-centred design, data-driven decision making: there’s no denying it’s game-changing stuff. But without the basics in place, you won’t reap the full benefits of their brilliance. 

Back to basics

So what are the basics, those vital elements of successful transformation?

We’re talking about skills, mindset, audience centricity, data and integrations.

Ask yourself, does your organisation have the skillset to use your new digital platforms? Do your teams have the mindset to adapt to change? Are you putting the audience first? Are you interpreting data and making decisions accordingly? Do you use results from your last project to plan your next one? 

Slow and definitely not sexy

I get it. These things aren’t new, you've heard it all before. And some of them, like solving data issues, are just not sexy. They’re not big-ticket strategy items that will demonstrate ambition in the boardroom. They’re not even very visible. There’s no big ta-da moment to show them off when they’re done.

After all, none of this stuff is new. We’ve been talking about these building blocks since 2008. I’m still sharing a video of my colleague’s audience journey design presentation from 11 years ago, when we were all inspired by the lessons of Obama’s digital campaigning.

So - if this is such old news, surely we’ve nailed it all by now!  The truth is most organisations haven’t yet. We still have skills siloed in teams. We still run manual processes for segmentations. We’re still hampered by a reluctance to automate.

Why? 

“If it ain’t broke”

People take an “if it ain’t broke” approach. A few times, when my clients actually decided to de-silo and shift teams towards engagement, I asked them what their motivation was. Every time the answer was along the lines of, “It can’t get any worse, so we may as well try something new”.

“It’s too hard”

Often, these knotty, difficult changes to an organisation’s core start off brave then get watered down. If change takes too long, if it gets sticky and messy, people get disillusioned and give up. Leadership gets cold feet. It takes real tenacity and willingness to hold your nerve to make lasting change.

For example, a client has decided to co-design a new process with their department. The process design looks great. Now, the trick is to implement it while there’s work coming through the old process. They are in a transition period. So, it's sticky. It’s messy. But the leadership is clear, determined, transparent and supportive. So this support and clarity is giving teams confidence to keep going and make the new process work.

“It’s too slow”

Even in an organisation where everyone is on board, progress can be slow. It takes time. It takes countless iterations. Teams and leaders need to be prepared for change to take time.

I often tell the story of a client who, following the digital maturity audit, planned for three team co-design sessions over 4 weeks to uncover deeper issues and find solutions to their low maturity ratings. The second session opened up a lack of trust and accountability within the team that didn’t come up before. So we had to pause and stay with that for longer than we thought. This moved our deadlines by a few weeks too.

The old problems holding you back

So, siloes still exist. Integration is still a problem. Deep-seated trust and accountability issues remain untouched. We’ve been banging on about these principles for so long, but they’re still an issue.

And it’s holding us back.

Take digital skills, for example. In many organisations, digital skills are still siloed in a digital team. Fundraising, campaigning, marketing and the other teams plan in isolation and expect the digital team to implement it. Overworked, the team start saying “no”. They become a bottleneck, hindering progress.
However, if some time ago we’d started developing modern skills for the ever-changing (digital) world in other teams, we’d be more adaptable and able to pick up and use new technologies with ease.

Benefits of basics

There’s never been a more important time to get your basics in order. With such complicated changes coming towards us, we must make sure we’re ready. AI brings with it huge opportunities as one of the most powerful new tools we’ve seen since the internet. There’s so much work your non-profit can offload to automation, from segment selections to data exchanges and API integrations. 

But to do so, we really need skilled people who know what they’re doing. Because to get value from AI, our data, technology and processes need to be tidy. 

I recently worked with an amazing organisation that was determined to reap the benefits of AI in an ethical way. They spent a year trying things out and documenting their learning process. When they started thinking about how AI can actually help them, a chunk of the team’s ideas were not resolvable by AI. They were all about the good old basics: data structure, data processes and integration of systems. All the things that we also need in place to benefit from AI.

It’s a familiar story. I have seen teams come up with ambitious and complex theoretical audience journey plans, when the organisation’s data and technology cannot actually deliver them.

Without the basics, we’ll only be able to crawl. While in this ever-changing world we need to run with confidence. 

If you are interested in how to develop skills and capabilities in your organisation have a look at the toolkit I developed with my colleagues at the Charity Change Collective.