Digital Design Principles
10 design principles to help charities build better digital services:
- Start with user needs, and keep them involved
- Understand what’s out there first
- Build the right team
- Take small steps and learn as you go
- Build digital services, not websites
- Be inclusive
- Think about privacy and security
- Build for sustainability
- Collaborate and build partnerships
- Be open
Building skills for building chatbots
Our events team wanted to build a Chatbot as part of the fundraising raising events acquisition journey.
They used the bot society simulator to design the flows and had intended to pay an agency to build the bot. Instead, I spent a couple of hours with one of the team to teach her the basics of building a Chatbot. She picked it up really quickly and built most of the bot in the first day.
Things I learned:
Digital transformation requires giving people the opportunities and space to develop new digital skills. This is more productive and efficient in the long run as it reduces reliance on external (and often costly) resources.
About using bot simulators specifically, beware of falling into the trap of thinking of the Chatbot as a visual interface like a webpage. Chatbots are conversational interfaces and need to be designed more as a two-way interaction then the kind of one-way passive interactions we usually have with screens.
Building something like a Chatbot yourself means you have a greater understanding of how it works, which will be a big help in iterating and improving the bot, puts the organisation in greater control of this and future Chatbots, and gives the team member another skill to go on their CV.
The removal of digital
I read Robert Green’s blog post about digital getting out of the way for fundraising and not using the term ‘digital’ in team names.
It reminded me something an old manager of mine said, “One day, having a social media team will be thought of in the same way as having a telephone team”. He meant that everyone has a telephone on their desk and knows how to use it, and that social media and using it to talk to customers would be something everyone in a business does, it wouldn’t be owned exclusively by a single team.
Whilst I’m not sure social media teams would agree as arguably social media platforms have gotten more complex since then, the point is easily transferable to ‘digital’.
Digital is a mindset and a skillset that everyone who works in a twenty first century business should possess. Organisations may take the same approach as CRUK and choose not to have a separate digital team, such as Halfords which split it’s digital team and joined them with the IT and Marketing departments. Or organisations may use a hub and spoke model with a core digital team doing customer-facing digital activities such as website development and performance marketing, but with the intention to push out digital skills into other parts of the organisation. Or an organisation could choose to have a single central digital team who manage all the digital activities for the organisation.
And perhaps, as Robert suggests, you can measure an organisations digital maturity by the model it uses. A really digitally mature organisation just does ‘digital’ without even thinking about it as separate from doing ‘reporting’ or doing ‘writing’ or doing ‘customer service’. I remember a few years ago, CRUK’s head of digital as he was then, saying that he wanted the people at CRUK to be as digital at work as they are at home. No one sits and home, switches off the TV, and thinks, “I’m now going to be ‘digital'”, as they put Netflix on, they just do it. Maybe removing ‘digital’ from team and role names is big part of being as digital at work as at home.