A Digitalised Enterprise

Our digital service at Community Enterprise has been running for 18 months now.   

During this time, we’ve gained invaluable insight into the variety of needs and ambitions of third-sector organisations looking to streamline processes and service delivery with technology.  

Our understanding has developed from working 1-1 with our clients to support specific digital projects or to facilitate the creation of an overarching digital strategy. 

Every organisation is unique in its resources, and this can be challenging, particularly if there are no dedicated team members to own and drive a strategy to success.  

Another all too common challenge is budgeting for essentials such as new software licenses, staff time and training. We can help you scope the costs involved in projects and highlight what discounts, funding and support may be available to you as a non-profit organisation. 

Digital buy-in at all levels of an organisation is also fundamental. A trustee with digital knowledge who can represent at a strategic level, a management team who will communicate ambitions and carve out space for progress to be made and a staff team who has time to learn new tools and contribute their skills.  

As a charity and social enterprise, we’re on our own digital journey and are keen to be transparent with our learnings. 

What we’ve been working on in the last 6 months: 

Creating a digital strategy 

Organising topics and prioritising them – what are our short, medium and long-term goals?  

Within each topic, what do we need to learn more about? Where are our pain points? Who are the relevant staff members to drive the project forward? 

Timeframes – setting realistic and achievable timeframes based on the level of effort vs the impact. Projects that are identified as relatively low effort with high impact are quick wins and should be in your short-term goals.  

Forming a digital working group 

Every project needs an owner. Creating a small working group that meet regularly to research, scope and ultimately drive ideas forward is working well for us. Our most recent project has focused on password management systems and the security benefits of having such a system in place. 

Reviewing what we use, why we use it and training needs:

Collating a list of all the systems you use and their primary functions is a worthwhile exercise. Conducting a staff survey to ask about any potential training needs will save time inefficiencies in the long run. 

Our full-staff team recently attended Office 365 training. We discovered we all had different understandings of how to use this suite of tools, and we benefitted greatly from this full-day session.  

To find out more about our digital support, please contact jane@communityenterprise.co.uk.