The document outlines the importance of having a cohesive digital strategy within organizations, highlighting that many lack a defined digital program or staff. It emphasizes the need for alignment among organizational goals, processes, and digital capabilities to achieve maturity in digital practices. The author also discusses the cultural shift necessary for transitioning from tactical to strategic digital approaches, stressing the significance of leadership, collaboration, and continuous learning.

1. Digital is a
Strategy
Not Just Tactics

2. Hello!
I’m Ryann Miller
I have an early-adopter twitter handle (@ryann) but I never use it.
Find me here instead: linkedin.com/in/ryannmiller1/

3. Our agenda
What’s the problem?
What is digital?
What is a digital strategy?
What’s digital maturity?
How do we get from tactical to maturity and digital first?
My framework and some useful charts and graphs
Digital maturity
Closer look at a digital strategy
Culture, leadership, talent
Winning the board over

4. What’s the
Problem?
We’re expected to know what to do with digital at work.
We can’t even define it.
It’s amorphous. Which doesn’t make things easier.

5. Let’s define it
Digital emcompasses everything from infrastructure to the website and online
giving to email to social and mobile. It generally serves a number of masters,
who don’t work together and have their own targets. It generally has no
central strategy. It generally means different things to different people.
What we’re moving towards: “digital capabilities in which a[n organization’s]
activities, people, culture and structure are in sync and aligned toward a set
of organizational goals.”
Sloan Management Review 2016, Aligning the Organization for It’s Digital Future,
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/aligning-for-digital-future/

6. Examples
● Investing in technology, assuming it’ll fix your internal
political/resource/culture problem. #CRMdreams
● When you want the person who controls the email to just send your
email out, and they don’t share your sense of prioritization.
● Running a digital/social acquisition campaign and didn’t execute on
email stewardship afterwards.

7. Examples
● Someone thinks it’s a good idea to go all in to a platform or tool (eg
Twitter, text program etc) when you don’t even track website website
conversions - which is 63% of the organizations (Digital Outlook
Report).
● When teams fight for digital budget when if they worked together,
they’d get more, easier.
● Adding a hashtag to a campaign and thinking you’ve got this digital
thing all figured out. #micdrop

8. Let’s talk.
The 2017 Digital Outlook Report found that 62% of the nonprofits and
charities surveyed have no digital program.
Your organization is part of the 62% if you don’t have dedicated digital
staff, follow a written digital strategy, or measure key performance
indicators.

10. Digital Strategy
Digital Program
Digital Plan
...sigh

11. Digital Strategy
is a bigger picture vision doc that sets the stage for organizational growth. It should cover 1) digital and organizational goals, 2)
staff and tech needs, 3) outline the team responsible, 4) define success, how you’ll measure each goal, 5) and budget.
Digital Program
is this strategy in action. A program is defined as having dedicated staff, following a strategy, and having KPIs.
Digital Plan
is an offshoot of the strategy, and you should create one of these for each and every campaign you run (assuming you’re not
digital-first). The more digital-embedded you get, the easier these get. A digital plan asks and answers these questions: why are
we doing this (the top level or org goal, and how the campaign goal ties up into it)? Who are we doing this for (audience)? What
does success look like and how will we measure it?

12. Digital’s a continuum.
Moving from tactical to strategic, from legacy to
digitally mature, requires buy-in, curiosity, and
dedication.
Deep thoughts

13. No
buy-in
Tactics, tools
legacy ways of working (aka 1.0)
silo’d teams, independent KPIs
not enough sharing
fear of risk
status quo
not agile
Digital strategy, program
Strategy drives digital
building staff, competencies
experimenting with new ways of
working, delivering services
testing more collaboration
On the
radar
Digital integration,
convergence -> maturity
Investing in training
overlapping/shared KPIs
Testing, failing, learning, sharing and
testing again
Stuff about culture making sense
now
Leade
rship
buy-in
Digital first
digital is your approach, how you
work
digital strategy feeds down into
campaign plans that are digital first,
not digital last
lean startup approach
Data-driven decision making
Deep
and
wide
buy-in
adding digital doing digital hiring digital being digital
Digital framework

16. Let’s define it
And digital maturity:
“[D]igitally maturing organizations [are] companies in which digital … has
transformed processes, talent engagement, and business models.”
Sloan Management Review 2016, Aligning the Organization for It’s Digital Future,
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/aligning-for-digital-future/

17. Maturity
“Digital-first companies have more fluid structures, where
people are identified by their competencies and
capabilities and come together to solve particular
business problems.”
Sloan Management Review 2016, Aligning the Organization for It’s Digital Future, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/aligning-for-digital-future/

19. Now let’s circle back to
the digital strategy

20. What actually goes into a
digital strategy:
strategy

21. What actually goes into a
digital strategy:
people & process

22. What actually goes into a
digital strategy:
operations

23. Moving from ‘doing’ digital to ‘being’ digital.
It’s the culture shift.

24. ● Supporter/consumer-centric
● Transparent
● Collaborative
● Empowered
● Data-driven
● Agile
● Innovative
● Emergent
● Iterative
PostScript.com/digital-strategy
Digital Transformation: What it is and how to get there - econsultancy
Digital Culture - key attributes

25. Leaders communicate strategy effectively, transparently
Leaders drive the values, including risk and failure positivity
Leadership

26. 1. Soft skills
2. Retention
At legacy digital organizations, more than 50% of
employees who responded say they are planning to leave
their organizations in less than three years, and more than
20% plan within one year.
“At digitally maturing companies, on the other hand,
only 25% of employees expect to be seeking greener
pastures in the next three years, and only 4% have
plans to leave within a year.”
3. Training, professional development
Talent
Sloan Management Review 2016, Aligning the Organization for It’s Digital Future,
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/aligning-for-digital-future/

27. Talent

28. No
buy-in
Tactics, tools
legacy ways of working (aka 1.0)
silo’d teams, independent KPIs
not enough sharing
fear of risk
status quo
not agile
Digital strategy, program
Strategy drives digital
building staff, competencies
experimenting with new ways of
working, delivering services
testing more collaboration
On the
radar
Digital integration,
convergence -> maturity
Investing in training
overlapping/shared KPIs
Testing, failing, learning, sharing and
testing again
Stuff about culture making sense
now
Leade
rship
buy-in
Digital first
digital is your approach, how you
work
digital strategy feeds down into
campaign plans that are digital first,
not digital last
lean startup approach
Data-driven decision making
Deep
and
wide
buy-in
adding digital doing digital hiring digital being digital
Digital framework

29. Thanks!
ryannm@care2team.com
Find me here: linkedin.com/in/ryannmiller1/

30. Want more?
Link to a folder in my google drive that has some
templates, articles, reports:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EXHikBpN6Wv1g
2jhF2rvkXle5inD-cDn?usp=sharing
Thank you to my clients and friends for answering questions and
discussing these ideas with me, Brani Milosevic of Digital Leaders in the
UK, and the other resources I used and referenced.
The digital framework from Digital is a Strategy, Not Just Tactics by Ryann Miller, is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may copy, distribute, display and perform the work
and make derivative works and remixes based on it, provided you give Ryann Miller credit (attribution).