Advancing Digital Practices
Capacity Building Leadership Strategies for Social Enterprises
Digital practices, both strategic and operational, are a core part of the social enterprise’s business innovation readiness. Digital exchanges and data platforms should be fully embedded across the enterprise value creation production chain by the board, staff, and volunteers.
Advancing a social enterprise’s digital practices capacity requires the activation of five capacity-building strategies: creating value at the core, fostering inclusive practices, integrating functional units, developing workforce digital skills, and measuring the impact of digital services. These Accelerate Impact Model strategies provide essential guidance for advancing the organizational capacity of social enterprise ventures that propel social impact while generating sustaining earned revenue.
Create Value at the Core
Design digital customer journey maps to understand how best to deliver high-value digital services to your members. Our firm uses Mural to add several mapping activities within one virtual space. Mapping your beneficiaries’ and customers’ experiences captures data compactly and provides a visually engaging story.
- Initiate: Create a map relevant to the organization’s point of view, scope, mission, and structure.
- Investigate: Design your diagram with existing studies, interview stakeholders, and observe beneficiaries and customers interacting with the product or service.
- Illustrate: Get your team involved in a design sprint — from sticky notes to diagram creation.
- Align and envision: Use diagrams as a visual springboard to discuss innovation that engages productive collaboration for building solutions.
These customer journey maps are critical to having an end-to-end approach to digitization. Rethink how best to deliver value from your organization’s service or product. Place the digital service user at the center of your universe and evaluate any workflow changes from the user/customer lens.
Customer journey mapping is essential for any social enterprise looking to create value at its core. It’s no longer just about charting a path; it’s about understanding and enhancing every touchpoint with your users. We must rethink our approach to incorporate the latest digital trends and methodologies.
Expand the scope of your mapping activities. Use tools like Mural to integrate multiple mapping activities into one space. This approach should be all-encompassing, capturing data from various sources and providing a visual narrative that tells the complete story of your beneficiaries’ and customers’ experiences.
Embrace collaborative methodologies like storytelling and card sorting in your design sprints. These techniques help overlay context, perspective, and imagery around the user’s journey, turning insights from customer journey maps into valuable inputs for future strategies.
Incorporate tools that allow for real-time updates to customer journey maps. The dynamic nature of the digital market and consumer behavior necessitates maps that can adapt and evolve with changing contexts and preferences.
By integrating these updated strategies and tools into your digital customer journey mapping, you can ensure that your social enterprise stays ahead in delivering high-value digital services.
Foster Inclusive Practices
Inclusivity must be baked right into our digital blueprints. Here’s how to champion digital inclusion:
Before building anything, map the digital barriers marginalized communities face. Lack of access to devices? Limited internet connectivity? Low digital literacy? Partner with local stakeholders and community leaders to understand their needs and challenges. (Check out World Bank’s “Bridging the Digital Divide: A Toolkit for Policymakers” for a handy guide.
Once you understand the terrain, build solutions that cater to diverse needs. Consider offering affordable tablets with offline content, solar-powered charging stations, multilingual interfaces, and accessibility features for differently-abled users. (IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit offers excellent tips)
Partner with local schools, libraries, and community centers to offer digital literacy training programs tailored to specific needs. Provide instruction in basic browsing, online safety, and entrepreneurial skills for digital businesses. Check out UNESCO’s “Skills for a Digital World” framework for inspiration.
Partner with other social enterprises, NGOs, and even private companies to pool resources, share expertise, and build more extensive support networks for bridging the digital divide. The UN Global Compact’s “Digital Solidarity Platform” is a great starting point.
By working together with empathy, creativity, and a collaborative spirit, we can ensure that the digital revolution leaves no one behind. Let’s make the digital highway truly inclusive, where everyone can navigate their path to a brighter future.
Prioritize Responsible Innovation
Innovation is the fuel that propels our social impact missions forward. But with great power comes great responsibility, especially in the digital realm. We must avoid ethical potholes and unintended consequences when deploying digital solutions. Here’s how we can prioritize responsible innovation:
Be transparent about data collection and usage, obtain informed consent, and implement robust security measures. Check out the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for best practices.
Humans build algorithms so they can inherit our biases. Regularly audit your algorithms for bias, be transparent about their limitations, and ensure they serve everyone fairly. The World Economic Forum’s “Ethical Al Framework” is a valuable resource.
Think beyond the immediate impact of your solution. Consider potential downstream effects on the environment, communities, and unintended beneficiaries. Proactive sustainability assessments and stakeholder engagement can help mitigate risks. Check out the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” for a holistic framework.
Be open about your digital practices, share lessons learned, and be accountable for any ethical lapses. Building trust with users and stakeholders is crucial for sustainable impact. The “Principles for AI” developed by Asilomar AI Institute offer excellent guidance:
Building ethical digital solutions can harness tech for good with integrity and intentionality. Pave the way for a future where innovation serves all and technology is a tool for justice, not a perpetuation of inequities. By embracing these principles, we can chart a responsible course for our digital impact journeys, ensuring that technology becomes a force for positive change, leaving a lasting legacy of well-being for all.
Integrate Functional Units
Create a digital strategy roadmap to outline how to integrate teams and units across your organization. The goal is to fill the gap between aspiration and reality with an organization-wide commitment to clarifying your strategic and operational work.
Boston Consulting Group recommends five essential deliverables for a practical roadmap to provide a rigorous blueprinting approach with strategy. For social enterprises, that essential list includes:
- Digital vision. How is digital changing your member’s industry?
- Competitive advantage assessment. How do digital tools provide a competitive advantage to keep beneficiaries and customers engaged?
- Prioritized list of digital bets. Which digital opportunities are consistent with your organizational strategy and core assets?
- Gap analysis. What gaps in business innovation readiness need to be filled?
- Transformation roadmap. What are the timelines, targets, and accountabilities for each of your organization’s programs, services, and products?
Essential to activating the roadmap is your staff team’s connectivity. Email and Slack communication provide core functionality, but better integration of work with strategy can occur using project management tools. Basecamp and Smartsheet are the preferred tools that our firm has used successfully with venture start-up projects and digital strategy integration.
Develop Workforce Digital Skills
Initiate a continuous workforce training and development plan with HR and senior staff engagement. Mercer recommends shifting from the traditional linear workforce training process to an integrated process.
In this model, the HR office and the staff workforce help to define the problem, solution options, and workforce adjustments in an empowered, digital-supported workforce.
To continue to nurture digital talent, consider the right incentives for a virtuous cycle of staff engagement. Promoting the right talent will attract similar talented candidates to support future hiring needs. Success with your current team breeds success in recruiting new talent.
Be intentional about creating an effective digital culture for your workforce. Staff development that supports better operational agility and team collaboration can further support digital service outcomes.
In today’s digital landscape, your social enterprise is only as agile as its team. However, navigating the evolving tech terrain requires more than basic digital skills. It’s time to equip your workforce with the digital superpowers ( responsible generative AI) they need to propel your impact mission forward.
Lay the groundwork with comprehensive training on internet basics, email communication, online collaboration tools, and cybersecurity awareness. Consider online platforms like Coursera’s “Google Digital Literacy Basics” or MIT OpenCourseware. Empower your team to understand and extract insights from data. Offer training on basic data analysis skills like using spreadsheets, creating data visualizations, and interpreting statistics. Resources like Harvard’s “Data Science: Essential Tools for Every Career” can provide a solid starting point.
Investing in your team’s digital skills is not just a cost; it’s a strategic investment in your future. By building a digitally fluent workforce, you unlock new opportunities, boost efficiency, and ensure your social enterprise stays ahead of the curve in the digital age. Remember, it’s not just about having the latest tech gadgets; it’s about empowering your people to use them with confidence and creativity to drive positive change.
Consider the transformative potential of ChatGPT across various stages of social enterprise development. The Playbook’s six published articles on this theme serve as a roadmap for students, leaders, and funders in the social enterprise sector, encouraging them to embark on a continuous learning journey to become more effective and impactful in their contribution to the social enterprise sector.
Let’s build a community of empowered social entrepreneurs where digital skills are not a privilege but a core competency for lasting impact.
Measure Digital Services Impact
Engage all organizational levels in defining digital success measures related to social impact mission and earned revenue goals. Create digital KPIs that matter.
Gartner Inc. suggests the best metrics:
- Have a clearly defined and defensible causal relationship to a business outcome
- Work as a leading, not lagging, indicator
- Address a specific, defined audience
- Are understandable by a non-IT audience
Tap data from your AMS to anticipate emerging patterns in the behavior of members. Integrate internal data of structured data, such as demographics and purchase history, with unstructured data, such as social media. Emphasize real-time monitoring of KPIs against digital priorities, with senior management linking staff performance reviews to timely data.
“KPIs need to be industry-specific and then organization-specific to be meaningful and useful.” Paul Proctor, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner
Beneficiary and customer focus metrics include service net promoter scores, new customer acquisition rate, and percentage increase in customer engagement in digital channels. Your digital proficiency can be measured by the percentage of digital marketing spend and the percentage of non-dues revenue through digital channels.
Integrating impactful digital services has become a cornerstone of operational success for many organizations, including social enterprises. Generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, can provide a framework for evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise digital services. By comparing against industry standards, social enterprises can gauge their current standing and identify pathways for continual improvement, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant. Equally critical is the role of beneficiary and customer feedback in shaping digital strategies. ChatGPT can support a deep dive into user experiences and expectations, empower organizations to refine digital offerings, and respond proactively to their beneficiaries’ evolving needs and preferences. ChatGPT can aid enterprise leaders in conducting cost-benefit analyses of digital services, thereby assisting leaders in making informed decisions regarding managing digital endeavors.
Digital Practice Capacity Building
Digital practices are not peripheral but central to a social enterprise’s innovation and operational success. This article proposes activating five key capacity-building strategies: creating value at the core, fostering inclusive practices, integrating functional units, developing workforce digital skills, and measuring the impact of digital services.
Digital interfaces are increasingly becoming the primary interaction points. Thus, the emphasis on creating value at the core through digital customer journey maps is particularly salient. This strategy isn’t just about understanding customer touchpoints; it’s about redefining them to deliver superior value. Tools like Mural exemplify the innovative approaches needed to comprehensively capture and visually narrate the customer experience.
Fostering inclusive practices in the digital space ensures no one is left behind in this technological leap. Social entrepreneurs should map digital barriers and tailor solutions that cater to diverse needs, recognizing that inclusivity in the digital realm is as crucial as in the physical one.
Integrating functional units through a digital strategy roadmap is another pivotal strategy. It bridges the gap between aspiration and operational reality, ensuring that digital transformation is not a siloed effort but a cohesive, organization-wide movement.
Developing digital skills within the workforce is crucial to building a digitally fluent team. The article rightly points out that in the evolving digital landscape, most notably the generative AI sector, equipping staff with digital skills is not just an option; it’s a necessity.
Lastly, the article’s focus on measuring the impact of digital services through concrete KPIs reflects its commitment to tangible outcomes and accountability. This approach ensures that digital strategies are implemented and evaluated for effectiveness and impact.
Advancing Digital Practices is a guide for social entrepreneurs, providing them with actionable strategies to embed digital practices profoundly and meaningfully within their organizations. Its emphasis on inclusivity, integration, skill development, and impact measurement makes it a crucial read for anyone looking to leverage digital transformation for social impact and sustainability.
Editor’s note. A prior AIM Playbook article published in October 2020 provided the initial basis for this article.
General References
Data for Social Impact: A New Frontier for Social Enterprises (McKinsey & Company, 2023): https://www.mckinsey.com/solutions/orgsolutions/overview This report explores the potential of data for social impact ventures, outlining key opportunities and challenges in building data ecosystems. It offers valuable insights into data value mapping, stakeholder engagement, and ethical considerations.
Building Data Cooperatives for Social Good (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022): https://cimatri.com/leveraging-data-analytics-for-smarter-decision-making-in-nonprofit-associations/ This article delves into the rise of data cooperatives as a model for shared data governance and benefit distribution in social impact initiatives. It provides concrete examples and practical steps for social enterprises to explore this collaborative approach.
The Ethical Data Commons: A Framework for Responsible Data Sharing (World Economic Forum, 2023): https://www.weforum.org/publications/data-collaboration-for-the-common-good-enabling-trust-and-innovation-through-public-private-partnerships/ This framework guides responsible data sharing within data ecosystems, addressing critical issues like privacy, consent, and potential harm. It offers social enterprises a valuable tool for ensuring ethical data practices within their partnerships.
Unlocking the Value of Data for Development: A Roadmap for Policymakers and Practitioners (UNDP, 2022): https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-document/hdr2021-22pdf_1.pdf This UNDP report examines the potential of data for development goals, focusing on leveraging technology and building inclusive data ecosystems. It highlights vital considerations for social enterprises working in developing contexts.
The Data Revolution for Global Social Good: Opportunities and Challenges (World Bank, 2022): https://live.worldbank.org/en/event/2022/digitaltransformations This World Bank report provides a comprehensive overview of the data revolution’s impact on social good initiatives. It explores current trends in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and data governance, offering valuable insights for social enterprises navigating the evolving landscape.
Kalbach, J. (2016). Mapping experiences: a guide to creating value through journeys, blueprints, and diagrams. Sebastopol, CA: OReilly Media, Inc.
Building the healthcare system of the future. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://reports.weforum.org/digital-transformation/building-the-healthcare-system-of-the-future/
Roberts, D. (2018, April 25). Ten ways digital could transform healthcare. Retrieved from https://www.ey.com/en_gl/digital/10-ways-digital-could-transform-healthcare
Integrating Functional Units
Digital Strategy Roadmap and Planning for Transformation: BCG. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.bcg.com/digital-bcg/digital-strategy-roadmap.aspx
Kane, G. C., Palmer, D., Phillips, A. N., Kiron, D., & Buckley, N. (2016, July 26). Aligning the Organization for Its Digital Future. Retrieved from https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/aligning-for-digital-future
Developing Workforce Digital Skills
Engaging the Workforce in Digital Transformation: Mercer 2018. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.mercer.com/our-thinking/career/engaging-the-workforce-in-digital-transformation.html
Digital Skills for the 21st-Century Workforce. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.investinwork.org/-/media/Files/reports/digital- skills-for-the-21st-century-workforce.pdf
Measuring Digital Services Impact
How to Measure Digital Transformation Progress. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/how-to-measure-digital-transformation-progress/
Tanguy Catlin; Jay Scanlan Raising your Digital Quotient. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/raising-your-digital-quotient
Measuring the Digital Transformation — OECD. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/publications/measuring-the-digital-transformation-9789264311992-en.htm
