Building digital confidence at Cancer Research UK

(This article first appeared on the CR Digital Team blog)

Back in wintry January we wrote about how we’re building the digital skills and knowledge of people at CRUK through our hub and spoke model. We’re doing this to become a more digital organisation and to keep moving towards 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.

When our digital team works with another team at CRUK in a ‘spoke’, we help them deliver a digital outcome. Like increase their digital presence or the performance of their pages.  And just as importantly we help them learn new digital skills and ways of working. This way we’re developing our staff and becoming a more digital organisation at the same time.

But we haven’t stopped there. We’ve provided lots of other ways for people to build their digital skills and confidence.

Digital Talent Development

Through our Digital Champions scheme, we’re giving more digital responsibility to teams across the charity. Following some introductory awareness building workshops with each of our digital Practice Leads (UX, Agile, content, SEO, analytics, production and proposition management), we’ve matched each of our 16 champions with a digital mentor. The mentors help the champions work out an individual digital personal development plan. And offer face to face training to build their confidence.

Senior marketers can attend our Modern Marketing Academy. Over 8 weekly sessions we’ve challenged our marketers to diversify their channels and test more ideas. We’ve used internal and external inspiration. Including a trip to our UX lab to observe some live usability testing, a speed meeting session with a range of media owners and an analytics and measurement workshop with the help of our in house analytics team. And we saw a big increase in participants’ confidence levels. The group reported a commitment to making a change in their area of responsibility of 4.7/5. And they’ve made some important changes. Like setting digital development objectives, building test and learn strategies and introducing UX tools for marketing.

We also run a regular programme of training on everything from agile to UX. We support this with twice weekly ‘Digital Hour’ drop-in sessions. Anyone can come and chat to a generalist producer or a specialist in content, SEO, agile, UX or analytics. It’s working well as a training refresher, a way to get advice on a new idea or a way to get a quick digital task done to a high standard.

Some success stories

Many of the talented people whose digital skills we’ve helped build are creating real change. Several teams have reviewed their structures to make digital more prominent. And to encourage more innovative, ‘test and learn’ ways of working. A member of our internal communications team, Joe, learnt lots about digital while on a spoke. His team have now reshaped his role to make the most of his new skills. He’ll now be leading a review of all of our internal digital platforms and developing a strategy to ensure we’re gaining maximum value from them.

Freya, in our research innovation team, has also been on a spoke. Her team recognised the need to retain and challenge her, to harness her new digital skill and awareness. She’s recently gained a Head role, from which she can encourage digital ideas and ways of working.

Our goal? 3 in 4…

Our digital talent development strategy allows people to get things done quicker and with less support from digital. We’re building the digital capability of our great people so that we can move at pace and make sure that we reach 3 in 4 people surviving cancer by 2034.