Digital leadership

With the development and mainstreaming of Digital across organisations together with increased investment and activity in this area, many Digital Leads, in effect, find themselves spearheading the organisational change process.

However, senior management often do not realise the extent to which this is happening and the support that might be required. Also, Digital Leads are either not skilled or positioned in the organisational hierarchy to help lead organisational change.

In order to bridge the gap both sides need to change their approach to working with each other.

The Digital Leadership workshop will help towards this goal by increasing the understanding of the challenges both groups face. The participants will also be introduced to some techniques for managing others, self and up while delivering day-to-today work.

Digital strategy development

Who: for senior managers and digital managers/influencers

While principles of building digital strategies (cross-organisational or for a specific project or a campaign) are generic, how they are implemented is specific to every organisation. Working with participants' real-life examples, the Digital Leadership workshop helps participants unpack the challenges of digital strategy development and, more importantly, implementation, as well as help find new solutions.

Advance reading is required so the workshop can focus on problem-solving based on real-life scenarios.

The workshop will cover:

• Digital strategy: Does it exist and is it embedded in your organisation? What can be done to improve the implementation of it?
• Digital leadership: What are the challenges for your organisation's Digital Leads and how can they be overcome? How can the Digital Leads and Senior managers best support each other?
• Digital implementation: How are stakeholders getting involved with Digital across the organisation? What planning and implementation processes work /don't work?

At the end of this workshop, participants will have a framework for digital strategy development – whether this is a cross-organisational strategy or just for a marketing/political campaign. More importantly, based on participants own examples and situation, participants will have tips to help them implement this strategy across all levels of the organisation.

eCampaigning best practices

For more than 15+ years, e-campaigning practices have been evolving, particularly in the email-to-action model. The result is that modern email-to-action best practices are extensively tested and verified and, when combined, can result in dramatically improvements in mobilisation, recruitment and retention. This workshop will explore those best practices through analysing best practices vs. the emails, websites and actions of participants' organisations and/or other organisations.

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review a checklist of best practices for emails, action pages and websites.
2. Pick three or four organisations to review their campaigning emails, action pages and websites to compare vs. the checklist
3. Make recommendations for those websites to improve their best practices and estimate what impact it will have on various key indicators

eCampaigning models

While the email-to-action model (e.g. petitions, emails to politicians/companies) dominates NGO and independent e-campaigning, it is only one of many models. This workshop will explore other models and when it is appropriate to use each through reviewing these models at work.

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review other successful and repeatable e-campaigning models
2. Pick two or three campaigns and identify what other models they could use, why and how
3. Discuss other potential models participants have seen or other uses of the models explored

Recruiting supporters online

Many people (senior managers, politicians, journalists) think that recruiting new supporters online is easy. It isn't. Yet many campaigns are planned without a strategy or plan for recruiting new supporters online, despite recruitment being a secondary goal of most campaigns and a critical element of the influence strategy. This workshops focuses on the variety of ways to recruit new supporters, including best practices, word of mouth, chaperoned acquisition and incentives.

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review best practices and recruitment approaches
2. Explore participants recruitment strategies, successes and failures
3. Develop a draft recruitment plan for one participant's campaign

Retaining supporters online

Most e-campaigning activity focuses on mobilising existing supporters and recruiting new supporters. Yet the silent threat to most organisations is the massive proportion of 'supporters' who never participate again after their first 5-minute engagement. This workshop focuses on how to prevent supporters from lapsing, keep them involved and identify and re-activate lapsed supporters by learning how to retain supporters, reviewing where each organisations' gaps are and developing a draft retention plan.

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review benchmarking data on retention, how it is defined and what the best practices are
2. Explore participants' organisations retention strategy and performance
3. Develop a rough welcome series, ladder of engagement and re-activation series

Digital split (a/b) testing

Split testing is one of the most critical practices for continuos improvement with digital campaigning and fundraising. This workshop will explore the importance and potential of split testing through cases and through exercises in planning a split test. Advance reading is required.

At the end of this workshop, participants will have a better idea of why to split test, how to plan and implement valid tests, what to test for, case studies and how to evaluate the results.

Data analysis

Understanding and analysing data is now an essential skill in the digital world. This workshop will explore key principles for accurate analysis including sampling, statistical significance, and experimental design by working through some real data and using participants' own results (where available).

Fundraising via digital campaigning

Digital fundraising is still a minor part of most organisation's fundraising results and activities. Yet most organisations recognise that fundraising from traditional channels like direct marketing is declining and the younger donors are not responding. Meanwhile a few organisations have had great success with fundraising for campaigning actions and from campaigning supporters. This workshop will focus on various cases and models for fundraising via digital campaigning.

In this workshop, participats will:

1. Review a range of cases and best practices around integrating fundraising with e-campaigning
2. Choose one-two participants' campaigns to plan a fundraising ask
3. Draft the messaging to support the fundraising ask

Writing great emails

Everyone writes many emails every day, but that doesn't mean they are effective. This workshop will outline the principles of writing a great email that is effective through some campaigning cases and reviewing recent action emails from the participants' campaign.

In this workshop, participants will:

1. Review email writing best practices and our experiences of great emails
2. Review some organisations emails and rank them
3. Each participant write one email for a campaign they are working on, present it to another participant for feedback, revise and present to the group

Participants will leave the workshop with a greater understanding of what makes a great email and how to apply this to campaigning emails, fundraising emails or even emails to colleagues and friends.

Converting online activists into donors

Case study of Amnesty Canada’s strategies for converting activists to monthly donors, including lead acquisition, cultivation, and conversion campaigns.

1. Paid vs. organic lead acquisition
2. Data analysis, segmenting by engagement level
3. Conversion techniques (telemarketing, post-action appeal, ROI comparisons)

Canada: Digital election strategy 2015

The next federal election will probably happen in the fall, but uncertainty in the timing has always made it difficult for groups to organize around.

This workshop will look at what we need to start doing now to prepare for when the writ is dropped. Time is running out, and there is so much to do to influence this election.

We all have lists of supporters, will we be able to use them with the new anti-spam legislation? Do we know who are the influencers within our lists? What approaches will people be using in the election? How do we maximize the use of social media to influence.

Are we prepared to run a national election campaign engaging with over 1000 candidates across Canada? What is the impact?

Many groups have similar goals for the 2015 election. By working together, how can we have a maximum impact on election day.