The word “strategy” gives some people the fear. It sounds complicated and expensive, the sort of thing you’d pay a consultant for and end up with a thousand page document gathering dust in the corner of your office. Really though, a strategy is just a roadmap: a way of articulating where you’re trying to get to with your organisation.

A digital strategy is – not surprisingly – the online component of this. Some argue, and in essence they’re right, that “digital” shouldn’t be a separate thing to everything else: if you’ve got a marketing strategy then it should contain both digital and non-digital components for it to be most effective. This is absolutely right – being joined-up across channels is really the core to making any strategy work. Having said that, there is some merit to thinking specifically about digital, particularly in cultural heritage organisations which often struggle with how to mesh long-standing organisational approaches with the ever-changing world of online.

The role of strategy can be articulated in a single, cyclical diagram:

Where are you now?
This asks what you’re doing digitally right now: do you have a website? Social media presence? An e-newsletter? What content do you have? Where is it? Is it fit for purpose or does it need to be adapted in some way?

Where do you want to be?
What would “success” look like in a year? How about in 10 years?

How do you get there?
What do you need to do to get from where you are now to where you want to be? Is it about writing or commissioning new content, or marketing, or both? Do you need a new website? New photography? Do you need to stop doing some things in order to focus on others?

How do you know when you get there?
What measurements will help you determine success – more visits, more signups, longer time on page… or is this about building a social profile? What about more qualitative measures – getting great feedback about your events or online exhibitions..?

What should you change next time?
Compare what you aimed to do with what actually happened – what does this tell you? Did you allow enough time for content authoring but the CMS wasn’t quite up to scratch? Did you have the tools you needed for co-authoring social content across a team? What can you change during the next cycle?

As the diagram implies, digital strategy isn’t a single document that gets signed off once and then popped on a shelf – it’s a constantly evolving process. As anyone who works closely with web or social tools knows, the whole environment is predicated on a try-measure-adapt cycle, and your digital strategy should follow exactly this pattern.

Determining the direction you want to take is often best done via a series of workshops with as many stakeholders as you feel is practical. Ask big questions like “what is our website for?” and “what content do we have?”: be realistic but also try not to let the “daily grind” get in the way of big ideas. As someone once said, strategy is about working on your business, not working in it!

The strategy document

Although the process will ultimately involve the whole organisation, it is often useful to articulate a digital strategy in a single document. One way of approaching this is to start this document with a big, overarching vision and then hone this down into goals and then tasks, becoming more specific and actionable as you go – something like this:

Vision

Start the document with a big picture “What we are aiming to do” vision which should mesh closely with the wider organisational vision. It’s a grand statement of what you’re aiming to do – for example:

Our museum is recognised throughout the region as a valuable resource for local historians. The website gives us invaluable insights and opportunities to engage with these enthusiasts, enriching knowledge and lives as it does so.

The vision sets the scene and gives a useful “elevator pitch” answer to the question, “Why are you doing this?”.

Goals

Next, lay out your goals for a definable period – say 6 months or a year. These should fit the vision but are a bit more tangible. We tend to recommend 5 goals – but it depends on context. Here are some examples:

• Over the coming year, we will:
  • build our online presence to 30,000 visits a month
  • drive engagement through the use of social tools
  • run 10 public workshop events
  • train all staff to use the website CMS
  • develop our mailing list

These goals are starting to look a bit more like work packages, but aren’t yet actual tasks.

Tasks

For each goal, then lay out the actual work – including allocation to a member of staff, amount of time to be spent on each and so on. We find a simple grid is a good way of making this digestible, but you may have your own task management approach which you prefer.

To continue our example above, our first goal could be broken down as follows:

Goal 1: build our online presence to 30,000 visits a month

…etc

Conclusion

Developing a strategic approach which follows this kind of funnel approach will make the whole thing seem less scary and more manageable. Ultimately, the complexity and size of the strategy you take will depend entirely on the organisation itself – some large museums might end up with a complicated and multifaceted approach; small organisations might have a single-page document which lays everything out in one place.

We’ve developed a range of free worksheets and templates to help sketch out your digital strategies – download them here.