Three ways to organise staff for digital media success

What's the best way to structure teams to make sure digital media campaigns run smoothly? Should there be a central digital media team, or should digital media experts be found in every department across the organisation?

Earlier this year, Unicef UK produced and shared with the sector a report on charity digital marketing. It stood out for me because the writers found three dominant structural models, all of which resonated to a greater or lesser degree.

In some charities, fundraising departments take the lead on digital marketing and all activity related to income generation. In others, digital marketing is owned by a “new media” type department that provides technical help and advice to fundraising teams, and does the lion’s share of the work.

But there is a third way: in some charities digital experts can be found in all departments, and while staff are flexible about who “owns” a project there is always one person - a single point of coordination - who ensures consistency and that projects are delivered effectively.

I tried to work out where my charity, WaterAid, sits and I concluded we don't really fit into any category: we straddle different approaches and we often tackle different projects in different ways. Going forward, this will need to change.

We're somewhere between being a “big medium-sized charity” and a “small big charity”, with an ambitious strategy in place that sees us becoming a much bigger hitter in the sector.

There are four of us in the web team, so compared with organisations such as Oxfam and Greenpeace our resources are slim. Against this background, we have some big ambitions: We want to do much more “digital”, our website is in need of redevelopment, and we also have the issue of the many internal legacy systems to deal with.

Our latest campaign, Dig Toilets, Not Graves, has only just kicked off. It's a pretty basic website – just three or four pages – but the campaign is doing well and creating a buzz, thanks largely to the hard-hitting “diarrhoea song” – a short film that is an integral part of the campaign. Last week it was Third Sector's digital campaign of the week.

But getting it up and running was not entirely plain sailing: digital media is still quite a new area for our supporter recruitment team. So although they were managing the project and the creative, they still needed a “techie” from the web team (me), liaising and negotiating with the third party technical team to ensure everything worked when the site was put onto a live server.

Because it was quite a technical project, one of the biggest problems was making sure everyone knew what the technical jargon, which our supporter recruitment team may not have come across before, actually meant. Phrases such as bounce rate, tracking, back-end, MySQL, etc had to be explained and understood to ensure we were all on the same page.

Another issue that only became apparent once the site had been built was that there was nothing in the original spec to say that there would be a content management system for the micro-site. So if changes need to be made they must be done manually, which is not ideal.

There were also a few nail-biting moments, such as doubts about whether our new online donation system, being re-developed at the same time, would be ready in time (it was!)

In an ideal world then, a digital project such as this should follow the “third way” approach from the Unicef report: lots of expertise and input from across the organisation feed into the project, but one person, a digital project manager with the time, knowledge, digital skills and experience to pull everything together successfully, owns the project and is ultimately responsible for delivering it on time and to budget.

We’re not quite there yet but, with some formal project management training and an organisational drive to embed this across the business, together with more projects such as Dig toilets, not graves providing a steep learning curve for all involved, we soon will be.