John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
While we never know what’s round the corner in the world of digital and the third sector, we’ve seen a number of interesting trends emerge in 2018 that will grow further in 2019. Here’s our take on what’s next for digital in the UK charity sector.
We have undertaken many migrations for clients from existing content management systems to Drupal. These moves are prompted by a number of factors, and include:
We all know it can be a lot of work to keep your charity intranet vibrant and all used. That said, here are half a dozen really quick and easy ways to improve your intranet and make it more useful and visited by your staff.
While I want to look specifically at social intranets in this article, I should first point out that the business case for any intranet is in general poorly understood. While it's possible for Comms teams to go to senior management with a case for a new or revised intranet, it's unusual to see KPIs rigorously reviewed after the first year. Indeed, while evidence is hard to obtain, it's clear to anyone working in the sector that the overhwelming majority of intranets are not often measured against meaningful benchmarks.
It's been interesting to watch commentators deal with the recent revelations over Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. While the #deletefacebook campaign has gained some traction, many critics of the social media giant are reluctant to close their accounts. This is because they rely on Facebook to help promote their message and they may be worried that removing themselves from the platform will diminish their ability to effectively campaign to the widest possible number of supporters.
There's no doubt that concerns over GDPR are now starting to become more urgent for our clients as the regulation comes into full effect on May 25th.
I've been doing a lot of reading and attending events on GDPR so feel somewhat informed now and can share some headlines that I hope will be of use to Comms and Marketing people working in charities. There are many aspects to GDPR but my focus is here is how this might affect the way in which charities can work with their digital agency suppliers to make the most of the GDPR opportunity.
Since our first Intranet Design Annual in 2001, 10 nonprofits have been among the winners, and two of those are from this year. Might this represent an upturn in intranet budget and perceived importance of intranets at nonprofit organizations?
There's no one-size-fits-all solution to managing key documents like policies and procedures on your charity's intranet. However, there are broadly three approaches you will commonly find adopted. It's likely your organisation follows one of these.
It's challenging to effectively share useful information amongst team members. Very often members of staff find something useful on the intranet or the web they'd like to share with colleagues but the process can be painful. Using social media is often not an option as there might be privacy issues on intranet content and you can't guarantee your colleagues will always be using the same networks. So what are your options to improve sharing on your intranet?
Gaining engagement and effecting outcomes with your website is often the key goal for many organisations and while we've heard a lot of talk recently about chatbots, old fashioned live chat has been around for a while now and seems to be gaining in popularity.
