019 – Digital Maturity Models

Digital maturity is a measure of how well an organization is able to create value through digital channels and react to disruptive technologies and events. For example, how badly COVID disrupted your nonprofit is one indicator of digital maturity.

In this solo episode, Spencer discusses the various digital maturity models available today and outlines a digital marketing maturity framework for nonprofits.

• Deloitte’s digital maturity model
• Forrester’s digital maturity model
• Optimizely: What’s the right digital transformation model for your business?
• Digital Leadership’s digital maturity model for nonprofits
• Brooks Digital’s digital scorecard for nonprofits

Full Transcript

Spence Brooks 00:03

Welcome to Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing. We’re a podcast for nonprofit marketing and communications leaders using the internet to reach and engage people with health issues. I’m your host. Spencer Brooks of Brooks digital, a digital agency for health nonprofits. Today we have another solo episode for you. We’re gonna be talking about digital maturity models. So this is something that I have been doing some research on lately, thinking a lot about, the idea of a digital maturity model, for me, it comes out of this concept, this way of thinking that as the world becomes increasingly digital, a nonprofit must increasingly think and operate like, say, a technology company or a digital media company, in order to not just survive, but to also compete, to differentiate. And the process of getting there is it’s kind of it involves this category of digital transformation, right? You might have heard that before, but I think for nonprofits, that’s something that I see them being behind a little bit in terms of digital adoption sometimes, and you know, the topic of digital transformation, I guess it can be, I get different responses to that sometimes, sometimes people are skeptical, they don’t believe it. Others are totally bought in. But certainly, my perspective is that to do at least digital marketing well, and I really think to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of your audience, it’s very helpful to think about your nonprofit operating like a digital media company, like a technology company, in some ways, but ideally focused on maybe doing a little bit more good than some technology companies have been doing lately. So the idea of a digital maturity model then is this tool to help your organization map how it would mature in different areas, so that you would be able to have some sort of structured way of facilitating that transition to becoming a little bit more digitally savvy or more digitally mature.

Spencer Brooks 02:34

And I think, there’s this quote from Optimizely, I think they published this, an article on digital maturity, and I thought they put it well when they said, the key to assessing your organization’s level of digital maturity is to determine your ability to adapt to disrupting technologies, trends and events. A less digitally mature organization reacts slowly to major occurrences and has difficulty adapting to them. A more digitally mature organization is more aware of the marketplace, can react quicker to major events and is more flexible in adapting to them. And I thought that that was really interesting, because certainly, COVID is a glaring example of a major disrupting event. And I think in some ways, as a nonprofit, you can start to get a sense of your digital maturity by how your organization was able to adapt to COVID. Were you able to quickly pivot? Were you able to be able to move to maybe more of an online services model, or even just to take your team remote? Or was that a really big deal for you, and did you struggle to move into the digital post pandemic world? And so I think certainly there are going to be other disrupting events. There’s going to be other disrupting trends, technologies, things like that. And so, I think digital maturity is just as Optimizely put it really well, the ability to react to those kind of things, or at least that’s one measure of it.

Spencer Brooks 04:23

So, what I like about the digital maturity model, and what has had me thinking about it so much, is it’s, in one way, a holistic view of your, and I’m just talking really right now about digital marketing. There are, and we’ll get into this in a second. There’s different digital maturity models that exist, and sometimes those involve other areas, like your IT or whatever. And I’m thinking about this. This is a digital marketing podcast, so I’m thinking about in many ways. What does digital maturity look like from a marketing perspective? And I think that a model, a good one, would help you to have a holistic view of what are the different areas that your nonprofit should be considering when it’s developing a good digital marketing program, or just a good digital program, and where are you in terms of levels of maturity? Because I think every organization is mature in some areas or more mature in some areas, and maybe fairly immature in other areas. And I don’t necessarily think sometimes it’s the goal for every nonprofit to be mature in every single area, like, for example, with staffing, you might have a super mature nonprofit that has a full in house digital department. And you know, they’re truly acting like a digital media company from a staffing perspective, that’s all in house. But honestly, I know for many organizations, and certainly ones that are not a large nonprofit, it just doesn’t make sense to have full in house staff, and so I don’t think the goal is necessarily with a digital maturity model, or thinking about digital maturity, the goal is not always to just get to this black belt level of maturity, but to understand where are you right now, and where does it make sense for you to arrive at and so I think what has been really interesting about considering a digital maturity model for nonprofit marketing, as well as just looking at what’s out there right now, has been this idea of you have a holistic view of where you are in these different areas, and then you can get this sense of where you are right now and the roadmap to get to where you need to be. So I think it’s a helpful framework. And certainly I see sometimes, for example, I’ll get a client that comes to us and they have a some sort of stated problem, and then we get into it and realize, actually, that’s not really the problem. The problem is somewhere else, right? They might think, for example, we need to upgrade our website technology. And we might look under the hood and start talking with them and realize actually the content is but you know, this is out of control, or it’s not categorized well or organized well, you know, as one example. And I think the cool thing about a some sort of model for digital maturity is that with a holistic view, it’s not just necessarily about, oh, we have, this is our one problem. It might expose different opportunities, or maybe different problems in other areas, and present a clear way of actually navigating through the process of addressing those problems. Because, for example, with a website technology like that example that I gave before, it might make a whole lot of sense to address the organization of the content before doing any kind of technical update, but in the absence of really understanding and seeing the big picture, it’s a more inefficient way to just perhaps accept a problem at the face value and tackle it.

Spencer Brooks 08:39

So, there’s a few different models out there that exist right now, and some of them are put out by, I think Forrester has one, Deloitte has one as well. Google and Boston Consulting Group put out another digital maturity model as well. And so this, it’s not a new idea, these exist. But I think one of the things I’m definitely, I’ve definitely been mulling over in my mind, is what does this look like for nonprofit marketing and generally these digital maturity models, they will have different dimensions to them, say, these broad categories, and then underneath them, they’ll have sub dimensions in these different areas, and some ways of scoring them, like a level one to a level five, and that rolls up into some overall score, where you get categorized into, you know, one of a couple phases, right? I think Google has four phases of their digital maturity model, and they basically boil down to, you know, something like crawling, walking, running, flying. It’s not those exact ones, but that’s basically the progression. And you. I have been thinking about what possible dimensions would be appropriate, certainly for nonprofit marketing, and I think even in the health space, particularly, what would be a good model.

Spencer Brooks 10:13

So today, I just wanted to chat a little bit and throw out some different dimensions that you as a nonprofit marketer, I think that you should consider, when you’re holistically looking at your digital marketing program, and what maturity might look like for each of those and certainly there’s not enough time, you know, there’s 20 that I have identified. So I don’t really think we have a ton of time to to talk about those in detail, but I think this might be a good start, at least for you to think about what a holistic maturity model looks like.

Spencer Brooks 10:57

So, the dimensions that I’ve prepared, or at least I wrote down as I was thinking about this, and I combined, and I sort of took some inspiration from a couple different places. I think digitalmaturity.org I think that’s the website is one great example of actually what a digital maturity model looks like for nonprofits. That’s not specific to marketing necessarily, but I think that was a great resource that was one of the inspirations that I pulled from, as well as the other sources I mentioned, like Deloitte was one, and then Google and Boston Consulting Group, all of them have digital maturity models and things like that so.

Spencer Brooks 11:43

Anyway, without further ado, the main dimensions that I’m considering right now are, first your website. I think there’s a number of sub dimensions in there, but the website is one major overarching category. One-dimension, digital marketing is another. I’ve kind of separated website and digital marketing. Obviously, you know, your website is part of your digital marketing, but, you know, it didn’t make sense for me just to really have one particular website dimension. I think there’s a number of ways that I wanted to break down actually different sub dimensions of your website there. So anyway, there’s a website, there’s digital marketing, there’s your culture, and then there’s your habits. And so some of these are going to be about channels. What are you doing on specific channels, and other things are going to be about what is your organization like? How do you operate? How do you think? And these play on each other, and because sometimes the problem is not the technology, the problem is your approach or how your leadership thinks about things. So these dimensions that I’ve come up with, they are colored to some extent, by certainly my own background. They’re colored by what Brooks Digital does a lot of websites. Is something we do a lot of. So, I say that because this is not, I don’t think there’s a perfect representation of, here’s a nonprofit marketing model, right? I think it’s probably going to a different consulting firm might come up with a different model based on what they do a lot of but I do think this is actually helpful to literally try to map out what the territory looks like, certainly from my perspective. And so I hope it’s helpful, but going through the website dimensions for a second.

Spencer Brooks 13:43

So, website is the first of four major dimensions, and inside the websites, some of the sub dimensions, I think, are worth considering in terms of maturity, are first year performance. There’s five of these, by the way, performance, SEO, your infrastructure, your user experience, and then accessibility. So, starting at the first one with performance, and, by the way, this is a working model, so you know, if I publish a blog post about this in two years or something, and it’s it’s different, then that’s good. You know, this is a, this is something I’m actively thinking about and shaping right now. But in terms of performance, it ranges, I think, the maturity level, for me, it ranges from the first level, I think, is we’re just not even sure why website performance matters or how to measure it. It’s kind of the this, I know, the unaware stage, and then I think it goes all the way up to we, not only do we have say, performance targets for our website, but we’re actually automatically, monitoring these as we make changes to our website, to see when we might actually be making our performance worse, for example, on the most mature level, so that that’s like the range, for example, with website performance.

Spencer Brooks 15:11

With SEO right one, one level, the first level of that, the least mature one might be, we’re not sure how SEO works or how well our site is optimized, right? It’s sort of, it’s, again, sort of this unaware stage of how we’ve heard people talk about it, but I’m not really sure how this works. Is it applicable for us? Is it not? And then on the other end of the spectrum, with really mature nonprofits in this area, it might be that you have built a really high domain authority, and you occupy the top spots for your target keywords, right? And if you don’t know what domain authority is, then there’s you learn that as you move up the maturity levels. But that’s one example of what level five might look like there.

Spencer Brooks 16:04

With infrastructure. This is mostly about and infrastructure is the third one in this the website dimension, the overarching dimension. But infrastructure is a lot about the technology that underpins your website and the hosting. So maybe the first level of this might be that you’re using a Website Builder or some sort of DIY tool for your site. It’s kind of a more primitive infrastructure that might be like level one and level five, at the top, might be that we’re leveraging leading edge tools to drive innovation. And in some middle ones might be, you know, like a level three could be, our site allows us to do our basic day-to-day work without significant hassle, right? And so that’s one spectrum there.

Spencer Brooks 16:52

Buzzing along here, and I’m gonna have to pick up the pace. You’ll sit here all day. But with user experience, that’s the fourth one here. I think that ranges from our site’s design and organization is as actually turning visitors away actively. It’s a detractive experience to on the complete other end of maturity, it’s seamless. Our site’s user experience is, it’s a regularly tested and it’s improved based on user feedback. And it’s almost this invisible, seamless, it just, you know, it works without people even realizing that it’s working well. It just fades into the background, because it’s so great.

Spencer Brooks 17:31

With accessibility, which is the fifth one, it ranges, I think, from we haven’t even considered the accessibility of our website, or maybe one level up from that is our site has known accessibility issues, or we know that we’re not doing well. That’s sort of like level one and two. And then at the very top end, it’s you know that people with all ranges of disabilities can use your site in its full capacity, and you’re well aware of that, because you’ve tested, and you know exactly what you’re doing to facilitate that. So those are the website areas, the dimensions under that website category, again, performance, SEO, infrastructure, user experience and accessibility.

Spencer Brooks 18:17

When it gets into digital marketing, I think of this, for example, like audience knowledge is one subcategory there, social media is another, digital advertising, email marketing, online fundraising. And so, for example, with audience knowledge, what that is, I think, in many ways, your knowledge of your audience underpins a lot of what you do, and so that’s why I’ve actually broken it out into a separate category that can range from you haven’t even considered who your audience is to your regularly soliciting feedback from your audience to keep up with their changing preferences. One one end of that is basically total ignorance. And the other end is we know exactly who they are. And not only do we know who they are, we are figuring out how they’re changing. And that’s it’s a very different end of the spectrum.

Spencer Brooks 19:17

So social media, again, that can range from we’re just not on social to we’re influencing the social media conversation in our issue area. Or we have a huge following right. With digital advertising that definitely ranges from the lower end of maybe you either don’t do digital advertising at all, or you’re just basically spending your money each month, so you don’t lose it, that’s sort of like level one and two to you know, we are have a really well developed attribution model. So we really understand that we can attribute our, whatever our these conversions are, to our different advertising sources. Maybe we understand how our audience prefers to be reached, and what’s the most effective ad channels to reach depending on your goals, from awareness or education to lead generation or direct fundraising, depending on what you’re doing with your ads. But that’s an example of what digital advertising might be.

Spencer Brooks 20:20

Email marketing that could range from don’t have an email list to we’re leveraging marketing automation to deliver personalized content. And you know, that’s a whole another topic. I think I’ve actually written about that on the Brooks Digital site. I can’t give you the name of the article right now, but you could search and find it. There’s something about marketing automation there.

Spencer Brooks 20:45

Online fundraising is another one here. It’s not so much, this one, I think, is mostly for me, about the technology behind it, because really, online fundraising is coming through the mix up channel. You could be doing that on social. You could be doing that with digital ads, right? And so I think it’s more about, okay, we’re, you know, you could be on one end of the spectrum of like, we’re relying on donations through like PayPal or something, or some processor like that, where it’s really hard to track what money is coming in for specific campaigns, or to even have a some kind of log of who’s given what, you know, all the way to, we have a sophisticated CRM set up, we’re using, you know, like Razor’s Edge or something like that, right, where you have deep, interconnected, integrated data on your fundraising and constituency.

Spencer Brooks 21:46

So those are some examples of what maturity might look like in those digital marketing areas. Again, the areas are audience, knowledge, social media, digital advertising, email marketing and online fundraising. Just some stuff to consider. So that’s the first half of this. The other, the other pieces are culture and habits. For me, these are some of the areas that I’m still actively thinking through. I’m happy to give you my thoughts right now and some of the definitions for the ones previously, you know, I had been able to write down and I have more loose form thoughts on culture and habits right now, but the five areas under culture that I think are worth considering are your capacity in staffing, learning, leadership, budget and vision & goals. So, I do think culture is important as a part of digital marketing maturity, because you could, I think in order to actually reach maturity in some of the things that I discussed earlier, the culture has to be in place to support that. So it’s going to be really hard to, for example, leverage marketing automation, which is an advanced email marketing strategy, if there isn’t sufficient buy in from leadership or there you’re there’s not any sort of ongoing learning on how to actually manage marketing automation. So, I think culture is important and it supports and a lot of these dimensions are kind of integrated, and they play off each other.

Spencer Brooks 23:32

So, the first one here to talk about is capacity and staffing, and that relates to how much your organization has in house versus not. So that could be, like, on a very basic level, the level one that could be, you have the accidental techie who’s doing everything, and the person who, you know, I don’t know, maybe they can just use Google Docs the best so you stuck them with the website and level five could be you have a whole in house digital team, and there’s a range in between there, but that’s those are some maturity levels for example there. With learning, it could range from, you know, staff members just have to do their own research, and they have to carve out time in their schedule to learn digital skills, and it’s just, it’s totally on them, it’s a fight to level five could be that you have a structured training program and budget and staff are regularly leveling up their digital skills, and you might even have, say, a digital skills matrix or something for them, so that it’s really clear how they can improve their skills when it comes to leadership, I think this is mainly about the buy in and where digital leadership happens, like the level one would be, you know, it’s just the tactical person, whoever’s responsible for the social media or the website, they’re providing the digital leadership. They’re responsible, and they’re the ones pushing for digital within the organization to level five might be, this is coming from the executive director or the CEO or the board is actually providing the digital leadership in the organization.

Spencer Brooks 25:17

Budget that could be from, you know, the level one is just like we’re basically paying, we’ve budgeted to keep the lights on like we’re paying for our website hosting, you know, so our website doesn’t go offline to, you know, all the way at level five, that might be, you know, we’ve dedicated a significant amount of our budget to, actually, to not just keep the lights on or but actually to we have room to innovate, and so that’s what budget might look like. In terms of vision and goals. I think sometimes that can range from we just either don’t have a clear sense of what success looks like in three years from now, or how you might measure that to you know, we’ve been able to articulate a clear vision of what success looks like three years from now. Here are the metrics that we’re going to use to track that, and we have a strategy to get there.

Spencer Brooks 26:16

So those are some cultural pieces. The last area here is habits. And I think this is an interesting one, because habit, you could have a great culture, but if the way that you’re operating your organizational habits are immature, then you also might get stifled in your efforts. So, under habits, we have another five categories. We have agility, your content delivery, your data and analytics, experimentation and documentation and so a couple things about each of these. So agility, this really relates to how quickly of a feedback cycle you’re working on. So level one in agility, probably looks like you’re doing mega projects that take years. You’re not really thinking about continuous improvement. It’s just, we have, you know, we’re undertaking these massive, you know, whatever these, you know, waterfall projects are right that it can take years sometimes. That’s level one and level five might look like we are using like agile or scrum principles within our organization to manage our marketing in, you know, these either bi weekly or monthly cycles, and there’s someone within our organization who’s leading that, and the whole marketing team is aligned around that, that schedule. In terms of content delivery, this mostly relates to how consistently you’re able to deliver content. So, it could range from we’re just never updating our social media feed or our website or resources to on the complete other end of the spectrum is that we have a detailed content calendar. This has been informed by the needs of our audience, and we’re hitting those targets. We have, you know, clear systems and processes in place to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. With data and analytics that is mostly related to, are you capturing data? Are you looking at it? Are you getting insights from it? Level one might be we’ve installed Google Analytics, or maybe not even that, and we’re not even sure what data we’re collecting or how to how to read that. And level five might be we have detailed dashboards set up, and we know our relevant data. We’re collecting it, we have a reporting schedule and cadence, and we’re gleaning insights from this data on a regular basis. And ideally, that’s maybe that data is integrated across multiple systems, so you’re getting not just a siloed view of what’s happening on the website, but that might be connected to your CRM or your email marketing, and you’re generating insights across touchpoints. It’s, you know, it’s advanced stuff, but certainly possible.

Spencer Brooks 28:24

Two more left here, and the second to last one is experimentation. Experimentation really relates to the culture in your organization of risk taking, and how easy it is for people to try new things. You could also call this innovation, I guess, it’s they’re kind of the two sides of the same coin. But the first level with that might be that people feel afraid to take risks, to try new things, and so you just don’t, you’re not trying new things. You’re always trying to find the safest, the safest bet and failure is punish yada yada yada, you get the point. Level five might look like, people in our organization feel empowered to try new things, to take risks or make educated guesses, and we are getting smarter. We’re figuring out what’s working, and we’re innovating as a result.

Spencer Brooks 30:22

And the last one here is a documentation and this one is kind of overlooked sometimes, honestly, this is one of the last ones that I added, but I think it’s pretty important, because you could be doing a lot of stuff right, and you get new people, and if what you have isn’t codified somewhere, with their documentation and how you operate in your processes, then you can start to drift as people change. So level one with that might be just, you know, we don’t have anything documented. We’re just training via word of mouth. Or people are doing things differently, and we don’t really have a standardized system to all the way at level five might be we have a detailed knowledge base or standardized, we have SOPs for our digital marketing efforts on how you do, how you make social media posts, or how you publish an email newsletter, how you update a website or add a new blog post, things like that and those things are, they’re not just left there, but they’re actually updated over time, and everyone is contributing to updating them.

Spencer Brooks 31:30

So those are the habits; agility, content delivery, data and analytics, experimentation and documentation. So those are, that’s, those are 20, the 20 categories. Those are a lot, you know, if you’re still listening, and I well, first of all, good job. I know that was, I just did a little bit of a data dump on you but I think that the that’s a really interesting way of thinking about your digital marketing maturity as a whole. And so this is, this is something that I hope that you are able to use and or that at least it sparks some thinking on it, Hey, I haven’t really considered this yet, or we might be really immature in this area. This is something that over at Brooks Digital that we’re developing into something called a Digital Scorecard. And the idea with that is to be able to profile organizations on these 20 different areas, and then be able to assign you your the different level, you know, from one to five in all those different areas. And then for you, that gives you the like I was talking about earlier, this roadmap on how to be able to improve your digital presence. Not just have definitions from, this is what it actually looks like to be a level five. But then how do you like? What steps do you take? Where do you start, what areas do you start in? And so it’s something that I’m pretty excited about. If you’re interested in that, feel free to reach out to me. Or, you know, the Brooks Digital website. You can use the contact form there as well. Or, if not, you know, I wanted to give this framework out and share the resources as well. So if you’re interested in using it at your own organization, with or without us, that you have that as this framework, this mental model.

Spencer Brooks 33:30

So that wraps up our show today. If you found this episode valuable, please consider rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you listen to Apple podcasts and Spotify or whatever. This show is also a part of the thought leadership of Brooks digital. Again, we’re a digital agency especially built for health nonprofits. We specialize in web strategy, design and development. So if you like this podcast, go check out our website at Brooks dot digital you can find more of our insights there and learn about our work