Digital strategy development for creative and cultural organisations: A step-by-step guide
Developing a robust digital strategy is essential for creative and cultural organisations to thrive when having to achieve a lot with limited resources. A digital strategy allows you to connect with your audiences more effectively and helps to ensure that you are well positioned for growth and well prepared for change. Here’s how creative and cultural organisations can build a strategic plan that aligns with their values and vision, providing clear actions and outcomes to make meaningful change happen.
This article is intended to function as a step-by-step checklist as you plan, develop and execute your digital strategy. Along the way, you’ll find links to resources and articles that provide context, additional advice, and frameworks you can use for each stage of the strategy.
The planning tools document contains templates for all the models and methods referenced in this article.
Stage 1. The purpose
Defining your purpose is the first step in strategic planning because it provides a clear long-term direction, aligns decision-making, and establishes a framework that makes sure all efforts contribute to achieving sustainable, overarching goals.
- Clarify your vision: Where do you want to get to? A digital strategy is about forward thinking. What is your organisation’s purpose and the role you play in the cultural landscape? What future do you envision for your organisation in the digital space? It’s crucial to start your strategy by revisiting your vision statement. Understanding your core purpose will inform every decision you make. Whatever your vision, ensure it aligns with your broader organisational goals and reflects the digital opportunities available.
- Embrace your values: What matters most to you? Values are the guiding principles that steer your organisation. For creative and cultural institutions, these could include making a commitment to areas like creativity, diversity, accessibility, sustainability, or any unique cause that is important to you or your organisation. As you map out your digital strategy, make sure your values are reflected in the technologies you choose, the platforms you adopt, the content you produce, and the user experiences that people will have.
- Define your targets: Who’s it for? Understanding your stakeholders and their needs is fundamental in developing a digital strategy. By defining key audience and/or user groups, you can tailor outputs to be more relevant, shape your marketing and communication tactics, and maximise reach, value, and impact. A sustainable strategy must target the centre of both business and stakeholder needs.
Stage 2. The strategy
To successfully implement a digital strategy, you need to map out how you’ll do it. This will involve planning specific steps and actions, and what skills, people or tools you’ll need, as well as creating the right conditions for change to happen.
- Establish your options: How will you get there? With your vision and values in place, it’s time to define your strategic intent. You can now translate your long-term goals into actionable steps. What specific digital initiatives will drive your organisation towards your desired future? For example, you might aim to refresh your website, take a new approach to how you store and distribute content, or do more with your data and marketing contacts. Clear, practical steps are crucial. Prioritisation is inevitable.
- Create conditions for change: What do you need to make this work? Change doesn’t happen on its own – it requires the right knowledge, resources and support. What do you need to put in place to make your digital strategy a reality? This could include investing in new technologies, securing partnerships, or upskilling staff. Consider the infrastructure, tools, and people that will power your digital transformation.
- Reality check your strategies: Identifying your limitations and opportunities? To successfully execute best laid plans, you must identify the key factors that will affect your ability to implement your digital transformation effectively, or even at all. These could include anything from security concerns to supplier relationships to maintenance costs. Digital transformation isn’t just about adopting new technologies – it’s about augmenting human capacity and skill. Is the culture within your organisation supportive of and willing to change? Does your team have the flexibility to adapt to new ways of working? A supportive, open-minded culture will be essential in driving your strategy forward.
Stage 3. The design
Your digital strategy will have better focus if you can define specific, attainable targets and metrics that will result from it. You’re now ready to bring it all together in a roadmap that communicates your goals, progress, and roles, ensuring alignment and measurable outcomes throughout the process.
- Set attainable goals: What do you need to achieve? It’s essential to set measurable targets to track the success of your digital strategy. What are the tangible outcomes you want to achieve? For example, you might aim to grow your email database, attract new audiences to an online exhibition, or increase ticket sales by a certain percentage. Defining these targets will help guide your efforts and provide benchmarks for success. But you should ensure these goals are realistic – most things don’t improve without either doing something more effectively, or devoting more resources and time to it.
- Confirm your success metrics: How will you measure success? How will you know if your digital strategy is working? Identifying the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for monitoring progress. These might include increased website traffic, improved customer feedback or growth in engagement on key marketing channels. Regularly assessing these metrics will allow you to adjust as needed to stay on track.
- Develop a roadmap: How will you communicate your strategy? Finally, a digital strategy is only effective if it’s communicated clearly to all stakeholders, and they are clear about their specific actions and responsibilities. Create a roadmap that outlines your goals, timelines, and roles, ensuring everyone involved understands their responsibilities. When you can share your strategy across your team and embed it into daily working, you create a common language that has the potential to align forces more tightly and encourage collaboration more freely – I like to call this ‘a growth culture’.
Stage 4. Review the plan
Have you sense checked your strategy? Your digital strategy will form the central blueprint for your work for a long period of time. To ensure that your strategy is set up for success, it’s important to regularly evaluate whether it aligns with your organisation’s goals and values, and whether it’s primed for long-term impact.
Here is a five-point checklist to guide your reflection and evaluation.
- Is the plan aligned across teams and agreed by all stakeholders? A successful digital strategy requires buy-in from all departments and stakeholders. Ensure that everyone, from leadership to creative teams, understands the vision and objectives of the strategy. Alignment across teams ensures smooth execution and a collective commitment to shared goals.
- Is the plan audience-focused? Your digital strategy must put your audiences at the centre of your approach. Is your plan designed to engage and connect with your community or target demographics in meaningful ways? Ensure that audience needs, motivations, and behaviours are considered in every aspect of the strategy.
- Is the plan realistic and attainable? While ambition is important, your strategy must be achievable. Are the goals you’ve set within your organisation’s capacity in terms of budget, resources, and expertise? Assess whether the timeline and objectives are realistic, and be confident you have the right resources and training in place to bring them to fruition.
- Is the plan scalable, robust, and relevant? Digital landscapes evolve rapidly. Does your strategy allow for growth and flexibility over time? It should be scalable to accommodate future growth and robust enough to withstand unexpected challenges and changes that out of your control. It must also stay relevant as both technological trends and audience needs shift.
- Is the plan intuitive and easy to understand? A complex, unclear strategy will hinder your organisation’s ability to execute it effectively. Ensure that your plan is straightforward and easy for all team members to grasp, from those implementing it to those providing oversight. Simplicity is key in ensuring clarity of direction and smooth implementation.
Regularly assessing these questions will help ensure that your digital strategy stays on track, is relevant to your organisation’s goals, and is primed for success in a dynamic and evolving digital landscape.
Creating a digital strategy for your creative or cultural organisation is not just about adopting new technology – it’s about weaving digital transformation into the fabric of your vision, values, team culture and attitudes. By following these five steps, you can ensure that your digital strategy is purposeful, impactful, and well aligned with your vision for the future.
The planning tools document contains templates for all the models and methods referenced in this article.
Further support
The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free one-to-one support to all creative and cultural organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up for our newsletter below and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter) @ace_dcn for the latest updates.
