My Digital Leadership at CRUK

In the last year my department digitally upskilled more than 17 teams across Cancer Research UK making them able to manage and improve their own digital things, and experiment with new ideas and techniques themselves...meaning they've become modern marketers with better technology skills.

 We are doing this through our version of the Hub and Spoke model which explicitly devolves digital ownership and skills into the organisation, and, by creating our own digital products to enable this in a way that works for CRUK.

Digital Devolution through Hub and Spoke

A Spoke is a group of CRUK people who come together as a partnership from the digital team (the Hub) and business teams to deliver an outcome (using digital), and upskill the business team in digital ways of working and technical skills. Delivery and upskilling are equally important in a Spoke. 

As a result of Spokes, business team roles change gradually to accommodate digital ownership, and the delivery of outcomes speeds up. 

Some recent Spoke achievements include:
  • Walk All Over Cancer has already generated > £2.5 million fundraising; the concept itself and the website were developed and launched in under three weeks on the CRUK platform by non-digital CRUK colleagues who'd been upskilled through a Spoke.
  • Almost every Race for Life runner signs up through the website, and keeps up to date about their event and fundraising by email. There are around half a million runners each year, who raise around £50 million annually. Before being upskilled through a Spoke,the Race for Life team outsourced their email marketing and website, now they do this themselves and as a result have increased the proportion of Race runners who are actively fundraising..and have saved a huge amount of money!

Better Technology: CRUK's Digital Product Platform

We've finished creating our own products; they're reusable components that form the building blocks of our digital platform that give us standardised business and data processes for our customer interactions, and, they give upskilled teams across the charity the majority of the tools they need to achieve their outcomes.

Products re/launched in the last year include:
  • Payments which processes all CRUK's payment transactions that happen online  (donations, event entry fees, online fundraising donations, ecommerce payments) giving us full control of end-to-end payment processes and data, and has lowered our transaction costs.
  • Online Fundraising was previously outsourced to JustGiving and others, who charge fees and own the data and customer experience. Creating our own platform enabled us to better support and integrate the fundraiser journey and improve the customer experience, lower transaction costs by avoiding fees, and, keep ownership of the data.
  • Activity Management and Event Registration allow teams across CRUK to create customised sign-up journeys on demand for free, paid for and discounted events using standardised processes and data. These products save substantial costs, replacing multiple solutions and avoiding per-transaction fees through commercial event platforms.

Sharing Our Experience with the Digital World

We're proactively sharing our what we're learning about digital through our blog, our conference presentations, and the meet-ups we host in our offices. Here are a few example posts:

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