Spring 2026 digital leaders' retrospective

In April we hosted one of our regular digital leaders’ retrospectives: a chance for digital folk from across the charity sector to get together, share what’s been going on for them and offer a word of support or inspiration. Here are some of the themes and tips that cropped up this time.

Ever-increasing demands, never-increasing capacity

There’s a sense in the air, across the sector, that people are working harder and even approaching burnout. The demands aren’t likely to stop, so how do we protect ourselves and our colleagues?

One aspect of this is feeling like the single point of failure. Digital practitioners often end up feeling like the single point of failure, with sole responsibility for a range of channels or outputs. There might not even be anyone else who could take these things on. It’s a fragile position to be in, and it keeps you up at night. In this scenario, finding ways to decentralise, share responsibility and empower others can have all sorts of benefits.

But whatever the size of your team, resources are always limited and there’s only so much you can do.

How to prioritise, and whether to push back

Digital teams are small, and you’re often expected to be experts in everything: from social to new technologies to pay-per-click marketing. It’s a lot to cover. One team conducted an exercise to map out what the hours look like in the team for the following few months, revealing that they were at over 100% of their capacity. But there was still nothing that was an obvious candidate for removal.

In these situations, involving senior management in your decisions about what can be deprioritised can be invaluable.

It’s also worth thinking abouthow to push back. Saying no to people doesn’t help your relationships across the organisation. It can also often mean people going ahead anyway, but without your cooperation. Finding ways to say yes differently – “We can absolutely support you with this, but let’s work together to plan how it can fit in” – keeps things feeling collaborative.

The role of the digital team

Another theme was a real determination to use digital teams’ expertise, experience and insight, not just treating them as a service delivery department. In one very familiar example, for any given problem, senior leadership would assume “AI can do that…” when actually there’s a lot of nuance involved, and digital colleagues have the experience to think it through with you.

In another, there was a lot of excitement about the introduction of a new project management tool, but only in most of the organisation. So, the hoped-for new seamless information flow was not quite what appeared. But people don’t change behaviours against their will; you can’t just impose a new system. This is where getting the digital team in to look at everyone’s needs and walk the journey alongside people might have helped.

New strategies can be a good opportunity

It feels as though there’s always a new organisational strategy just been implemented or just around the corner. The strategic development phase is the perfect opportunity to embed digital properly, not as an afterthought. One of the questions should always be: How can digital help us meet these aims?

And as the digital world grows ever more complex, organisations’ approaches are maturing, with a growing understanding that each approach has its own purpose. Paid and targeted campaigns work differently from organic social media, for example.

Where and how are we reaching people?

Across the sector, website traffic has gone down year-on-year. As well as being demotivating, it’s difficult to explain to senior leaders. Engagement might remain good, and donations might remain high, but boards are still worried by shrinking visit numbers.

What might be the reasons for this? Two very likely culprits are new cookie policies and AI search summaries, but these possible causes lead to very different conclusions. If it’s a cookie issue, then all that’s likely happening is that a higher proportion of your traffic isn’t being recorded. If it’s about search summaries then yes, your traffic likely has really dropped, but some version of your key messages might still be getting out there.

Writing for humans vs writing for machines

A big issue at the moment is whether, and how, to adapt website content to better serve AI-based search. Some, for example, are moving more ‘About us’-type content onto the front page. Others are starting to rewrite their content into more succinct question-and-answer formats. But optimising in this way is a trade-off: “How do we keep authenticity on the website in light of AI search?”

As with so many other things, ultimately, understanding our audiences, and their needs and behaviours, is at the heart of how to respond to this.

Social platforms each need different approaches

Over on social, Bluesky still isn’t really filling the hole that Twitter/X has left. It needs a specific strategy, and there isn’t always the time or money to spend on it.

But ads on LinkedIn have been performing well for some, delivering low cost-per-result and good impression numbers. The key has been to target a very specific audience, tailored to each specific campaign, ideally complemented by a one-to-one engagement campaign.

New tools

People remain interested in using AI to improve productivity, despite differing levels of skill and understanding. One thing that was really helpful was a training session with an external consultancy to get everyone to a level of shared understanding. This made it easier to write a policy that specified which tools people should and shouldn’t use, narrowing down the options and reducing the sense of overwhelm.

One organisation is looking into automated ways to flag photos whose licenses have expired. This is the sort of thing that’s usually done manually - prone to error, and a lot of repetitive work. It’s been a great success and now they’re considering what other systems they might automate. “The more you look at it, the more you realise you could do with it.”

And in terms of externally-facing tools, a lovely win from a simple change: improving and relocating the postcode search option on one charity’s homepage led to a 225% increase in people searching for help in their local area. More people are getting the help they need more easily.

New collaborations

Some of the biggest wins are coming from new ways of working, not with tools or platforms, but with each other.

Bringing a cross-organisational partnership approach to social media has been really promising. In an organisation delivering many different help services in many different places, better collaboration means teams can reach new audiences and often support them earlier, before they reach rock bottom.

In another charity, a regular “pipeline call” has been helpful: sharing opportunities across the organisation rather than keeping them siloed within departments. It’s led to many more opportunities to collaborate.

And, in a campaigning charity, partnering with a social media influencer for the first time was a great success. It needed the whole organisation, including senior leadership, to buy into it, but reached a whole range of new, engaged audiences who really cared about the cause.

It underlines something we always say at William Joseph, but came through particularly clearly in this discussion: digital projects, like almost anything else worthwhile, are ultimately about people and the connections between them. Keeping that in mind is how you make a difference.

Say hello

We’re always keen to meet new people at our regular digital retros and other events. If you fancy joining us, or if you just want to chat about any of this, get in touch. I’m always keen to say hello.