How and why to establish a digital vision

A digital vision is your digital team's guiding document, serving as a 'North Star' to inform everything you work on. It's a concise, forward-thinking statement that outlines where you want to go. Having an agreed-upon destination then informs all your digital initiatives, ensuring they align with your overall strategy and mission.

If strategy is 'How you get there', then your vision is 'deciding where you're going'. It comes before strategy, because there's no point arguing over the best route until you've agreed where it is you want to get to.

It sounds simple, but large organisations have complex needs and competing sets of stakeholders, so getting the destination agreed in advance is extremely important and saves lots of time and money down the road by avoiding clashes further into the project.

Imagine you're kicking off a new website project (maybe if you're reading this, you really are!). Everyone's buzzing with ideas, making suggestions for new features that'll help their individual teams, and suddenly you are juggling a huge number of different and sometimes contradictory priorities. Sound familiar? This is where a digital vision comes in. It helps you cut through this noise and decide on a clear set of priorities agreed at the highest level. This document then helps guide the project over its entire lifetime, being referred to whenever a major strategic decision needs to be made.

A great example of how setting a digital vision up-front can be so useful over the lifespan of a project is our work with the University of London. We've worked with them over many years, supporting their website through multiple projects.

By getting a clear vision signed off at the vice-chancellor level, London’s digital team could stick to the institution's key priorities and push back against the inevitable tug-of-war between different departments. It allowed them to provide us with an extremely clear over-arching priority – student recruitment. We could factor this into every decision about how the website worked, from the visuals to the information architecture.

Without this guiding light, you might find your website turning into a battleground of competing interests. This can become especially tricky when it comes to the homepage. Almost every part of your organisation will want to be featured on your website's most valuable bit of digital real estate. But the best homepages don't try to showcase every single element of what you do all at once. Instead, they make tough decisions about priorities to present a single and focused narrative that shows what your organisation does whilst providing users with the information they arrive on your site to find.

A digital vision helps you prioritise what truly matters, ensuring your online presence reflects your organisation's core objectives. Take the SOAS homepage as an example.

This homepage does not seek to convey everything SOAS does. Its layout does not reflect a compromise between competing departments who all want a section about what they do. Instead, it shows what SOAS is about by presenting a single idea — 'what do curious minds ask?'.

This homepage is the result of a clear vision that allows SOAS's digital team to avoid clashes of opinion and prioritise the attributes they've decided will make them stand out.

Creating a digital vision is a collaborative process, and it must involve your organisation's leadership at the highest level.

We recommend arranging workshops with your executive leadership team to uncover their priorities. Your digital vision should translate those high-level organisational goals into concrete digital priorities.

This process is all about bridging the gap between those big, far-reaching organisational goals and the role digital can play in bringing them about. Let's take the example of an art gallery, where the executive team consider 'broadening access to culture' to be one of their key priorities. Your digital vision can take this important but potentially nebulous concept and set out how digital will help achieve it. For example, it might say the website must achieve an AA WCAG rating or that the website will survey users to understand their background, identify baselines, and understand what needs to be improved.

Digital visions are highly tailored to the needs of their organisation, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach. But there are certain factors that all great digital visions share. These are:

1. They're concise. Aim for two to three pages maximum. Any longer, and you risk overcomplicating things.
2. Align it tightly with your organisation's overall vision and strategy. It should be a natural extension of your broader goals, applied to digital means.
3. Focus on high-level strategic guidance, not tactical details. This isn't a creative brief or a technical specification. Those things are important, but adding them to your digital vision will dilute its purpose. Lay out your high-level goals and what the resulting digital product needs to accomplish, not the nitty-gritty of how you'll get there.
4. Make priorities crystal clear. Your vision should provide guidance on what priorities are the most crucial so that when you face a trade-off in the project, you know which choice will best reflect your most important goals.
5. Match your digital vision's timeline to your organisational objectives. If you're working with a five-year strategic plan, your digital vision should mirror that timeframe.

Running a big digital project without a digital vision is possible, but it invites problems further into the project and can be costly in the long run. Here's what can go wrong:

1. You might uncover fundamental differences of opinion far into the project, perhaps at the design stage. At this point, making changes becomes expensive and time-consuming as so much effort has already gone into the project.
2. Second-tier metrics may drive crucial decisions. Without a vision to cement your key priorities, tactical metrics can lead to campaigns dictating key decisions. For example, you might be a charity that provides mental health support to users in crisis, but your homepage might feature one-off donation drives because your team is chasing sign-up metrics that, whilst important, aren't what your organisation exists to deliver. This results in a poor user experience because you lost sight of your most crucial objectives.
3. You risk investing in the wrong places. Digital projects often require long-term commitments, like hiring and training specialised teams. These decisions can't be made overnight. A solid digital vision helps you identify gaps in your capabilities early on, allowing you to make informed, strategic decisions about resource allocation. You don't want to invest in hiring a digital specialist, only to find you don't need them further into the project, or realise you desperately need a certain kind of support and need to hire expensive consultants to plug the gap.

A digital vision keeps you focused, aligns your team, and ensures that your digital efforts are contributing meaningfully to your organisation's broader goals. In our experience it will invariably save time, effort and money by preventing the problems laid out in the last section.

Crafting a great digital vision isn't easy. That's where we can help. We've developed digital visions for a wide range of purpose-driven organisations, and our team know how to translate your executive team's high-level organisational objectives into digital goals. Get in touch via [email protected] to discuss how we can help develop a digital vision for your organisation. Your digital presence—and your stakeholders—will thank you for it.