Digital Strategy for Charity: HLA

Humanitarian Leadership Academy, part of Save the Children

The Humanitarian Leadership Academy is a global charity that provides education and training in developing countries, specifically in order to prepare for and respond to crises. 

As part of the Save the Children fund, HLA provides the people on the ground with cutting-edge technology in locations such as East Africa, the Philippines, the Middle East and Bangladesh.

The digital problem facing the charity 

The problem which arose for HLA was that their existing learning management software was not easy to use. Though the front end of the system looked great, the back-end was difficult to moderate and didn’t perform as expected, impacting the day-to-day runnings globally.

Unfortunately, an entire replacement of the system would have taken too much time and expense for the charity. Therefore, it was decided to run a workshop to uncover different steps to success, using the same or similar framework.

Developing a charity digital strategy 

Bliss was selected to undertake a Digital Discovery workshop thanks to our comprehensive brief and variety of experience behind our digital strategies - using the opinions of developers, designers, marketers and strategists, to create well-rounded and practical steps to success.

Digital discovery workshop

We broke the workshop into two parts with the overall aim to deliver a digital strategy aligned to the Humanitarian Leadership Academy’s objectives and how to improve the software.

During the 1st discovery phase, we spoke at length to fully understand the charity - from daily operations to values and goals. 

In the 2nd phase, we explored ideas and digital solutions for the seven opportunity areas HLA wanted to improve, to form a strategy.

Results of the strategy workshop

• The workshop was completed in just 1 day, keeping the sessions highly focused to minimise time disruption for the charity.
• Bliss created an in-depth report detailing the workshop’s findings, proposed digital strategy and clear action plan, to be shared amongst HLA’s key stakeholders  
• Multiple tutorials and software options (at different price points) were suggested per opportunity area, so HLA could choose the solutions which worked for them
• Questions HLA had posed were answered in detail to give a greater understanding of the problems and how to fix them
• A strategy that would utilise the existing in-house team as much as possible was proposed

With a clear strategy in place, HLA was able to start making some digital changes that wouldn’t break the bank but would solve their initial problems.

Putting a digital strategy into action

Thanks to the success of the first stage of the project, HLA decided to enlist the help of Bliss again to action part of the strategy.

Regarding the poor-performing learning management software, our recommendation had been to provide a validated roadmap of improvements using the opinions and experiences of real users. 

HLA chose Bliss to set up an ambitious project which involved recruiting users from countries across 4 continents, remote tests, video interviews, data analysis and a report outlining results and recommendations.

From this report, HLA was able to determine how they could make important changes to the software without wasting money on fixes that would be unimportant to the end-user.

HLA’s Digital Strategy results

The end of this project saw HLA in a much stronger position and knowing how to proceed digitally. 

They had both a clear roadmap to fix the problematic software based on the opinions of global users and digital strategies and software recommendations for other opportunity areas.

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