Planning to go online

Skills and resources

A small or medium sized organisation may not have all of the skills and resources necessary to manage and implement all aspects of its digital strategy. However, there is a strong and competitive supply of these skills in the marketplace.

For example, developing a sophisticated website can be a complex task, depending on your requirements and expectations. Some of the tasks, including website design and development, can require specialist expertise. It may be best to engage specialist skills and resources to deliver any components of your digital strategy that fall outside the direct experience and capabilities of your internal staff. Even when you have appropriately qualified staff, it can sometimes be appropriate to outsource some activities, for example to allow the internal staff to focus on other activities. Using external specialists might also assist in ensuring that your website benefits from the latest trends and complies with current standards.

Doing it yourself or outsourcing

There is no exact rule as to what you should do yourself and what you should outsource. However, in general you may want to consider the following:

• Skills and resources—evaluate whether you have the right knowledge, experience, and tools in your organisation to implement your digital strategy.
• Costs—compare the costs of doing it yourself with the cost of outsourcing certain online services. It is important to ensure that when you are obtaining quotes for the outsourcing of comparable activities that all costs are included in the quotations you receive.  Always get quotes from multiple suppliers and compare their offerings.
• Continuity—once you choose to engage with your customers, supporters, donors or suppliers online, they will likely come to expect this channel to always be open to them as a way to communicate with your organisation. Consequently, any digital strategy represents a long term commitment. Whether doing it yourself or outsourcing, ensure that you have a strategy for the long term continuity of your investment, including ongoing capacity to access and support your own content.
• Mixed strategy—in most cases, both doing it yourself and outsourcing of different activities will be required. Whilst you must take responsibility for developing your requirements or the functional specification (no-one knows your business and expectation better than you and this is what you will measure your contractors’ deliverables against), you might consider, for example, delegating the web design to professional experts and technical development to experienced HTML developers.  As noted above, it is prudent to be clear with your outsourcing partners about your expectations for the scope of ongoing support and maintenance of your investment.

Outsourcing strategy

When engaging outsourcing partners you should generally consider the following.

• Evaluation process—you can use the same set of requirements or functional specifications to request commercial offers from several potential suppliers. This will give you an opportunity to evaluate and compare their prices, responsiveness and customer service, the overall quality of their proposal, compliance with your requirements, additional suggestions, references and commercial terms and conditions.
• Location—While many overseas companies offer attractive pricing, consider what impact time differences may have on your ability to collaborate in real-time. Legal protection can also become an issue with companies located outside your own jurisdiction.
• Ownership—it is important to come to a clear understanding about who owns or controls the intellectual property that is used within your project. For example, you will probably want to control the rights to content, graphic design or brands that are developed by contractors for use in your project. Your contractor may want to control the rights to any processes or technologies used in the project. You will need to agree with the contractor about who is responsible for licensing any third party material used in the project and make sure appropriate permissions are obtained.
• Confidentiality—protect important information from being disclosed publicly by securing appropriate contracts with third party suppliers as well as your own staff.
• Legal—both parties should sign a legal agreement covering compliance with terms addressing specifications, deliverables, timing, variations of orders, intellectual property rights and confidentiality, among other things specific to your needs.