This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 09 November 2009

If you work in a digital team in a big organisation you’ll be familiar with this scenario:

Someone you haven’t met before phones you and says something like:

“I’m working on [insert strategy/product/policy/event]. We’ll need a website. How do we get one?”

Your instant reaction might be “No chance. How about using the extensive web presence we’ve already got?”  but you don’t say it quite like that. You say something like: “That’s interesting. Tell me what it is you want to achieve?”

How do you turn this scenario into an outcome that satisfies everyone? It’s not something we’ve always got right in the Foreign Office in the past. Here are some ideas:

1. Have a coherent online strategy

You need to do this before you receive the phone call. But if you don’t have a positive vision for how you intend to use the web as an organisation, you’re not going to be able to convince anyone to follow your advice.

So set it down. And make sure it’s ambitious.

If you work in UK government, the Transformational Government website rationalisation programme actually makes it pretty hard to set up new government websites. But you need to offer your excited policy team more constructive reasons to follow your advice than saying “the Cabinet Office won’t let you”.

In the Foreign Office our digital strategy, policy and guidance is all published on our digital diplomacy website. This includes our vision for digital engagement and outreach into other spaces, as well as explaining how we benefit from a single web domain for all our official sites.

2. Don’t say no

It’s likely the people that want new websites are exactly the people you want to be working closely with – finding people who have ambitious ideas about how they might use an online presence should be a blessing for any digital team.

And maybe their definition of “website” is actually compatible with your vision of an integrated online presence.

So find out what it is they want to achieve. They might present a compelling case. You might be able to offer them something much better. But you need to work with them – saying no isn’t a good way to start.

3. Demonstrate what you can offer

In the Foreign Office our web platform is home to 255 official sites in 40 languages. And we’ve delivered effective digital campaigns that mainly make use of online spaces that other people run. We’ve thought very carefully how to present the work of the office online. So we can usually demonstrate what can be done by showing what we’ve done already.

So for example, we have already thought about how to present foreign policy campaigns and big cross government campaigns, partnerships with NGOs, and policy engagement on subjects that aren’t really campaigns, and content about the UK and one other country, and content about multilateral organisations. We have plenty of good precedents, and we have case studies, evaluation reports and a whole bunch of people we’ve worked closely with in the past to draw on.

4. Share your methods

However good your internal comms, it’s likely that a lot of people in your organisation don’t really understand what the digital team actually does.

In the Foreign Office we spend a lot of time explaining what we mean by “digital diplomacy”. We know that staff don’t understand what a digital campaign manager does in the same way that they understand what a press officer does.

So you may need to demonstrate what your team actually offers. For us that means talking through our digital diplomacy method (listen, publish, engage, evaluate), offering to run workshops for policy teams, and demonstrating what we’ve done for other teams or campaigns.

5. Offer to help them produce a wider digital strategy

Sometimes people think they need a website, but actually just need some help thinking through how they might use the web to meet their objectives. Sometimes a request for a new website might turn into an online marketing strategy, or a blog, or a set of digital partnerships.

As a digital team you should be able to offer them something better than they imagined. By combining their enthusiasm to do something and your expertise you’ll be well on the way to doing brilliant work.

You can help them to work through this by developing a comprehensive digital strategy for their project. It doesn’t need to be long. We use a set of 5 headings for our digital campaign strategies: Context, Objectives, Audience, Activity, Evaluation. 1 side of A4 is usually enough.

6. Be realistic about resources

The person making the request for a new website might not have considered the resources it takes to maintain it.

And you might find that by sharing all this expertise and good practice, you end up with a long list of tasks to deliver yourself. You might be very happy with this, but if you have other priorities you’ll need to decide how you’re going to deliver them all.

You don’t need to take all the actions yourself. Some campaigns will need full time staff to deliver them – if you want to run an online community then you’ll probably need to recruit a full time community manager. If you want to update web content every day, then you probably need to train some new devolved editors. If you’re recommending personal digital outreach or blogs then you need to be clear about they time it will take for staff to carry this out.

Digital engagement often comes with no technology cost. We often run big ambitious digital campaigns in the Foreign Office without spending any money on technology. The main resource is usually staff time, and you shouldn’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to deliver successful digital campaigns.

7. Set up a new website

If you’re done all of this and you conclude that it’s the right thing to do, then you should set up a new website. That’s exactly what we did for our London Summit campaign, and it’s kind of what we’re about to do with our cross government Afghanistan content, although both sites make use of existing platforms and are part of wider engagement strategies.

So there you go. A 7 point plan to avoid your heart sinking at the moment that you ought to be delighted by a new opportunity to work on something brilliant. I’d be interested to hear what you do when you take the “new website” call.