Above: The NetHope European Chapter met in beautiful Innsbruck, Austria for a Digital Responsibility Workshop hosted by The Center for the Digital Nonprofit held in February 2019.
By Fredrik Winsnes, Director, The Center for the Digital Nonprofit
The digital world has exponentially expanded over the past several years, but the skills we need to protect ourselves from nefarious elements have often not kept pace. We all have heard of data breaches that have hit the private sector, but what level of security does the nonprofit sector have and is the information they collect safe?
On February 20, 2019, the NetHope European Chapter met in beautiful Innsbruck, Austria. The Center for the Digital Nonprofit hosted a Digital Responsibility Workshop for our European members, attended by over 30 participants representing 17 organizations.
This was the second in a series of Digital Skills workshops that followed on the successful Data workshop held during the 2018 NetHope Summit in Dublin, Ireland. The Center for the Digital Nonprofit will be making available a series of workshops based on its Digital Skills Framework.
As we reported last year, the NetHope Digital Nonprofit Abilities™ (DNA) Assessment found the PEOPLE and PROCESS components the lowest scoring and in greatest need of addressing. As a result, the Digital Skills framework was developed that identified six critical Digital skills a nonprofit would need to successfully complete a Digital Transformation Journey. Without such foundational skills, any digital transformation attempt by a nonprofit would be severely hampered and face a high probability of failure.
Being Digitally Responsible means making conscious decisions about what you are doing while you are online and accept the consequences (results) of your action.
As a warm-up and ice-breaker exercise, the attendees were asked to rate their organization on a scale from 1-3 on where they felt their organization belonged based on the below statements:
Digital Responsibility 1.0
In your organization people work online with data, but don’t do a lot with that data. You have no confidence that people understand the vulnerabilities of sharing data online. Online work is susceptible to hacking and misuse, while a lack of basic security practices in your organization puts all online activities at risk
Digital Responsibility 2.0
In your organization, data easily shared between teams. Teams work together online, and there is a baseline of behaviors and activities to protect and secure information. However, security isn’t reviewed regularly, and you don’t do regular updates to online safety protocols. Sometimes it’s just easier to do the work than think about protection of information.
Digital Responsibility 3.0++
In your organization, you are very agile – you have extensive networks and use your data well, but also use external data. Your organization makes very conscious decisions about how data is handled online, and people receive regular security updates and protocol practice. Employees are Digitally Responsible as individuals and are committed to keeping information safe no matter where they are in the world.
The results of these workshops with examples and recommendations can be found in the Digital Responsibility Whitepaper. You can access the entire whitepaper here.
Stay tuned on the Center for the Digital Nonprofit on the NetHope Solutions Center and explore the DSFW Library for pointers to useful content and to contribute with feedback and suggestions.
Do you want to attend a Digital Responsibility workshop or hold one in your organization? Please contact digital@nethope.org
