In this post, we explore how good digital governance helps organizations build capacity to support sustainability efforts and drive long-term business success. We also share tips on how to improve digital governance practices without throwing your operations into a tailspin. 

At Mightybytes, some of the most common client challenges we see arise from a lack of effective digital governance:

• Constrained resources or inadequate staffing wreak havoc on an organization’s ability to effectively manage its digital products and services and foster more resilient operations.
• Problems also arise from challenges in the organization’s culture or leadership, specifically in policies and procedures (or lack thereof) related to digital products and services.
• Sometimes, these problems stem from an unethical agency partner in their digital supply chain. This is especially challenging since solutions are often out of the organization’s control and can require costly fixes. 

Unfortunately, these challenges can undermine the organization’s viability, seeping into every aspect of its operations. Let’s explore how.

Defining Digital Governance

Digital governance is a framework for establishing accountability, roles, and decision-making authority for an organization’s digital presence—which means its websites, mobile sites, social channels, and any other Internet and Web-enabled products and services.

— Lisa Welchman, What is Digital Governance?

Digital governance refers to the policies and practices an organization uses to manage digital products and services over time. It is an often overlooked and undervalued discipline that has become increasingly important as technology is more ubiquitous in how we run organizations. 

But good digital governance isn’t just for the IT team. It helps people in any department make more informed decisions, track progress against their goals, improve business practices, reduce costs, and boost efficiency. Clear digital governance policies and procedures create consensus, help teams build skills and capacity, and provide numerous other benefits for organizations of any size from any sector. 

More importantly, digital sustainability requires the rigor of good governance. This is especially true in digital marketing, where teams often cobble together various third-party products, services, and suppliers to quickly—and affordably—find solutions to common business challenges. 

Unfortunately, this ad-hoc approach usually undermines sustainability efforts. Before long, things can get messy. 

Bad Governance = Command & Control

Poor digital governance has a few common characteristics:

1. Fear of failure: An organization’s culture doesn’t embrace failure or uncertainty as learning opportunities, but rather instills a ‘cover your ass’ mindset for fear of repercussions. This is very common in overly hierarchical organizations. 
2. Overplanning: As a result, teams overplan large projects, ostensibly to reduce risk. However, this usually comes at a steep price when priorities shift (which they always do).
3. Outputs vs. outcomes: This also leads to organizations prioritizing outputs over outcomes. Unfortunately, measurable long-term success usually depends on the latter.
4. Resources: Perhaps most importantly, a poorly governed organization doesn’t sufficiently resource important initiatives that help them build capacity, like training and upskilling, good product management based on continuous improvement, and so on. 
5. Quick Fixes: Similarly, quick fixes—often in the form of software subscriptions, plugin purchases, or, more recently, AI tools—are prioritized over long-term solutions under the guise of saving time and money. Unfortunately, this shortsighted approach usually leads to adverse consequences down the line.
6. Policies: Finally, the lack of clear policies to support an organization’s purpose can lead to confusion among teams, which breaks down trust, causes employee attrition, and undermines the organization’s long-term viability. 

Consequences: Paying the Price for Poor Digital Governance

Some of the consequences that can arise from items noted above include: 

• Vanity goals: Sometimes, digital projects and campaigns don’t focus on goals that are meaningful to the organization, resulting in lost revenue. In fact, many digital marketing “best practices” often rely on abysmal success rates of 2% or less.
• Accountability: With so many third-party services, providers, and so on, teams become reactive rather than proactive while playing a game of organizational hot potato around ownership and accountability.
• Attrition: In turn, high employee attrition and turnover rates due to a lack of clear policies create a dysfunctional workplace culture where everything’s an emergency and long-term goals are often ignored to deal with short-term problems. 
• Technical debt: Similarly, poorly managed digital products and services build up technical debt and undermine sustainability efforts, which costs the organization money. 
• Penalties: Deeper consequences include stiff financial penalties, or even lawsuits, especially related to web accessibility, data privacy, or other emerging legislation, like responsible AI laws.

Good Governance = Collaborate & Consent

On the other hand, well-governed organizations embrace failure, put innovation practices in place, and set their teams up for long-term success with adequate resources and clear but flexible policies driven by continuous learning and improvement. 

Good governance within these organizations can be identified by the following characteristics:

1. Stakeholder representation: These organizations understand their stakeholders and invite them into the creation process in ways that respect diverse perspectives and share decision-making power.
2. Growth mindset: Shared learning and skills-building are priorities across the organization. 
3. Collaboration & experimentation: Teams know how to effectively collaborate and share permission to innovate without fear of repercussions from failed experiments. 
4. Tooling: Teams have the right tools in place to help them grow, learn, and build capacity over time. 
5. Measuring what matters: Finally, continuous improvement is driven by clear metrics that can be benchmarked over time to show progress and pivot quickly from failed experiments.

These organizations show that digital strategy and impact strategy don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Clear transformation policies and practices can support sustainability goals while providing operational benefits as well. 

Forms of Digital Governance

From managing software subscriptions to improving marketing operations, digital governance takes many forms. Here are a few common examples. 

Content Governance

Many organizations have dysfunctional relationships with their content. The web is riddled with millions of pages and posts that underperform or are never read, managed, edited, or improved. 

Content governance applies more sustainable management principles to content creation, publishing, and marketing. It includes: 

• Content workflows: The multi-step processes organizations use to create and publish web content. 
• Editorial guidelines: Tools, resources, and documentation used to maintain content consistency across an organization. 
• Content audits: Regular content performance assessments that help an organization maintain quality standards and serve stakeholders. 
• Other tactics, like calendar planning, social media strategies, search engine optimization, and more…

This blog contains many posts on various aspects of content governance. To get started, try reading How to Create a Content Governance Plan or review our full list of governance posts. 

Data Governance

Similarly, some organizations struggle to effectively manage and maintain the data they use for business intelligence. This is especially true in marketing, where Big Tech platforms encourage poor data governance to drive their business models. 

In the face of ever-changing regulatory policies around data privacy and ethics and sustainability concerns about AI, organizations should consider adopting more sustainable data strategies in tandem with overall digital governance efforts. This will help them better govern data they collect, use, and perhaps most importantly, dispose of.

For more information on data governance, read Sustainable Data Governance for Marketers. 

Marketing Ops

Also, we can’t cover digital governance without including marketing operations (MOps). Marketing Ops teams are responsible for supporting policies and systems that enable marketers to effectively do their jobs. 

Since so much of modern marketing is enabled by technology, impactful MOps govern the complexity of marketing technology and ensure that it works as needed for the organization to meet its marketing goals. 

Too often, especially in small businesses, startups, or nonprofits, we see these practices siloed in IT departments. This causes untold problems for marketers and the organization in general.

Product Management

Similarly, good governance is required to effectively manage the digital products an organization creates and manages, like websites, smartphone apps, progressive web apps, and so on. Product management functions within organizations are rarely successful without it. 

Product managers go to lengthy measures to operationalize policies and practices that help them make product improvements over time. This saves their organizations time, money, and resources while also helping them build capacity and create long-term value for customers, including those with disabilities.

In addition to the examples above, WebOps, DevOps, DesignOps, and other operational frameworks used to manage digital products and services are all forms of digital governance. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you might employ one, several, or all of these frameworks.

Seven Digital Governance Practices to Build Capacity

The rate of advance and increasing scale and complexity of digital systems present challenges for government and industry to promote sustainable digital growth and development, particularly as it relates to reduced inequalities, decent work, and responsible consumption and production within the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

— Governance Strategies for a Sustainable Digital World

With all this being said, if digital governance is so important, why are many organizations so terrible at it? Is it organizational bureaucracy? Workplace culture? Human nature? We’d venture a guess that it’s all of the above. 

In other words, if we’re going to redefine success in marketing so our industry can help organizations thrive while also prioritizing ethics and sustainability, good governance needs to be central to these efforts. 

With that in mind, here are seven ways to help you build capacity while embracing good digital governance practices.

1. Create a Digital Governance Strategy

First, define a digital governance strategy that will set your organization up for long-term success. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just something to get you started. Inevitably, you’ll improve it over time.

Build equity into the process by including those who might be impacted by this strategy in the creation process. If possible, do this in a collaborative workshop setting where said stakeholders can voice their ideas and concerns and help co-create your approach.

Remember, make it flexible. Create guidelines that can grow, change, and evolve as your needs do. Prepare just enough materials to build consensus, then test your new strategy out with a few lightweight experiments. More on this below.

Specific tactics: 

• Stakeholder mapping: Start by understanding the stakeholders in your business ecosystem. Conduct stakeholder research to understand how they interact with one another.
• Task force: Next, create a task force of representatives from key stakeholder groups to ensure diverse perspectives are represented. 
• Problem-framing: Frame the primary governance problem(s) you hope to address so everyone is clear on objectives, goals, potential obstacles, and so on.
• Identify metrics: Identify the metrics that matter to define success in these efforts. You don’t have to measure everything, just what’s important for success. 
• Workshop it: Most importantly, workshop your strategy with stakeholders and ensure the task force revisits it every few months so it remains viable over time. 

2. Set a Measurable Baseline

Next, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Learn where you are today to understand where you need to go by starting with a measurable baseline. This typically requires auditing the organization’s existing digital governance efforts (if applicable) to see where you stand. 

Once you understand the baseline, set the task of measuring improvements over time. If you’re starting fresh, use the points provided in this post to identify digital governance metrics that are important to your organization. 

Specific tactics: 

• Risk assessment: Run an audit and/or risk assessment on digital governance practices. This could be done as part of a more ambitious digital life cycle assessment process.
• Stakeholder interviews: Conduct stakeholder interviews to understand how digital governance might impact workflows, capacity, and so on.
• Baby steps: Identify low-hanging tasks that you can address quickly with few resources. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t overdo it right out of the gate.
• Incremental improvements: Using the baseline, progress to larger, longer term items in the assessment as time, resources, and capacity allow. More on this below.

3. Sustainable Technology Foundations

Third, you need a marketing technology stack that can evolve and grow as your needs do. Digital sustainability principles should drive this process toward more responsible solutions. 

Plus, using open source over proprietary tools can help reduce costs. To that end, give back to the open source community by sharing tools, resources, and solutions you devise.

Next, ensure that technology requirements are aligned with organizational goals and not impulse purchase decisions to cover an immediate need. Digital governance becomes especially critical when you need to manage and maintain this technology foundation over time. 

Specific tactics: 

• Tools audit: First, audit the tools you currently use. Are there any you don’t need or use often?
• Sustainability: Use sustainability criteria to screen which third-party products, services, or suppliers are or aren’t aligned with your business and impact goals. Do they have the features you need to be successful? 
• Suppliers & partners: Next, shift misaligned contracts to more responsible partners that are aligned with both business and impact goals.
• Ethical supply chain: Finally, devise a longer term plan to migrate to more ethical suppliers as solutions and features become available.

4. Training and Upskilling

Few things will help you build organizational capacity better than a clear training and knowledge management strategy for stakeholders. This is especially important in a constantly changing technology landscape.

Appointing and appropriately resourcing a cross-disciplinary task force that’s empowered to manage this process will help to ensure that training and upskilling remain priorities throughout the organization. 

Specific tactics: 

• Training budget: Create a budget line item for training and shared learning if you don’t already have one.
• Knowledge base: Build a knowledge base to ensure stakeholders know where to find resources and information and new employees can learn the tools you use to run the organization. 
• Skill-sharing: Build opportunities for team members to cross-train and share new skills during dedicated meetings and workshops.
• Upskilling: Educate and upskill team members as opportunities arise and resources allow.
• Check-ins: Finally, schedule regular check-ins with team members to understand how useful the new skills and tools actually are.

5. Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Housing your media assets in a central repository promotes good governance. Plus, if graphics, media, documents, and other files are appropriately tagged and categorized, you can save time, money, and resources on production. 

These typically third-party subscription services range in price and features. If possible, find one you can grow with. For instance, a shared Google Drive folder might work in the beginning. However, as your team’s needs grow you might require a more robust solution specifically made for DAM.

Specific tactics:

• DAM: Digital asset management (DAM) systems like Brandfolder or Bynder can help your team keep track of digital assets that are important to your organization. The latter has a public-facing environment and sustainability policy statement on their website. For our money, we’d start there. 
• Design system: Similarly, if you really want to level-up your organization’s asset management, consider investing in a design system that covers your website and other digital products you create and manage. 
• Purge: Most importantly, craft a meaningful data disposal strategy that includes regular media purges to declutter your digital assets and reduce your footprint. 

6. Incremental Improvements

The measurable baseline you set in step two above should provide a clear foundation for ongoing experimentation. In digital, most things can be tested and improved upon over time. Understanding this will help your team get into a test-driven mindset. 

However, experimentation has a dark side as well. ‘Growth hacking’ digital products and services can lead to unintended economic consequences as well as a slew of social issues and environmental challenges, like greenwashing and ignoring informed consent , for example. 

Don’t move fast and break things. Move intentionally and test things instead. This is the path to long-term sustainability. 

Specific tactics: 

• Can I test it?: Ask yourself this question whenever you don’t know whether a strategy or initiative is working. 
• Fail forward: Even resource-constrained organizations can run simple tests and benchmark performance over time. It’s a mindset shift, not a wholesale redesign of your team or organization (though that might eventually happen). 
• Intentionality: Similarly, be intentional about what you hope to accomplish, why, and how. Make sure your team and other stakeholders understand the intent.
• Stakeholder engagement: As always, engage stakeholders over time to ensure that your efforts meet their needs and unintended consequences are kept to a minimum.

7. Pivot Sooner vs. Later

Finally, it can be challenging to tell when digital governance strategies aren’t working. After all, governance is about policies and procedures. In traditional organizations, people generally don’t want to go against company policy. 

Similarly, it’s human nature to fall in love with our solutions rather than our problems. This often means we hold onto policies and practices long after they’re rendered ineffective. At Mightybytes, we’ve seen this firsthand and paid the price for it.

Don’t fall into these traps. If a strategy uses more resources than the value it provides, it’s time to move on. Instead, foster open communication and collaboration so that teams can shift away from experiments that clearly aren’t working. Empower your team to make these decisions as needed. 

Specific tactics:

• Pivot criteria: Identify what the criteria are for moving away from a test or experiment. This will help stakeholders understand why a campaign, product, resource, or feature is no longer available. 
• Retrospectives: Regroup after each campaign, sprint, or project to assess what worked, what didn’t, what everyone learned, and how you might improve on the next one.

Using Digital Governance to Build Capacity Over Time

We’re the first to admit that, as a small business, we still struggle to implement effective digital governance practices. However, making progress in small, measurable steps allows us to improve over time without overwhelming our team. 

Plus, incremental improvement is a core tenet of sustainable web design and a cornerstone of operating as a Certified B Corp. This enables us to step back and take stock in what’s working and what’s not, then proceed accordingly. 

This helps our team build capacity and improve work and deliverable quality. Ultimately, that’s what we’re aiming for. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation Requires Good Governance

Digital transformation can be both exciting and sloppy. The practices in this post are derived from what we’ve learned over the years from our clients and our own digital marketing efforts. 

Stakeholder-driven marketing organizations prioritize equitable decision-making and continuous learning and improvement to create shared value and align digital marketing strategies with sustainability efforts. 

With that being said, you don’t want to get bogged down with so much governance-driven bureaucracy that you lose the ability to learn from your mistakes. Hopefully, this post will help you strike the right balance and set you on a journey of continuous improvement. 

Got questions? We would love to chat. Feel free to reach out via our contact form or via LinkedIn.