Getting your Digital Champions started

Congratulations! You’ve recruited your Digital Champions. You’ve put on an onboarding training session. Now what?  

Don’t expect to have a fully operational Digital Champion programme right away. You’re building momentum and you’re part of a change management process. It takes time, so don’t put pressure on yourself or your Digital Champions.  

Start small with a specific team or area of your business. For example, your organisation is deploying MS Teams so you do some targeted work on that. Whatever your starting point might be, here’s a few suggestions:  

• Curate your list of approved resources and share them with your Digital Champions. 
• Setup your Teams/Slack channel and add your Digital Champions.  
• Host a group session with your Digital Champions to identify the key priorities for your first task. 
• Let Digital Champions work in pairs of small groups to roleplay the Digital Champion and the learner – this will help identify possible issues or barriers that learners might have and build their confidence. 
• It can be hard to know where to start. Create a list (with your Digital Champions) of 5 ‘quick wins’. These should be things that are easy to do and will spark some curiosity in your learners. Giving Digital Champions something structured and defined to start with can help them build their own confidence and ease into their role.  

Plan a Digital Champion meetup for a few weeks after you go live. Use this time for Digital Champions to bring back the key barriers and challenges they’ve encountered. No Digital Champion project is without its challenges. Challenges are opportunities to learn and make improvements. You will always be learning and making changes. As the Digital Motivator, it’s your role to be responsive to your Digital Champions so they feel supported and they have their work recognised.  

"Don’t think about it. Don’t spend endless meetings discussing it. Jump in and embrace it. Celebrate the quick wins and success and learn from the failures, but don’t dwell on them. Not everything will work first time, perseverance and support are key attributes to making it successful."

Digital Motivator