Leading Digital Strategy
the art and science of creating clarity
Learn the skills and methods you need to lead your organization’s next big thing. If you’re excited — or overwhelmed — at the prospect of leading a website migration or redesign, launching a new employee tool, “appifying” a product or service, managing a rebrand across digital channels, or simply starting the conversation about digital transformation, this course is for you.
Leading Digital Strategy is primarily about facilitation. It’s about creating alignment, not playing with sticky notes, and how to be the person at the front of the room holding the whiteboard marker and moving things forward.
Why take this course?
Learn a flexible framework that can help you facilitate alignment and increase clarity at all levels of your digital strategy.
Max out your toolkit and build familiarity with the best tools from content strategy, content design, and UX for solving difficult content and digital strategy problems.
Build competence and confidence with key strategy facilitation tools and techniques like workshops, playbooks, and frameworks.
Who is this for?
Anyone with a complex or mission-critical digital channel or web presence that is rotting on the vine due to inaction and misalignment can benefit from this course.
It’s equally suited to new leaders and those looking to grow and strengthen their skills, but it is not introductory. View prerequisites
It’s ideal for those looking to make a big, case-study worthy impact in their current organization, or who want to hit the ground running and be an agent for positive change in a new role.
Strategy can be led at nearly any level. A few job titles that people interested in this course might have include: web manager, content manager, director of communications, marketing lead, IT director, content strategist, content designer, consultant.
How this course can help…
Be the person who made it happen.
You’re tired of talking about it. Your team is tired of talking about it. It’s time to get it done.
This course will help find your inner facilitator and give you tools and methods for navigating large complex projects, facilitating discovery and decision-making, and creating the kind of clarity that is necessary to make progress.
Set your must-succeed digital strategy initiatives up for success.
Project management can’t save you if you’re doing the wrong thing to begin with.
This course will give your key team members a shared vocabulary and powerful toolkit for leading your organization through projects like website redesigns or migrations, channel consolidations (“one dot com” projects), and the launch of new digital products and services.
Get to bigger wins, faster.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing more of a theatrical performance than a true strategic facilitation process, you might need this course.
Learn proven frameworks for identifying gaps, driving decisions, and helping your clients understand exactly when and why they need you on large website projects.
Set a new pace.
Glacial progress (if any), rehashing old conversations over and over, and last-minute wrecking balls swung by higher-ups don’t have to be the norm. There are ways forward, even if every stakeholder swears up-and-down that there’s no common ground or common need.
Many of the tools and methods of Leading Digital Strategy have been personally field-tested on higher ed projects by your instructor, Scott Kubie, and can help you reset the status quo and encourage decision making instead of endless deliberation.
Put your website to work for you.
You know it’s not about the website. It’s about what it helps people accomplish.
But whether through entropy, neglect, or a longstanding dearth of strategy, the site has become a junk drawer. Old events and photos and calls to action, convoluted online fundraising asks that never had a chance of converting, a dozen different patterns and tools for forms and surveys.
Leading Digital Strategy will teach you tools and methods for getting the strategy and buy-in you’ll need to clean house and make your website more purposeful and impactful.
Calendar and availability
Course details
Questions this course can help you answer
- How can we move conversations about the website forward?
- How can we best approach the sequencing of a large, complex digital strategy initiative like a website redesign digital service transformation?
- Where do key digital strategy decisions tend to live, and how do they relate and support (or conflict) each other?
- How can we best document and socialize our strategic decision-making such that we don’t backslide or have to revisit the same old conversations?
- Why can’t these people all get along?
- How do I get a room full of stakeholders protecting their teams and interests to understand the big picture and make decisions for the greater good?
- How can I use my own strengths and skills to be a more effective facilitator? (Especially if I’m not an extrovert.)
- How do we make the most of our limited budget for consulting or other outside help?
- How can I help our organization make more strategic and collaborative digital strategy decisions when our team has been trained to do whatever the HiPPO says? (HiPPO = Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)
Overview of topics
- The nature of alignment, how it differs from consensus, and why it matters
- Developing and leading effective ideation and decision-making workshops
- Gap analysis of your digital strategy, content strategy, and/or business strategy using proven strategic frameworks
- Using the VerMonT method (VMT) to choose the right tool for the job to shore up gaps in alignment and strategy
- Putting your strategy in orbit around the powerful twin suns of Vision and Voice
- Visual and conversational methods to help stakeholders better understand the nature of a proposed change or initiative (and, hopefully, offer less resistance to it)
- Helping people feel heard and bought-in
- Starting small and leading from where you are
- Scoping and sequencing large, complex digital strategy projects
Prerequisites
You should have several years of experience working in-house or as a consultant for large, complex organizations or ambitious startups. A background in web design, UX, marketing, or communications will be helpful. Alternatively, you should have completed the course The Practice of Content Strategy.
There are no specific prerequisite educational requirements. Classes and materials are delivered in English.
Participation in our online courses requires high-speed internet access, a reasonably up-to-date computer, a webcam and microphone, and a network that doesn’t restrict access to Zoom, Miro, or Google Drive.
Curriculum Notes
This course was designed by Scott Kubie. It is based in part on an earlier workshop, Clarity Through Content Strategy, which has been taught several times for diverse groups. The VerMonT framework that underlies this course has been presented in various forms at events including Confab, MinneWebCon, and Button.