1. Audit your Digital Assets

PLAN//THINK//DISCOVER

Audit your Digital Assets

Your digital assets are what your organisation has produced in house or bought and therefore owns. The assets might be tangible, intangible, heavily used, or unused. Listing them will help you see where you could create new opportunities if you made them available outside your organisation more widely.

Tangible digital assets could be:

  • online resources,
  • online customer base (depending on privacy policies),
  • traffic on your digital channels,
  • digital products,
  • online customer relationships (depending on privacy policies),
  • customer numbers on social media channels, digital revenue streams.



    • Intangible assets could be:

  • Intellectual Property (or IP) in bespoke digital developments or content (could you sell the channel or service to anyone else?),
  • the digital collaborative partnerships or services you have developed so far just for your organisation (could they be “white-labelled, and sold to anyone else?),
  • your data (if you opened it up, could technology developers do anything with it? See these Culture Hack Day results from 2011 for some ideas of what can be achieved when cultural organisations open up their data to digital technology developers).


    • Audit your Customer/Audience digital competence, perceptions, assumptions, and expectations
    Working out, from gathering feedback from your customers/audiences/stakeholders, what digital competence, perceptions, assumptions and expectations they have of your organisation can be surprising!

    First, establish what are the digital touchpoints, channels, and distribution mechanisms that your audiences/customers engage with you through. Run a focus group, or set up some interviews with customers of different age and social demographics. Consider:

  • Competence: what digital devices do your customers/audiences use, how, why and when? Do they use the devices to connect with your organisation? What’s their experience?
  • Perceptions: What’s their perception of how they should be able to digitally connect with your content/organisation?
  • What’re their assumptions about how they and you should be using digital technologies?
  • What are their expectations about how they should be able to use digital technology to
    - Be connected in your venue
    - Participate with your core content
    - Buy your products/tickets
    - Engage with your organisation
    • You could map the results visually on a Stakeholder Map. You could also undertake market research to establish what the norms of behaviour are for your customer demographic when they engage with other sectors; and undertake desk research to see what competitors offer. If you’re feeling brave, you could even ask sector experts to review your digital offering.

    What’s next?
    You might want to additionally audit your digital proficiency, your digital technology, and your business model to see where digital technologies play a part/are business critical. You might also want to gauge where your customers and stakeholders are at digitally, to see how they respond to your current digital set-up, and what they would like to see.

    At this stage you might feel a bit overwhelmed! It’s normal for cultural organizations to get a fright at this stage, particularly if the IT set up and digital developments have previously been ad hoc or piecemeal. But you know where you are at, now. The next stage of The AmbITion Approach is the uplifting and exciting part: brainstorming and thinking about where you would like to be! You will also be diagnosing what IT and digital developments you will need to implement to get to where you want to be, from where you are now.