Reviewing the digital work of our embassies

We recently conducted a review of how our embassies are using digital. This blog explains why and how we run that review. The next blog looks at the findings.

With a network of more than 200 posts (embassies, high commissions, consulates etc) across the globe, all using digital in one way or another, it can be a challenge for us in London to know if the FCO is making the most of the opportunities that digital offers to support its work. Equally, if you are in a post it can be difficult to have a consistent approach to using the latest digital tools and techniques and to know how colleagues in other posts are using digital.

With this in mind we have just completed a comprehensive review of how our network is using digital. Whereas previous reviews had focussed on communications and had an emphasis on the quality of the output, this year’s review went much wider looking at how digital is being used across all aspects of our work including in how we support British nationals overseas and how we can develop better policy.

Before launching the review we consulted some colleagues in the network on what would be useful for them. The feedback was clear: our colleagues wanted the process to be constructive and help them to understand “what good use of digital looked like”. We realised that whilst we had given lots of advice to posts on how they should use digital we had never set this out in one place. We therefore set about designing a “competence framework” broken down into four areas: digital communications; digital in policy; digital in consular services; and strategic planning and leadership. This framework was designed in close consultation with digital practitioners in London and overseas.

For each competence we explained what posts should be doing and also why and how. For example, the competences state that posts must understand who their audience, where they are and how they use digital. We then explained why this is important and gave advice on, e.g, how to produce a digital landscape report.

With the competence framework in place we next had to look at how we best assessed our posts against it. We wanted posts to feel part of the process (previous reviews had felt a bit like a teacher marking homework) and so we settled on a self-audit for all posts in which they scored themselves against each competence. This was followed up with phone calls for 40 of our major posts from our regional digital hubs. This approach helped posts to better understand what was expected of them in using digital. Each post was also asked to complete an action plan to detail what they would do differently / better over the next six months.

The review worked well. More than 140 posts completed their self-audits. Some were maybe a bit generous in their scoring, others over critical. But overall we got posts to better understand what ‘good’ looks like and received a lot of useful information on how posts thought they were performing, lots of excellent examples of good digital work across the network, and information on what posts needed from us in order to do their job better. The next blog post will look at these findings.