Digital Week at the FCO

Last week, the FCO held its first ever Digital Week: a concentrated effort to show our staff how digital tools and technologies can transform our policy-making, service delivery and communications. We organised a busy programme of talks, masterclasses, digital clinics and competitions, delivered both in our London HQ and around our global network. So what did we learn from the week, and what do we need to do now?

First of all, we wanted to make sure Digital Week was accessible around our global network. The FCO has staff in nearly 270 diplomatic offices around the world. Digital tools are fantastic in helping us to work together across this network. But you can’t just replace human interaction with an internet connection: staff in Australia don’t want to listen in to a talk in the middle of the night. And simply publishing messages from London about digital opportunities would fail to appreciate the regional differences in the ways our diplomats use local social media. So the success of our Digital Week relied on our global network of digital hubs and our 100+ digital champions, who organised events around the world to offer a local angle, and make the FCO’s digital transformation agenda seem relevant to their colleagues.

It was also interesting to see which bits of the Digital Week programme appealed most to FCO staff, and which were less successful. We wanted to look beyond social media, and demonstrate the potential which digital offers to transform the way FCO staff design projects, use data, and make policy decisions. We had a great programme of speakers (ranging from the Government Digital Service and the Open Knowledge Foundation to social media news agency Storyful, and taxi app Hailo). We also drew on internal expertise, with digital team members offering masterclasses ranging from Google search to cinemagraphs. The FCO is always busy, but even by our standards last week had a lot going on, so we recorded presentations and shared slideshows for staff to catch up in their own time.

But of course, there were also some areas that were less successful. Our daily drop-in clinics for staff to discuss digital questions with our experts were less popular than we had hoped. We can build this lesson into our training strategy, and make sure that we do more to approach staff with offers of help, rather than waiting for them to bring their problems to us.

Even more importantly, we need to make sure that we maintain the sense of momentum that has built up over the last week. We’re rolling out a new curriculum of digital training, preparing for the launch of a Digital Innovation Fund, and looking for more opportunities to run digital pilots across the range of the FCO’s work. And finally, of course, we’re enjoying watching the results of the most popular bit of Digital Week: the competition for staff around the globe to share photos of their journeys to work for us to publish on our Instagram channel.  Another demonstration of the way social media can bring our network together from such an amazing range of places.