You need to log in or create a free account to use the Tracker to create and save assessments or view reports. Before you start using the Tracker, you may find the guidance below helpful. To understand how the Tracker fits alongside other tools in the Digital Culture Compass, please read our Overview.

• What does it do?

  The Tracker has been developed with arts and heritage organisations of all types and sizes to help you to:

  • Assess your organisation’s current use of digital
  • Set targets for where you would like to be in 12 months
  • Record notes that explain the thinking behind your current assessment and targets
  • Share reports online with colleagues and others
  • Export content for working offline

  You don’t need to complete an assessment in one go: you can log in and out as often as you need. You can save multiple assessments, so you can report on your digital progress at different times or for different reasons. If you are a consultant or overseeing a group of organisations, you can create assessments for different organisations.

• When should I use it?

  There are various situations where you might want to use the Tracker:

  • As part of the comprehensive planning of all your organisation's digital activities, e.g. to support the creation or revision of your business plan
  • When reviewing digital activities to monitor progress from a previous period, e.g. as part of an annual review cycle
  • When focusing on specific aspects of your use of digital, e.g. reviewing the digital elements of your marketing activities
  • When considering how the range of digital activities are coordinated across your organisation: e.g. reviewing staff structures and the digital aspects of job descriptions 

  For a step-by-step guide to these different situations, read when to use the Tracker.

• What does it cover?

  The Tracker divides your organisation's activities into 12 areas. These include e.g: Strategy and Governance; Cultural Programme; Places and Spaces; Marketing & Communications; HR; IT; and Finance & Operations.

  You select which areas are applicable to your organisation and then, in each area, you assess the digital elements of between five and ten different activities, using a consistent five-point scale. These activities might include your use of technology, creative content, data, processes or ways of working.

  Like the areas, you can mark a particular activity as 'Not applicable' for your organisation. This means you can tailor the Tracker to your needs, without affecting your overall score.

  Read more about the 12 activity areas.

• Who should fill it in?

  You do not need to be a digital expert to use the Tracker. We have tried to keep the language simple and any technical terms are explained in the Glossary.

  The Tracker covers every aspect of your organisation. Unless your organisation is very small, it is unlikely that one person will have an accurate sense of all your digital activities and capabilities. The views of trustees, managers, staff and volunteers are all worth considering. The more you can gather different perspectives, the more accurate and useful your assessment is likely to be. You can also download questions and reports for sharing offline, so different people can contribute.

  NB - the current version of the Tracker allows one user login per account. Reports can be easily shared using private links. You can also share login details, to enable colleagues to update information directly, but you should avoid having more than one person editing assessments at the same time, since changes may not all be saved. 

• What are the five maturity levels?

  The Tracker allows you to assess the digital elements of an activity by considering five levels of digital maturity:

  1. Initial
  2. Managed
  3. Integrated
  4. Optimising
  5. Transforming

  For each activity, you decide if you have "Fully achieved", "Partially achieved" or "Not achieved" the criteria in each level (see more on scoring your progress below). 

  The criteria for the five levels are tailored to each activity. However, they always follow the same principles, which you can read about in our maturity level guidelines.

  This approach is similar to established business process maturity models. It gives an objective, consistent comparison across different activities and the standardised scoring means you can quickly become familiar with the method.

• What are the tags?

  There are certain digital capabilities which recur across questions in different areas: e.g. the ability to manage data, to develop digital skills and to support digital accessibility and inclusion. These recurring capabilities are indicated in the Tracker by tags displayed next to the relevant questions.

  The report on your assessment contains a bar chart and a data table that summarises your current and target scores for these capabilities across the Tracker.

• How do I score my current and target status?

  You should not aim for top scores in all applicable activities. Achieving 100% is unrealistic and suggests poor priority setting. With your finite resources, you should focus on improvements to those digital activities that best support your objectives. 

  For each activity at each of the five maturity levels (see above), decide whether your organisation has “Fully achieved” (2 points), “Partially achieved” (1 point) or “Not yet achieved” (0 points) the criteria.

  If an activity is applicable to your organisation but you haven't yet started work on it, then leave all five levels, including the 'Initial' level, set at '0', meaning 'Not yet achieved'. This indicates it is something your organisation should be doing but hasn't begun.

  If an activity or area isn't relevant to your organisation (e.g. you don't have a collection to manage), then mark it as 'Not applicable' and it will be removed from your scoring altogether. Your overall score for each area is then calculated as a percentage across the activities that you have decided are “Applicable”.

  You can score both your current status and a target for where you want to be in 12 months. Your final report will then show where the biggest gaps are in your current digital capabilities, versus where you are aiming for. If you don't want to improve something or have already 'Fully achieved' it, then you should score your target status the same as your current status. 

• What should I record in the notes?

  The Tracker allows you to add notes for both your current and target scores. Things it may be helpful to put in these notes include:

  For your current score

  • Any explanation or evidence to support your score
  • The people who helped you decide this score
  • The person/people responsible for managing this activity
  • Any constraints faced in managing the digital elements of this activity (e.g. limited budgets or resources; a requirement to use certain systems or suppliers)

  For your target score:

  • The rationale for the score (e.g. why is it a high or low priority for improvement?)
  • Resources (time, money, skills, systems, suppliers, partners etc.) needed to achieve any improvement targets
  • The person/people responsible for managing and delivering any planned improvements
  • Next steps required
  • Any risks to monitor or mitigating steps to take 
  • When you will next review progress
• What reporting is available?

  The Tracker allows you to generate several different reports and exports:

  • Graph and table summary of current and target scores in each area
  • The ability to download PDFs of these graph and table summaries for sharing offline
  • Interactive report allowing you to drill down into questions and answers for each area and activity
  • The ability to share graphs, tables and interactive reports with others via a unique link
  • A CSV export of all question and answer data in your assessment, so you can share content offline and create your own reports

  You can use these options for final reporting, but also to share progress and compare notes with colleagues and other stakeholders as you undertake an assessment.

• How is the data used?

  As a self-assessment tool, the data that you submit to the Tracker is yours to control. Staff at Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and other project partners will not use the data to assess your organisation, unless you choose to share with them the reports that you generate. 

  The system does allow the project partners to view aggregate reports based on anonymous data, so they can see the number and types of organisations that are using the Tracker and average scores for different areas and questions.

  This data may be used in future to improve the features of the online Tracker, including potentially generating insights about sector trends, which we will share with you. This is the reason we ask the profile questions in Section 2 of the Tracker.

  See the Privacy Policy for more information on how your data is used.