Courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts
What is it?
- Helps you identify where you want to be with your digital skills
- Shows you the gap between your current and desired digital skills (and where you might want to invest)
What are the benefits?
- You can see the opportunities for your organization
- You can identify the digital skills that will help your organization deliver results
- You can start to identify your digital goals
What should it assess?
- It will measure the gap between where you are today digitally and where you want to be
- It looks at eight main categories of digital use
- You might focus on specific categories or add categories, depending on what’s important for your organization.
Key Categories
Taken from: Digital Needs Assessment, Canada Council for the Arts
| Vision | The goals your organization has for the digital future |
| Activities & Services | How you use digital to perform activities and deliver services to your target audience |
| Target Audience | How you use digital to get information about your target audience: their digital expectations, preferences, and behaviours |
| Engagement | How you use digital channels to reach your target audiences |
| Development | How you build digital activities and services to suit their needs |
| Technology | How you currently use technology for processes and activities, and the type of technology you use |
| People & Organizations | How you enable your people to use digital tools and encourage new technologies |
| Security | How you protect your digital information with clear processes that you update |
EXAMPLE: Digital Needs Assessment
The example measures a fictional organization’s needs across eight possible categories.
For each category, there are four maturity levels where an organization can be: To Discover, Preliminary, Moderate, and Advanced.
With the use of the example, create your own Digital Needs Assessment for Archiving within your institution