Digital Readiness self-assessment

Based, in part, on the findings of the Beyond the Promise research into digital failure in the cultural sector, I’ve created a quick, free self-assessment tool to help you surface your organisation’s strengths, risks, and opportunities around digital work.

It’s designed as a starting point, a way to flag potential challenges and spark useful conversations before investing time, money, or energy into your next digital project.

This quick, practical tool gives you the steer you need to plan more confidently, address potential areas of weakness, and create the conditions to deliver real impact.

What this tool is and isn’t

This is a quick, practical self-assessment to help you reflect on where your organisation stands in key areas related to digital work.

It’s not a full maturity model or benchmarking tool, instead, it focuses on the areas that most often support success or cause things to stall: leadership, skills, systems, engagement, content, data, innovation, and governance.

The aim of the tool is to surface strengths, gaps, and potential blockers, and to help spark useful conversations about where clarity, capacity or support might be needed.

How to set up and use the assessment

1. Get your own copy of the form

• Click this link to the Google Form.
• Choose 'Make a copy'.
• This creates your own editable version of the form, stored in your Google Drive.

If you don't have a Google account then you can download the questions that comprise the assessment here and use them to build a survey form in whichever platform you want, or simply to start conversations with colleagues.

Note: all of the instructions below assume you're using Google Forms to make/share the survey but the principles should be broadly applicable to other platforms/services too.

2. Decide how you want to use it

You can use the assessment in different ways, depending on your needs:

• Individual reflection: one person (e.g. digital lead, CEO, project sponsor) completes it to get a baseline.
• Small team snapshot: ask a small group (e.g. leadership team, project working group) to each complete it separately, then compare results.
• Organisation-wide map: share more broadly across departments to identify differences in perception.

3. Distribute the form

• If running individually or in a small group: share the form link directly by email.
• If running organisation-wide: consider setting a closing date and a reminder schedule (e.g. one reminder email mid-way through).

You can customise the confirmation message in your form settings to thank participants.

1. Open your Google Form (the one you've created or copied).
2. Click on the 'Settings' tab (this is the third tab, after General and Responses).
3. Scroll down and click on the 'down' arrow next to the Presentation heading.
4. Look for the option called 'Confirmation message'.
5. Click 'edit' to the right of this option
6. In the text box, write your custom message then click 'save'.
7. (Optional but recommended) Turn off 'Show link to submit another response' if you don't want people completing it multiple times unnecessarily (unless you're encouraging multiple responses from a team).

Now, after someone submits their answers, they'll immediately see your personalised message.

4. Analyse the results

Once responses are in:

• View the 'Summary' tab in Google Forms to see visual charts (average scores, common patterns).
• Export results to a spreadsheet if you want to do specific analysis or track trends over time.

What to do next

Completing the assessment is just the start. Now it’s time to make sense of what you’ve learned and use it to improve the .

This doesn’t mean writing a strategy or fixing everything at once. Instead, take a few simple, low-cost steps to reflect, focus, and act.

1. Reflect together with colleagues

• Whether you’ve done the assessment individually, as a small team, or organisation-wide, set aside time to talk about what the results reveal.
• Use the final questions as prompts for more exploratory, reflective conversations:
  • What are we proud of?
  • Where are we stuck or unsure?
  • What support might help us grow?
• Pay particular attention to areas with low scores or inconsistent responses, these can signal hidden risks, confusion, or misaligned expectations.

2. Pick a focus area

• Don’t try to tackle everything. Choose one or two key areas where you think a small change could unlock bigger impact.
• Ask questions like:
  • What’s most urgent for our upcoming work?
  • Where are we likely to stall or get stuck again unless we improve something?
  • What’s within our control to change right now?

3. Take one small, practical step

Here are some low-cost ideas to help you move forward based on your priority area:

You can also book a free Reflection Session with me to discuss your results.

Why take the time to do this?

Good digital work doesn’t just rely on having the right systems, it depends on having the right conditions:

• Leadership support
• Cultural readiness
• Skills and processes that support and enable change

This assessment is a simple, effective way to make those underlying conditions visible, so that you can focus on where change is needed and start building the foundations for better digital outcomes.