Case Study: How Merging Culture and Digital Made Transformation Stick at Scouts

When Lara took on the role of Chief Digital Officer at Scouts in 2019, she inherited both an opportunity and a challenge. Backed by a CEO who understood the potential of digital transformation, she had the strategic support needed to push forward bold, organisation-wide impact. But even with strong leadership and vision, delivering genuine change would demand more than expertise around technology and some new ways of working. The turning point came when Lara spearheaded a major change in volunteer experience - leading the  two merged previously separate initiatives in the process: the digital transformation and the culture change programme.

Two programmes, one growing tension

At first, the digital transformation and culture change programmes at Scouts were run separately. Lara’s team focused on tools to enable volunteers – building a new membership platform, a digital learning environment, and streamlined volunteer recruitment systems. Meanwhile, the culture change programme was trying to shift aspects of how volunteering at Scouts was managed – introducing team-based volunteering, reforming governance structures, simplifying onboarding and learning, and changing long-standing role titles to make volunteering more accessible.

But despite shared goals, the separation between the two programmes was creating conflicts rather than progress . “It just wasn’t working,” Lara said.

By the summer of 2022, Lara led the decision to change direction. Scouts paused the entire programme. Lara then took full leadership of both strands (co-leading with a volunteer colleague), restructured the delivery team, re-profiled the programme and its resources, and crucially, united digital transformation and culture under one strategy and one team.

Reframing digital as the enabler

Although merging the programmes was difficult and disruptive, Lara is clear that it was the reason they succeeded. “Ultimately, that’s… how we’ve landed it – because we didn’t see the digital and the culture change as totally separate, being done by totally separate teams.”

This strategic pivot reframed the work. ‘Digital’ was no longer seen as a standalone transformation, but as the toolset to enable cultural change. The process became: define the behaviours and structures needed for the future of volunteering, then design the technology to support that.

As Lara explained, “The culture bit does have to come first. It’s the process you want to follow that leads to the design of the digital function.”

This approach shaped everything. Volunteer recruitment, for instance, shifted from formal panel interviews to warm, peer-led “welcome conversations.” Role titles once steeped in tradition – such as “County Commissioner” – were replaced by clearer, more accessible titles like “County Lead Volunteer.” Governance reforms ensured local Scouts Trustee boards operated with clarity and accountability, in line with Charity Commission frameworks. These weren’t digital projects – they were cultural reforms. But their success depended on being supported by digital tools that were designed to embed and enable, not just reflect, new ways of working.

The Volunteer Experience Programme, not “Digital Transformation”

The name of the programme mattered. Rather than call it “digital transformation,” Scouts named it the Volunteer Experience Programme. It focused attention on the end goal: improving the experience of the people who keep the Scouts movement running.  “We have always been clear that we need to retain and recruit more volunteers so that we can deliver more young skills to more young people. We call it our North Star.” Framing it in terms of volunteer impact rather than technology made it easier for people to engage, support and champion.  

That’s not to say digital products and processes weren’t central. The new volunteer experience included a single sign-on portal, digital learning pathways, and better tools to recruit and retain volunteers. But the framing positioned these digital aspects as a means to an end, never the end in itself.

Bringing people through the change curve

None of this success came easily. The transformation involved supporting significant behaviour change across a largely volunteer workforce, many of whom had been doing things the same way for decades. Lara emphasised that even the best-designed systems and processes mean little if people aren’t brought along the journey.

“You still need to take people through a change curve,” she reflected. “Whether you’re introducing it as a big bang or iteratively...People still need support, reassurance, storytelling and time.”

To that end, the Scouts team doubled down on change management and communication. They invested in drop-in sessions, explainer videos, regular updates, and peer learning. Importantly, they maintained a balance between transparency about the challenges and optimism about the direction of travel.

A model for joined-up transformation

What made this transformation successful wasn’t the technology. It was the coherence – cultural change, new ways of working and digital product delivery marching in step under unified leadership. The organisation was able to align around a shared goal and design systems and structures that reinforced that goal at every level.

The benefits are already showing. Over 100,000volunteers have completed their online safeguarding and safety training, a process that previously required in-person delivery. Thousands more have signed up to the new membership platform, more than doubling the engagement seen with the old system within just a few months. Admin burdens are easing for volunteering involved in recording training records. Recruitment is improving. Most importantly, volunteers are spending more time where it matters: with young people. And all this was achieved despite initial scepticism, technical hiccups, and deep institutional memory of previous failed rollouts.

By merging culture and digital into a single transformation journey, Lara and the teamensured Scouts was building a stronger, more adaptable organisation. And that is what transformation is really about.