If you really want to embed digital across your organisation then you need more than just your ‘digital’ staff to think digitally. What shocks me is that very few organisations ask their staff what skills they have.

A simple, quick yet effective way to get a better picture of skills that your staff hold would be to carry out a digital skills audit, a simple survey that asks staff how confident they are on a wide range of platforms from Facebook to Twitter, Blogs to social apps such as Foursquare.

This information could then be compiled to create a skills database. These skills could be called upon to help fulfill project needs from guest blogging, to live tweeting at out of hours events, to covering twitter when someone is off sick or on holiday.

A key to collating accurate information is to ensure staff know that you don’t want to check what they are up to online, indeed you don’t even want to know their Twitter, or Facebook names it is simply a skills register.

I think many museums would be surprised at the skills their ‘non digital’ staff have, put in to good use these skills could help your organistion embed digital across all that it does.

Dr Lynda Kelly wrote in her blog recently ‘We have seven community managers based on enthusiasm and capability and allocate one day per week to each community manager for them to monitor our Facebook and Twitter accounts’

The emphasis on enthusiasm and capability, rather than traditional job titles is an important one, digital should not be something that sits in one department, instead it should be something that all staff with the relevant skills are actively encouraged to become involved in.

A digital skills audit may be the cheapest and indeed quickest piece of research you do this year, but in terms of impact and engagement it may be the most effective!