Christmas is almost upon us. For the purposes of planning ahead, we thought we’d start rambling on about New Year now. Well, we started talking about Christmas in August. Start as you mean to go on, that’s what we say.

No doubt you’ll be making some New Year’s Resolutions. Read more, write more, work harder, spend more time with family, do more of the stuff you love; all the usual things. This year, why not make some work specific resolutions, too? It’ll help you keep on top of things. Here are our suggestions.

1. Have a start of the year planning meeting

Grab your team, some cake and a pot of tea, and invest a few hours in talking about all the things you hope to achieve digitally this year. Perhaps you want to grow your Facebook following, or take a leap into Instagram. Maybe you want to send out a newsletter a little more regularly. Sit with your colleagues and work up some resolutions you can work towards together. Don’t let people get carried away, though. You have the same number of hours you had last year.

2. Learn

Nobody knows everything. There is absolutely an element to your job you could do with learning more about. Why not make it your resolution to invest in your professional development by resolving to learn more about something you’re good at but could be great at, or something you know absolutely nothing about at all.

Platypus Digital have a great Control R course that will help you refresh your digital skills. It’s totally free, and was specially developed for charity workers like you.

3. Be realistic

It’s just another year. You’re not going to be able to totally transform your digital strategy unless you’ve somehow acquired an absolute tonne of money or a massively influential partner. It can be tempting to run into a new year with an unabashed amount of optimism, but you’ll burn yourself out early on if you think a number nine at the end of a date is going to give you more capacity.

Think carefully about all you want to achieve, add a healthy dose of reality and move forward.

4. Increase your communication

Communication is the key to everyone. You can’t ever have too much. Resolve to communicate more with your team, you bosses, your beneficiaries and your supporters.

We’re not suggesting you drag everyone into a meeting every two minutes, but we’re sure your organisation would benefit from a bit more chatter about how everyone’s doing.

5. Network

Networking is great for you and fab for your organisation. There are networking events all over the place now. Lots of them are free. Some of them are over breakfast, which is one of the better ideas we’ve ever heard. What’s better than coffee and a chat about work charity work you care about? Nothing.