Building a Champions Network That Works, part 6 of 7
Almost every champions programme that exists today started in a spreadsheet, and for a simple reason. Until very recently, there was nothing else. A programme manager setting up a network five years ago had a choice between a spreadsheet, a SharePoint list or a project management tool built for something else entirely, and the spreadsheet was the least bad of the three. It was honest, cheap and, for the first fifteen or twenty champions, it worked.
That is no longer the situation, and this article is written for two audiences. If you already run a programme on spreadsheets, it explains why they fail when they do and what a purpose-built platform such as CyBehave Heroes does differently. If you are about to start a programme, it makes a more direct argument: do not begin in a spreadsheet at all. The tool you start on shapes the programme you end up with, and the tools now exist to start well.
The spreadsheet was never the design, only the default
Nobody chose spreadsheets for champions programmes because they were the right tool. They chose them because a champions programme is a lifecycle, a network, and a measurement problem all at once, and no product addressed those three things together. So programme managers did what capable people do with the tools available, and for a while the gaps were hidden because one person could hold the whole programme in their head.
That is worth saying plainly, because a good deal of advice about champions programmes assumes the spreadsheet stage is inevitable, a rite of passage before the programme earns something better. It is not. It was a constraint of the period, and the constraint has lifted.
Where the spreadsheet breaks
For programmes already on one, the failure arrives in five places, usually in this order.
The first is lifecycle. Champions join, pause, change roles, move business units and leave, and a list cannot represent any of that. Names stay on the sheet long after people stop engaging, so coverage looks better than it is; nobody is offboarded properly, and when a champion leaves a priority team, the gap shows up months later.
The second is coverage. A list tells you how many champions you have. It doesn't tell you which divisions, sites, or functions they reach, or whether the teams generating the most risk have anyone at all.
The third is measurement. A spreadsheet can count activity: sessions attended, modules completed, emails opened. It cannot measure whether behaviour changed, because colleagues observe behaviour change rather than champions logging it, and there is no mechanism to collect it. Programmes end up reporting engagement and calling it impact, and boards can tell the difference.
The fourth is the network. Champions work through influence, and influence lives in relationships between people. A list has no relationships. It cannot show which champions are central, which are isolated, and which ones hold otherwise disconnected parts of the organisation together, so when a connector leaves, the network fragments and nobody saw it coming.
The fifth is the programme manager. Every spreadsheet-run programme has one person holding it together, and the programme pauses when they are on leave and often stops when they move on. The knowledge was never in the spreadsheet.
The cost that does not show up in the spreadsheet
A sixth failure is easy to miss because it is a cost of effort rather than a data gap. Running a programme on spreadsheets consumes the central team. Chasing champions who have gone quiet, compiling the survey results, building the quarterly report by hand, working out who is where, sending the reminders, tracking who has done which training: all of it lands on the programme manager and the security team, and it is the least valuable thing they could be doing with their time.
That overhead does something worse than waste hours. It drains the energy the programme depends on. A champions network runs on momentum, on champions feeling part of something that is visibly alive, and momentum is exactly what a central team cannot sustain when its week is spent on administration. Programmes on spreadsheets rarely fail because of a single event. They fade, as the effort of keeping them going outgrows the capacity of the people doing it.
Starting on the right tool from day one
For anyone building a new programme, this is the argument. The reason to start on a purpose-built platform is not that you will need its advanced features in month one. You will not. It is that the platform carries the programme's momentum and takes overhead off the central team from the first champion, so energy that would have gone into administration goes into the network instead.
Heroes was built from the experience of running many networks in different organisations that grew up on spreadsheets and paid for it, and it is licensed so that a new programme starts with what it needs and nothing it cannot yet use. The base platform is the whole working toolkit: recruiting and coordinating champions through the full lifecycle, priority behaviours, check-ins, the Behavioural Heartbeat that measures whether behaviour is actually changing, the Intervention Designer, Nudge, journeys, recognition and reporting. A programme running on Base alone can change behaviour and show the evidence.
Add-on modules sit on top and are added when the programme is ready for them. Measure & Evidence adds Programme Capability, trend analysis, and board reporting that turn a set of measures into a case. Network Optimisation adds Network Strength and the Social Network Analysis that shows the network's shape in detail, so recruitment can target the people who strengthen it most. Risk & Incidents brings risk and incident handling into the programme from day one. Behavioural Science opens up the full method and the workings behind every score for practitioners who want them. Each module is requested from inside the platform with its own trial, and nothing collected on Base is wasted when a module is added later, because the data already gathered is what the modules build on. A new programme isn't handed everything at once and doesn't pay for it either; it gets the right things, then adds the rest as it grows into them.
What that gives a new programme from the start are the three things a spreadsheet can never provide. A lifecycle that runs itself: champions are recommended, invited, onboarded, trained, active, and eventually paused, transferred or offboarded, each move a workflow with a coverage check attached, summarised in a daily digest rather than a stream of alerts. A baseline that exists before the first cohort is onboarded: the first Champion Check-In and the first Behavioural Heartbeat wave produce the measures against which the next two years will be judged, which is precisely the thing spreadsheet programmes discover they never captured. And a rhythm the champions can sustain: Heroes is built around twenty to thirty minutes a week of short tasks, bite-sized learning and quick check-ins, with recognition, journeys and Nudge, the built-in behavioural guide, keeping champions engaged without the programme manager chasing anyone.
What the platform does that the spreadsheet could not
For programmes making the move, each of the five failure points has a direct answer. Lifecycle is handled end to end. Coverage is a map across divisions, departments and geographies with an engagement heatmap, exportable when the board asks. The network is visible through Social Network Analysis, which maps who each champion actually influences by connection rather than job title, surfaces the bridge nodes whose loss would fragment the network, and flags champions whose engagement is falling before they disengage. And the programme no longer lives in one head: four roles, from Programme Leader through Programme Team and Security Team to Champion, each see what they need, and the programme persists whoever is on leave.
Measurement differs most in design. Heroes keeps three measures, each drawn from a different group of people so that none is the same number shown three ways. The programme and security team assess Programme Capability: what is in place to work with. Network Strength is reported by champions: how capable, connected and far-reaching the network is. The Behaviour Index, the one outcome measure, comes from the colleagues alongside those teams, gathered through the Behavioural Heartbeat four times a year. Engagement and coverage are shown but deliberately kept out of the scores, because turning up is not the same as changing. A programme reporting on this basis is reporting behaviour, which is what regulators and boards now ask for and what a spreadsheet was never able to give them.
The behavioural science underneath all of this is present throughout but never mandatory. Everything speaks plain language by default.
Making the move, or not needing to
For an existing programme, the transition is smaller than it looks. The spreadsheet's list of names becomes the first roster, the first Check-In creates the baseline the spreadsheet never had, and the first Heartbeat wave produces a Behaviour Index. Within a quarter, the programme has an honest picture of coverage, a view of the network, and a measure of behaviour that did not come from the champions themselves.
For a new programme the advice is simpler still. The spreadsheet was the right tool when it was the only tool. It is not the only tool anymore, and a programme that starts with the right one keeps its energy for the work that matters. The free CyberSHIELD Assessment takes fifteen questions to show where a programme stands, and Heroes offers a 28-day trial with full platform access and no card required.
About this series. Building a Champions Network That Works is a seven-part guide from CyBehave to starting, funding, recruiting, scaling and measuring a security champions programme, and to the shift from awareness to behaviour change that sits underneath all of it. Previous: Part 5, How to scale without losing what made it work. Next: Part 7, Behavioural change for awareness professionals.