There's a growing awareness that business has a major role in tackling digital exclusion and a responsibility to help clients, customers and colleagues with digital skills.
What we offer
- Our clients range from major financial institutions to global tech consultants.
- Companies come to us with different priorities, from employee volunteering to taking customers with them as they become "digital first". We help draw up strategies and create practical ways to implement them.
- We work with you to ensure projects are aligned to your organisational goals and structures and provide digital inclusion expertise when you need it.
- Every company we work with makes use of our products in a slightly different ways for different ends. Most start with Inspire to create a bedrock of inclusion across an organisation. Some then combine it with the Digital Champions Network.
- Wherever you are with your digital inclusion offer, we can help!
Priorities for Corporate Digital Inclusion
Digital inclusion is no longer a "nice to have." Tackling digital inequality is crucial to the success of all organisations in all sectors. Our clients usually come to us with one or more of these drivers:
- ESG/ CSR: we help create coherent strategies based round digital inclusion that are aligned to business goals and to the skills and values of staff; and that be implemented in meaningful ways.
- Employee Supported Volunteering: a digital inclusion based ESV programme leverages existing skills that can be put to good use quickly, to create a purposeful, long lasting legacy.
- Digital Service Transformation: on both demand and supply side. This is important for all organisations but particularly ones like financial institutions who need to ensure their clients and colleagues can use their increasingly digital services.
- Social Value Commitments: digital inclusion provides a solid foundation for delivering these statutory commitments in public service contracts in a way that fits with a business's ethos and delivers real impact.
But these usually evolve and grow as the programme grows. Once digital inclusion is embedded in an organisation, people recognise new opportunities and create products and services that are truly inclusive, efficient and profitable.
We co-created Inspire with Capgemini. As a tech-based organisation they knew they had a responsibility to tackle the digital divide and had always offered digital volunteering opportunities. But they realised their digitally-savvy staff often didn't understand the scale and depth of the issue. Inspire has been instrumental in:
- Raising awareness of digital inclusion, helping staff understand digital literacy as something everyone can contribute to via networks they already have.
- Providing a foundation for a volunteering programme helping everyone from beginners to coders.
- Scaling up volunteering commitments in a way that engages staff, fits into busy diaries and improves soft skills.
- Creating genuine understanding of inclusion across the organisation.
They started with a handful of volunteers and now have more than 1500 registered users. The effects of having a digitally-aware workforce are filtering through the business - for example, it's now part of social impact bids.
We’re using Inspire to amplify our business-wide commitment to digital inclusion and help our people to do something practical about it. Inspire explains the impact a lack of digital skills can have for individuals and how we can use our expertise at Capgemini to help redress the balance.
It’s motivating everyone to get involved and generating great engagement with our Digital Inclusion mission.
It’s all measurable so it’s easy for me to demonstrate impact to the rest of the business. We’ve also learned how versatile Inspire is and are now looking to share it with our clients and supply chain too.
Sally Caughey
Head of Digital Inclusion, Capgemini
Social value projects
Digital inclusion projects are an extremely effective way to meet social value commitments. In 2022, we started a project for Capgemini as part of the Sellafield Six programme. They fund Let's Get Digital, West Cumbria, supporting community organisations to tackle digital exclusion. This evaluation report looks at what it achieved in year one.
In 2024, we started on a similar Capgemini-funded project, launched here called Let's Get Digital, Durham, with an event that brought together nearly 100 delegates from health, education, local government and community groups. They shared challenges and ideas and Inspire Champions from Capgemini and the Home Office delivered digital inclusion awareness workshops.
All employees have 5 paid days of volunteering a year, but the organisation was struggling to create meaningful opportunities that met employee expectations, had impact and didn't require days of training. As the B2B arm of the business, they also wanted to align their CSR work with their aims and values.
As part of their "Connect More" programme, we created a pilot graduate project that evolved into a volunteering scheme rolled out across the business.
They used Inspire as a foundation to underpin their inclusion piece. Employees volunteer to help friends and family, or deepen their commitment by joining the Digital Champion's Network and volunteering in the community, at opportunities co-ordinated by Virgin Media O2 Business, often with their clients or community partners.
Working closely together, we've supported them to:
- Raise awareness of the issues across the board
- Build skills capability in staff to confidently help others with digital skills.
- Create a successful, flexible and scaleable employee volunteer programme in under a year...
- Which aligned to the values of their employees and their business goals.
- And strengthen their ties to community and to clients via genuinely impactful volunteering.
The initiative by Virgin Media O2 Business is both on trend and unusual. Nearly all service providers in the UK offer their staff volunteering days, but this is more focused than many ‘me too’ digital inclusion announcements.
Being a good corporate citizen is now seen as a key element of corporate behaviour and strategy, so offering substantial volunteering support for UK local authorities and the public sector makes sense… Digital skills support initiatives are key elements of ESG.
Global Data
November 2022
The UK's largest long term savings and retirement business. We created a strategy and programme for colleagues and customers involving
- A pilot of Inspire and a bespoke company-specific version of the course.
- Tailored Digital Champions Network content for customer-facing staff.
- A Community Learning Event at their head office.
- A branded Digital Skills Hub with test of concept by our friends at Community Clear Web.
Once tried, tested and in place, we handed on to regional partners to deliver.
NFU Mutual is a long-established, award winning insurance company. It has embarked on a journey to offer customers digital self-service options to complement existing channels, meet customer expectations and make doing business easier. We have developed a programme based around:
- Flexible strategic support to develop digital inclusion and skills capacity through an iterative approach, underpinned by a logic model and evaluation framework.
- An entirely bespoke version of Inspire training tied to NFU Mutual’s business and organisational model in their language and branding that sits on their platform.
As a pioneer in health care, improving outcomes for patients is core to Roche’s purpose and they want to address the unmet needs of diverse patients and communities. Digital inclusion is a key component of promoting better health outcomes. We've supported Roche to:
- Provide first-step digital inclusion awareness training through Inspire.
- Provide second level, CPD accredited training on the Digital Champions Network for colleagues who can commit to digital skills volunteering in the community..
Digital inclusion as customer service
This article by our CEO, Emma Weston looks at how we need to rethink how we consider and deliver digital inclusion.
Digital inclusion and ESG
This case-study by the Digital Workplace Group looks at our partnership with Capgemini as part of an effective ESG commitment.
