How to create Social Value Commitments with genuine impact

Why consider digital inclusion-based social value commitments?

• Digital inclusion underpins all forms of equity.

You cannot fully participate in modern society if you aren’t digitally included and yet 16.8m people have low or very low digital skills. More than half of all adults lack the full set of basic digital skills for work.

Whether you want to help people find work, combat loneliness, manage health conditions or just pay for parking – these things are almost impossible without basic digital skills. Today, all inclusion relies on digital inclusion and any social value commitments that tackle inequality need to consider its integral role .

• Align SVCs with broader goals and CSR/ ESG strategies

It’s possible to create SVCs that resonate with your organisation and fit your wider goals. If you’re really smart, you can combine them in a symbiotic and complementary way with your over-arching ESG/ CSR plans, which maximises all their impact.

As a global tech consultancy, Capgemini knows it has a responsibility to help tackle the digital divide and have created activity that runs across all these areas – there’s more here on how to make them work together.

• Your staff are ready already…

The staff in blue chip organisations know, even if subconsciously, about the importance of digital skills - because they use them everyday and work in digitally enabled environments (and they’ll know people who don’t have the skills too).  

Once they’ve been exposed to the hard truths about digital exclusion, combatting it is something they can easily get behind. And they are usually tech savvy themselves, so they can for example, do hands-on volunteering without extensive additional training. The one piece of training that is essential to unlocking this latent potential is digital inclusion awareness training: it’s often the ‘light bulb moment’ which creates momentum, action and impact.

The set-up for successful bids

• Unlock that latent potential and get everyone on board….

Make sure all your staff digital-inclusion aware.

Thousands of Capgemini staff have done Inspire, our digital inclusion awareness course. In the first 6 months of 2025 alone, they pledged to deliver an immense 6,345 hours of digital skills support. This has a big impact of its own. But digital inclusion awareness has wider implications for the business.

Once everyone knows what DI is and why it matters to business and clients alike, they come up with new opportunities and profitable ways to weave DI through what they do: those lightbulb moments generate a momentum of their own. Supporting digital inclusion becomes a unifying agenda.

• Think about where your expertise sits in the business

Both in terms of how the knowledge is spread and how people can make these new opportunities happen. Capgemini use a cascade learning model. Staff do the Inspire course and then can train others to do it, so it becomes something that the organisations owns and can grow at pace and scale.

And as the DI awareness grows, its SVC potential has grown with it. In Capgemini, the  Inspire programme co-ordinator works very closely with the Social Value team, with fluidity between SVC strategic planning and practical delivery and connections between the team and us as their delivery partners. 

• Fit your SVC to meet specific needs

Though these SVC projects have national public sector bodies as their end clients, they’re rooted in local organisations tackling local problems - tailored to the specific communities these organisations want to help.

For example, the end client for the project in Newcastle is the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and it has extra emphasis on helping older people with digital skills. The project we run as part of the Sellafield Six initiative, helps people get into work. These aren’t the only beneficiaries of the projects, but they are key targets.

Making it work

• Tie it to a logic model – and check back to it!

All our LGD projects have logic models and our reporting always ties back to them. It means you know when and how you’re making a difference, which you’ll always need to evidence across the organisation. And a clear logic model helps you hone what you’re doing. The Capgemini logic models for LGD look at outputs, outcomes, aims and inputs and track them in the short, medium and long term.

• Stay involved

Our programmes work best when we work in partnership, collaborating and combining our different areas of expertise. It maximises the impact any single SVC project can make – but it also enables all parties to imagine new ways to grow the programme. Work inclusively with stakeholders, remain open to their ideas and challenges and remember local delivery is only ever as successful as local engagement.

For example, Capgemini colleagues now deliver Inspire training workshops to organisations within the LGD areas and to public sector clients like local authorities.  It’s a way staff can grow their involvement AND it helps the business make strong connections across the area.

• Think long term

Creating meaningful change in communities takes time. Annual reviews are super helpful – time to get that logic model out – and funding decision are inevitably time-limited. But if keep one eye on the longer term future and try to plan with that in mind. Where could you go and grow next?