After 18 years at the helm of the good ship Digital Unite, founder Emma Weston took a year off to sail the high seas with her family. It was a long held ambition, and the time away provided ample room for reflection. Here in the last of a series of blog posts, is Emma’s take on where the digital inclusion challenge in the UK is, has been and should be going. In my last post, I talked about what we can learn from the numbers and behaviour captured on our Digital Champions Network. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about how we keep people engaged through their journey, and how we can all pull together to get the work done. To close that gap and set in motion a model for the future to ensure that digital divide stays firmly closed. As we add new courses to our Digital Champions Network, we will add new Badges. We will keep building that Digital Champions learning ecology with the Champions themselves and the organisations they represent. Collaborative co-design is our intention, which is a mouthful, but it means, rather than designing learning we think people want or should have, we will work with them to evolve the learning together. We believe that collaborative approaches – such as the one that gave birth to DCN4H in the first place – are the cornerstones of a healthy, dynamic programme or project. To illustrate the point, we convened a group of social housing partners recently to look at what courses and content Champions working in housing might usefully use in the financial inclusion arena. It was fascinating, it was challenging – and it was great fun. The core message: supporting and developing Champions to be as well and as flexibly resourced as possible, so they are capable of and confident in working with any number of different individuals with different needs, desires and concerns, must be the founding principle for anything we develop next. Collaboration is key What would I like to happen next? I want others to leverage these proven Digital Champion Network assets we have created to their own advantage. Very simple. I want us to work across the digital inclusion sector, the digital skills sectors, with some coherence and with a shared, underpinning vision. One that is of course open to interpretation, to tweaking, to evolution – to improvement – but for goodness sake, can we not do this in a joined up way? So that the most is delivered for the most in the most effective way. The other huge benefit of collaboration is ‘economies of scale’ which broadly means, it’s cheaper. Think of it like a Groupon approach to Digital Champions; the more people involved, the cheaper it gets. And I don’t just mean individuals: we can yes drive down the cost of training individual learners to become champs. But we can also do this for organisations as a whole, because if a group of organisations join together to develop new courses, for example, they all get to share both benefit and investment. More goes further. They might be staff or colleagues or trusted intermediaries, they might already be called Digital Champions – for some they will be known as Barclays Digital Eagles. And whether they are people who volunteer or who get paid, if their characteristics include supporting others with digital skills, building digital confidence, which will lead to greater digital inclusion and an overall improvement in well being as a result… let’s resource and support them from a central point, let’s pool them, inspire them, track and evaluate them through a shared, common framework. Let’s make the next three years count, and grab these opportunities with all our hands.
To find out more about our Digital Champions Network, please visit www.digitalchampionsnetwork.com or get in touch on du@digitalunite.com.