After nearly two decades at the helm of the good ship Digital Unite, founder Emma Weston took a year off to sail the high seas with her family. The time away provided ample room for reflection. Here in 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. This week I looked at the data crunching from last month’s activity on our Digital Champions Network for Housing. This same week I rediscovered a paper I wrote in 2011 for DWP about the Digital Champions model. The evidence back then pointed to the effectiveness of cascade models, and we have even more evidence of this now. So why aren’t cascade models being used more widely? For this first post, let’s start with the good news. The very good thing, in terms of this debate, is that it is indeed 2015, and what we now have at our fingertips is a mobile mindset. Even since 2011, the rapid growth of mobile internet use, of people accessing online from smartphones, of free public wifi, of an expectation of good internet access means that to deliver digital skills and support to people should have become, in practical and infrastructural terms – easier and cheaper. In parallel, the tremendous growth of social media means that the concept of the network, being networked to others, the idea of community online and peer to peer support online, these things feel standard rather than exceptional. And both these phenomena have added a very rich mulch to the endeavour of capacity building people to help others benefit from digital technology. Otherwise known as developing and supporting Digital Champions. Although it’s frustrating that much more could have been done at national, strategic level, Digital Unite has been able to get on and make its vision a reality - and now we have the evidence and knowledge to share wider. Over our 19 year adventure into digital skills, Digital Unite has moved through classroom to peripatetic models, and while there is undoubtedly value in a variety of forms of instruction and support, the one that will endure longest is the one that leads to home-grown capacity. That’s essentially because making people digitally confident is a long, slow burn, it’s not a thing that can just happen once and be done. Technology will never be ‘done’ it will always evolve and if we are fitting people to get the most out of it for their own benefit, we need to be changing not their attitudes to the technology itself, so much as their perception of themselves in relation to it.
- This is a digital world I am living in – what more could I be getting out of that?
- How can I use the internet to make some aspects of my life quicker/ cheaper/ more connected/ more informed – and why would I do this?
- What’s the benefit for me?
Even those of us who are digital skills practitioners cannot be thinking of ourselves as the top of this pyramid of possibility – we can at best be drivers, enablers, recyclers, connectors and our job should be to do that strategically, so that the most is being made of the most for the most. This desire to be strategic enablers led us to develop the Digital Champions Network for Housing (DCN4H), launched in September 2013 with the support of an initial 10 founding partner Housing Associations. There are now over 20 organisations using it - not all of them in the housing sector. Indeed now, 18 months later, we use DCN4H as a template model from which to build organisations bespoke champion networks, tied into the original DCN4H, so that benefits of scale are accrued for all. The premise is extremely simple, and is based on the argument we made way back when: we can support the digital transformation of social housing providers by creating a support system for their Digital Champions which can scale, through which economies of scale can be reached for the benefit of all; we can pave over the fragmentation and smooth out the silo working. What does a Digital Champions Network look like? DCN4H is an online network which delivers e-learning courses for champions, a community of fellow Champions they can share with, as well as loads of additional resources for those Champions to use in their communities to engage with and support end learners. The network collects consistent data which has provided a benchmark and the analysis of which gives individual organisations and the Network as a whole invaluable information about performance, champion and end learner behaviours. It exposes gaps, it suggests modifications. It is wonderful, rich data. We wait impatiently for the end of each month just to rummage through it all over again.
The new Digital Champions Network for Housing offers us a great opportunity to take our digital exclusion strategy to the next level - Tim Dumbleton, Digital Inclusion Project Manager, Orbit Group
Across those 20 organisations, which include a national project in Wales and two councils, we have around 750 trained Digital Champions. That’s 750 people who we know, and we know where they are; who have achieved a common skills set and who we are confident in their ability to be Digital Champions. People we can track as they do more learning and whose end learners we can track too. We are achieving a 50% successful course completion rate for e-learning courses, against an international average which is under 10%. We can also tie in other third party schemes and benefits to our Network; for example, we are working with Tinder to reward Digital Champions who can evidence engagement and training of end learners with grants for kit and connectivity that will make their work even more dynamic. In Emma’s next post, she will share some of the initial stats and lessons learned from Digital Unite’s rollout of the DCN4H, and how these can help other organisations striving to bridge the digital divide. To find out more about our Digital Champions Network, please visit www.digitalchampionsnetwork.com or get in touch on du@digitalunite.com.