What we learnt last quarter...

25th April 2024

It’s quarterly monitoring and evaluation time! When we ask questions like.. who actually uses Wordpad? Why are we even on LinkedIn? Is 95% a lot better than 94.6%?

Once a quarter, we pull in data from our platforms and networks and try to understand what’s going on in our business and sector. As ever, it always results in more questions than answers! But here are some reflections from Q1, 2024….

Boring is good!

A lot of our stats don’t change much from quarter to quarter.

For example, this quarter course completion rates on the Digital Champions Network were 95%, last year it was 94.6% Is that telling us anything?

As we are constantly evaluating what we monitor and why, and it takes time and resource, it sometimes makes us wonder why we are bothering to pull these stats in. But maybe it's good that things are the same and if they're ever different, we can spot it and deal with it.

Accessibility always matters

Accessibility is a core interest for our Digital Champions. Accessibility courses are some of the most popular on our Network and the meet-ups around accessibility are always the best attended. This makes sense given that digital inclusion is extra hard for anyone with any kind of impairment. It’s great to see digital champions consistently and continuously improving their accessibility knowledge.

We want bad news!

The feedback on the Digital Champions Network and on Inspire is consistently excellent! We love this, but it means we are also actively trying to find times where people say bad things about the courses so that we can find ways to make them better.... This feels strange.

100% of people completing Inspire would recommend

"This course is very wonderful"

^{Feedback on "Planning a session"}

97% of people completing DCN courses would recommend

We own “WordPad”!

If you search for anything about WordPad, our free tech guides consistently come near the top. Sometimes even above Microsoft, who actually own WordPad! By contrast, we often don’t appear on the first page of search results for “digital champions” even though that’s what we do. We think this is because we first published our free guides to Wordpad in 2013, and they've stayed solidly popular ever since, growing as a resource that people like and link to all the time. Now we just have to work out how to get some of that link juice into “digital champions”….

We don’t know why we’re on LinkedIn!

Our key metrics are engagement rates and user numbers. We do well on both every quarter. So by those standards, we are doing well. But sometimes it's hard to see how this translates and connects into genuinely useful activity. We love LinkedIn and we know we need to be on it, making connections, finding friends and interesting ideas and events - but how do we know if time spent is paying off? We’re still thinking this through…

People don’t use our sales tools...

....the way we think they’ll use our sales tools.

We have two: a free course which shows what our learning is like and a tailored planning tool which shows how a Champion program could work in your organisation…

Potential sales do come to us through them, but we can see that, for example, lots of students in India are doing our free course, not because they want to join to the Network but because it’s a valuable learning resource.

And lots of organisations that are quite a long way away from digital inclusion, like law firms and parking providers, are doing our free planner. Which interestingly suggests to us that digital inclusion is slowly becoming a mainstream concern…