Bath and North East Somerset Council has joined Digital Unite’s Digital Champions Network as part of their drive to embrace a digital first future.
The Council will be using the Network to train colleagues as Digital Champions who can help staff and customers improve their digital skills and confidence. Embedding a Digital Champion model will enable the Council to build digital skills capacity and use new digital tools to deliver effective and efficient services.
Moving services online can help councils save money, encourage local economic growth and improve the way they support residents. Yet 11.9 million people (22%) do not have the Essential Digital Skills needed for day-to-day life[1] and 3.9 million are offline altogether. In Bath and North East Somerset 35,000 people are latent or non-internet users[2].
Digital Champion support is now a proven way to increase digital inclusion within organisations and local communities as learners need and want personal and long-term digital skills support.
Steve Thom, Organisation Development Business Partner at Bath and North East Somerset Council said “Digital technology is changing the way we live and work and our customers’ expectations are changing too. We want to ensure that our colleagues and residents can embrace technology and enjoy the life-changing opportunities it offers. Digital Unite’s Digital Champions Network gives us a crucial foundation to develop new and sustainable support that helps build digital confidence and capability across our communities”.
About the Digital Champions Network
Digital Unite’s Digital Champions Network is an award-winning digital learning platform that supports organisations (public, charitable/third or private sector) to realise digitally enabled service transformation through peer learning models. It currently has over 200 member organisations and supports thousands of Digital Champions nationwide with helping others with digital skills.
[1] Lloyds UK Consumer Digital Index 2019
[2] Office of National Statistics Internet Users 2019