October 14th was a busy day for us at Digital Unite. As well as our Reinvigorating Digital Inclusion event, which gathered the good folk from health, housing, local authorities and charities across the country, we also held a briefing session for a select group of employers on Inspire, our digital inclusion employee volunteering programme.
Inspire is delivered through online learning which culminates in digital skills pledging. 41% of those who do the learning go on to pledge.
Sally Caughey ,who alongside colleague Alex Meunier initially pioneered the adoption and roll out of Inspire at Capgemini in late 2020, talked compellingly and frankly about the challenges and opportunities of launching an initiative as ‘ambitiously simple’ as Inspire.
While Capgemini is a highly digitally literate business, the premise of Inspire is that you don’t have to be a tech expert to help someone else with their essential digital skills.
More crucially are the human traits of empathy and patience, plus digital confidence and some knowledge and understanding around context: the ‘why’ digital inclusion and skills are so important, for everyone. Combine these elements with time, and motivation, and anyone can be an Inspirer. Just ask over 800 Capgemini UK employees.
For Capgemini as an organisation, Inspire has spread the message about corporate digital responsibility across the company:
“We have got the message out that digital exclusion is a big problem, that we as a technology company have a responsibility in this area, and that you don’t need to be a tech person to make a difference.” says Sally.
More face to face and online Inspire briefing sessions are planned for 2022. In the meantime, the Inspire website is full of information and resources including a self-assessment diagnostic tool for employers who’d like to understand how to get their workforces actively contributing to digital inclusion. And that’s within every employer’s reach.
As Sally says; “Now that we have a structured engagement programme that can scale, and a support offer which can be done remotely, we can open up to communities across the UK.”
For more information about Inspire and our briefings get in touch with the Digital Unite team today.