Free membership of the Digital Champions Network for community-based organisations in West Cumbria.
How does the scheme work?
Let's Get Digital, West Cumbria helps local people get the digital skills they need for everyday life. Digital skills are essential for almost everything now - from applying for jobs and benefits to paying for parking. But more than a third of us have "low" or "very low" digital skills and struggle to thrive in a digital-first world.
We are an award-winning social enterprise supporting hundreds of organisations to run Digital Champion projects. We provide the tools and resources to train staff and volunteers to become confident, skilled Digital Champions who can then help others with digital skills. We do this via the Digital Champions Network, an award winning training resource, full of bite-sized e-learning that can be studied at any time to fit around people’s paid or voluntary roles.
Sarah, the West-Cumbria Project Lead, explains in more detail...
The offer for organisations in West Cumbria
We're offering commnunity organisations free membership of the Digital Champions Network that includes:
- User licences for staff and volunteers to join the Network and train as Digital Champions.
- Access to 25+ CPD certified training courses, backed up hundreds of curated, updated resources, tech guides, session plans and training tips.
- Built-in Project Management tools to help you track your Champions' training.
- Easy-to-use reporting tools to show what your Champions have achieved.
- A friendly community of practice for Champions and Project Managers to share ideas and challenges.
- A dedicated local co-ordinator to help you get your project going and link you up with other digital schemes and
The Digital Champions Network membership is delivered by us, and funded by Capgemini. It was developed as part of the Sellafield Social Impact Strategy, SiX and enables digital inclusion across West Cumbria.
The champions training is helpful, bitesized and relevant. In libraries, where we are limited for capacity it is good to be able to access it when we can. We have given all staff in branch libraries access so they can build up their confidence and knowledge and give day to day support for customers. It is working!
Catherine Clark
Cumberland Libraries
It's free!
We cover all the costs for your organisation to join and use the platform with training for up to 10 Champions per organisation. And provide extra help and support from a local project lead.
Interested?
Fill in the form below and Sarah, our West-Cumbria-based Project Lead will be in touch to explain more. If after talking you decide it's not for you, there's no obligation to continue. If you want to email Sarah direct, please do!
Who is involved?
We're now in our second year running the project. Organisations involved include charities and local authority teams, ranging from AgeUK West Cumbria and Inspira to local libraries. All these groups are identifying and training up Digital Champions to support their service users and other community members throughout West Cumbria.
As well as helping them to deliver Digital Champions programmes, many organisations have also found it really useful as a way of coming together with other local groups to share ideas across the board, not just about digital inclusion. As we start on Year 2, we've got lots of plans to branch out and include more organisations as well as local businesses.
The project in West Cumbria has been such a success that in early 2024, we started a sister project, Let's Get Digital Durham.
Let's Get Digital in action!
This Pat from Ability Net helping Elizabeth (in black) at the weekly Tea & Tech in Whitehaven Library. They were working out how to slow down a drawing video on YouTube, as Elizabeth has taken up art again as it really relaxes her but wants to do it at her own pace...
Elizabeth is a regular attendee of Tea & Tech. She has a helpful granddaughter but she likes coming to Pat who is incredibly patient and doesn't mind talking her through something even if it's something they've done before! This was a new one on Pat, but like all good Digital Champions, she knows you don't need to know everything - you can look it up and work it out together.
