Tech for Good Ecosystem partnerships

Digital exclusion is one of the most invidious challenges we face in Scotland and although we all know that, it’s fair to say that we, as tech professionals, had little understanding of the implications digital exclusion has on individuals and the organisations trying to support them.

We engaged in an interesting exercise with Inspiring Scotland at the end of last year. We asked to hear from a dozen of the charities they support about the impact of digital exclusion from both the charity perspective and for their beneficiaries. We brought a number of Scottish Tech Army volunteers, in ‘listening mode’ only, to hear their stories and gain deeper insight to the problem at hand. We had the added and incredibly valuable input from a beneficiary of one of the charities, who shared their first-hand experience of digital exclusion.

Perhaps most inspiring of all was hearing from one charity, Thriving Survivors, about how they had worked to ensure their beneficiaries could be digitally connected during lockdown. Ashley Scotland’s sheer determination and hard work has ensured that her peer support groups were able to keep in touch with each other in very difficult circumstances, but more than that, the way she has done it offers the potential for a scalable solution to be developed.

The outcomes from this event have been far reaching. Immediate feedback from our volunteers was that dawning realisation of what exclusion really means – how difficult accessing help and services can be, even the fact that some people do not own a mobile phone came as something of a surprise – it’s easy to assume everyone’s like us. It was a very sobering experience for us all.

Immediate feedback from the charities was also fascinating – charities are focused their beneficiaries, not each other, so hearing that they shared similar problems was both enlightening and useful to know.

We brought our volunteers together immediately after hearing from the charities to capture what they’d heard and from this discussion session identified 3 key problem areas on which we could focus our efforts:

·       language, literacy and readability

·       digital confidence for charities staff

·       scaling up of Thriving Survivors’ digital inclusion kits.

Work is now underway in all three areas and we are continuing to work with some of the charities we met on the original workshop. This work is taking shape in different ways and we’ve recently engaged with ENABLE Scotland to arrange a workshop with their ambassadors to ensure that the voice of the end user is heard, so that any potential solutions are built first and foremost for them.

We look forward to updating you on progress in future newsletters.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash