Contents

Key Survey Comments

35. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us anonymously about how digital skills or digital skills funding could help your organisation, or your experiences with digital this year?


“We see more demand for digital services from our users. But the funding environment is very competitive. Many don’t want to invest in innovation and scoping. So many are focused on immediate basic needs and don’t see digital as being an area to fund.”


“1. More funding to CAST/Catalyst, who were superb. 2. Some of that funding to go to Agile – I really do feel the entire sector could benefit were more to adopt a different project management approach. 3. Funders – the issue isn’t (IMHO) with charities, it’s now with funders. They’ve spent 2 years shovelling money out the door (great, thanks) but in that time the world has changed dramatically and they need to get with the programme.”


“Just that rural areas are facing much bigger challenges than urban areas due to massive loss of services and many funders do not take these problems into account. Increasing rural poverty, higher fuel costs, lack of access to cheaper supermarkets, appalling public transport, lack of rural support for mental health, addiction, etc., means small rural organisations like ours are dealing with a lot more people in crisis and this is dominating our work at the moment so do not have the time, headspace or funding for any major digital changes.”


“We need continued digital skills funding to turn ideas for digital development into delivery.”


“Overall, advancing our digital skills would enable us to increase our reach and the number of community members able to benefit from our services. This is our current top priority and digital skills funding would be a huge help!  In addition, and once this increased reach has been secured and is ongoing, smart digital skills would enable us to strategise how we can use digital more effectively – in terms of acting on feedback from users and listening to their needs, as well as increasing the profile of our organisation as our impact equally increases. Finally, this will enable us to also market better and increase digital fundraising.”   


“Improve hybrid meetings as they don’t work all that well.  Build staff confidence with using Teams and Sharepoint as we regularly experience problems with these.”


“Digital skills funding could help us to measure our impact better, and to use data to align our activities with our purpose.”


“We’re a large organisation, made up of 42 services across the North West. Our central back office functions (comms, HR, finance, OD, etc.) have made good progress adapting to digital systems and ways of working. They tend to have higher digital skills and confidence. However, many of our frontline services are not using digital in the most effective ways. They tend to have lower digital skills and confidence, have stretched capacity and don’t see digital as a priority or something they should invest in. Our biggest challenge is having a single view of our service users, who might access a combination of community, residential, therapeutic and educational services – yet most services use their own case management and recording system (which aren’t integrated and don’t talk to each other).”


“It’s been hard for staff/volunteers to teach people who are not digitally minded how to get online when not face to face with them – you can’t use a computer to show them when they don’t know how to switch it on. We’ve also found there is a lack of digital volunteers – we feel there is volunteer fatigue as they have spent so long and so much effort supporting people during the pandemic that it’s really taken its toll on them. Digital volunteers/ champions/ buddies need a particular skills set.”


“We have progressed well against our digital strategy for 2020–2022, building frequency and consistency into our new digital activities (podcasts, webinars to name a few) but the whole sector has also moved so it is difficult to know whether we are behind or ahead of the game in terms of our comparators.”


“Our trustee board, like most, skews quite old and not all trustees have the skills and confidence to build their digital skills because they didn’t develop them in the workplace. We also have issues, perhaps, with a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, some trustees see ‘a database’ as a solution to every problem…”


“In my organisation, senior stakeholders still don’t buy in [to] the need for ongoing human and financial resources for core digital work, and the need to include digital costs and work streams in project plans. There is still the idea that now we have built a new website and started to use Salesforce, that this work is now ‘done’ and doesn’t need any further management or resourcing. Digital skills are somehow seen as inferior to ‘real’ charity skills like face-to-face service delivery – even though the majority of our channels and services are delivered remotely through tech. So for example, it’s more important for senior leaders to have these traditional skills, and not important for them to have any digital skills or leadership.”


“It is very strange to see how digital raised among the charity’s agenda as soon as we were hit by the pandemic, and yet how little has changed after two years: it is like there’s no appetite to change the way we’ve always conducted our outreach, and even if digital has shown great results everyone wants to go back to the old ways.”


“We need investment from grant funders in infrastructure digital and digital which brings about sector wide change.”