To what extent does your organisation support service users with digital inclusion (e.g. providing devices, skills training, data access)?
In total, over half (55%) of charities are providing some support to help people with digital inclusion.
Since the pandemic, we have been surprised by the decline in charities providing digital inclusion support to their communities. We suspected that many were providing this support informally or as part of their other services (rather than seeing this as an organisational priority or delivering specific digital inclusion programmes). We also know from the 2024 Lloyds Consumer Digital Index that 23% of the UK population have very low digital skills, while 1.6 million people are offline.
This year, we developed a new question to better uncover the extent to which digital inclusion support is provided by charities. We discovered that digital inclusion support is provided in a light touch way by charities as part of their delivery:
- Just over 1 in 10 (11%) are helping service users to a great extent, providing dedicated digital inclusion support. This is slightly lower than the 16% who see digital inclusion as an organisational priority and the 20% who say they most need funding to provide this support.
- An additional 45% are supporting services users to some extent.
- In total, just over half (55%) of charities are providing some level of support to help people with digital inclusion, including 10.64% helping to a great extent (percentage rounded to 11% above) and 44.76% helping to some extent (percentage rounded to 45% above).
Specific groups of charities are also providing more digital inclusion support. Overall, 56% of charities support clients with digital inclusion. This rises to 64% of black led charities, 64% of charities led by older people) and 72% of charities in the North of England.
Supporting clients with devices, data or digital skills (digital inclusion) is also a bigger priority for specific nations and regions. Overall, 16% say this is an organisational priority. This rises to 25% of charities in the North of England, 22% in the Midlands, 25% in Scotland and 22% in Wales.
We can see that more charities want to provide digital inclusion support, with 20% saying this is what they most need funding for. This rises to 44% of black led charities.
