We’ve been awarded follow on funding!

March 17, 2022 by Jason Tutin

As we explained in our last blog just before Christmas, our current round of funding for the Digital Inclusion Toolkit was coming to an end and we were looking ahead and planning next steps.

We’re delighted to say that we’ve secured additional funding from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). The Local Digital Fund’s Continuous Funding Model will enable us to move to the next phase of Toolkit development.

Our team is growing

Leeds City Council’s 100% Digital Leeds team will continue to lead the project with TechResort CIC.

We’ll still be working with our wider team that includes Content Designer Ben at Digital Word Communications, Interaction Designer Dave and User Researcher Alex at Telltale Research.

We’re really grateful to Croydon Council and Age UK Croydon for working with us on the previous phases of the Toolkit.

In this next phase we’ll be working with more councils to help us expand and enhance our content. Colleagues from Birmingham City Council, Dorset Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Norwich City Council will be joining us at our sprint meeting on 7 April.

We’re still talking to one or two other councils, so this list could grow further.

What we’ll be doing

Our biggest focus this time is convening roundtable discussions with the wider group to discuss our priorities and challenges and to learn from each other. We’ll cover specific issues in depth. Evidencing and measuring the impact of our work is a hot topic right now.

The results of those discussions will be turned into articles for the Digital Inclusion Toolkit. A video or audio recording of our sessions might be useful too.

We hope these practical, high-level discussions will inform our work and digital inclusion programmes in councils across the country.

Other work includes:

  • testing the major changes to the site and its navigation during Beta. If you’d like to help us with user research, please get in touch
  • starting to collect meaningful data about the impact of the Digital Inclusion Toolkit
  • growing our reach on social media. We think there’s plenty of useful advice here already, and that many more people could benefit from it

You can read our Beta report and next steps proposal to DLUHC.

Tell us what you think

We’d love to hear your comments and suggestions. Either post below, look us up on Twitter, or drop me a email.

There’s a great opportunity here to do the detailed work all councils need to progress their digital inclusion programmes, and in turn help citizens across the UK. Please do get involved!