Triaging support for digitally excluded residents — LGA pathfinder funded project

A few months ago, we carried out some digital exclusion research at Havering. We identified that our frontline, voluntary and charity sector staff have limited information about where to signpost residents who are digitally excluded and need additional support. Our research also uncovered that we aren’t utilising all the services and support available around digital inclusion.

We want a way to identify the digital need of the user and be able to signpost them to the support they need to become more included. We submitted a bid for funding to the LGA digital pathfinder programme. The programme aims to help councils innovate and pioneer projects to advance digital inclusion. Our bid was successful, and we secured £20k to run a discovery project which we started a few weeks ago.

Our Vision

Our vision is to create a simple triage tool for frontline staff, volunteers, friends, family or self-referral. The tool will identify the type of digital inclusion the user needs and triage them to the appropriate service available in the community. We envisage this working like the NHS diagnostic tool.

Discovery goals

This Discovery phase aims to provide a better understanding of:

• Users and their needs
• Questions to identify the digital inclusion need
• User journeys based on need
• The interventions and services available to meet the need
• How the directory could work (time-boxed)
• What is required to deliver the next phase (Alpha)

What have we done so far?

So far, we have identified the users of the triage and signposting tool. We identified five main types of users that could use and benefit from the triage and signposting tool.

They are;

1. The person(s) with the digital inclusion need
2. Havering staff that identify the need and signpost to support like librarians and customer services
3. Voluntary / Charity staff that can identify the user’s needs and signpost to support
4. Family/friends that can identify the user’s needs and signpost them to the appropriate support
5. Organisations that provide support to the person(s) with the digital inclusion need

We created personas to represent each group and help us communicate user needs. We have identified the digitally excluded residents needs and mapped their user flow. The user needs we have identified are:

• Connectivity (either at home or a location)
• A device (either at home or a location)
• Digital support e.g. to complete a transaction online
• Digital skills (for life and work)

We have started to collate the interventions and services available to meet these needs. We have spent time talking to council departments and voluntary and charity sectors. This phase has taken much longer than anticipated, and we are still struggling to find all this information. We will continue to collate our findings over the next couple of weeks. However, we may have to use some dummy data for this exercise. I recommend starting this exercise early.

We have had a few conversations about the directory that could be used to store the information about the services available. So far, we have spoken to the Local Digital Directory discovery project, AWS, and Hoop’d, which was developed by Hackney Circle. I’ll provide more information in my next update.

What are we working on in the next sprint?

During our next sprint we will be working on the following;

• Drafting the questions to identify the digital exclusion need. We want to keep this to a few questions so that it’s not overwhelming or time-consuming.
• Mapping the user flow for if more than one need is identified.
• Continuing to collate the interventions and services available within the community to meet the exclusion needs.

If you have any questions about this project or want to be involved please get in touch with me at tracy.cox@havering.gov.uk