Empowering the Charity Sector: The Digital Skills Framework
Back in 2021, CAST was approached by The Scouts Association to support them to improve staff digital skills. They’d already done a lot of the initial legwork to understand the types of skills they needed to enhance as a digital organisation, and, excitingly, had greater ambitions for this work: if they could get it right for Scouts, they could then make the output available to the charity sector as a whole. With reuse as one of the main missions at CAST and a history of upskilling charity staff through our programmes, we absolutely had to get involved.
Forming a core double act team, my ace colleague Joyce and I worked with staff at Scouts to understand how we could facilitate and encourage digital skills learning. Building on what had already been done, we co-developed a digital skills framework, drawing from the government’s Essential Digital Skills Framework so we weren’t reinventing the wheel and to cover those all-important ‘essential’ skills. To those, we added skills that we know from our programme delivery and coaching are important for organisations to become more digital: things like understanding your users and their behaviours and needs, using data to make decisions, and creating content that is accessible for your users.
Once we’d landed on the final list, we had to figure out how to test this framework cheaply, quickly and effectively. We decided to use off-the-shelf tools, selecting:
- Notion as our content management system
- Airtable as a place to store the resources for each skill
- Super.so to make the Notion pages look a little more polished and have control over some of the accessibility, look and feel of the framework.
Ready, Set, Launch!
We launched with a ‘Minimum Lovable Product ’ (here’s a great blog that explains that term) in September 2022. Just putting a framework in front of people wasn’t going to be enough though — we needed to ensure it was embedded in the existing processes at Scouts for it to be successful. Throughout the project we’d worked with Scouts’ HR and Learning and Development teams to understand current processes, such as inductions, reviews and personal development plans. We put a plan in place to ensure the launch was supported with comms (thanks to our brilliant colleague Sonya!), drop-in sessions and a roadmap of actions for coming months.
Testing, Testing
Since then, with funding from Catalyst, we’ve supported another six organisations to test and adopt the Digital Skills Framework, which now contains over 150 tools and resources.
During the most recent cohort (in the summer of 2023), we focussed on learning more about how we can support charity staff to improve their digital skills and confidence so that they are better equipped to support their beneficiaries. The knock-on effect that upskilling staff can have on the wider community is a huge area of interest for us; our fab colleague David has been representing CAST at the Digital Poverty Alliance committee since its inception in 2021, contributing to its UK National Delivery Plan, which aims to end digital poverty by 2030. One way of doing this is by ensuring that more people have essential digital skills across society, including in the workplace. The digital skills framework covers both essential and more advanced skills so we think it can help bridge the digital skills gap across the social sector.
We’re currently working with another six refugee and asylum support organisations through the EAR Programme in collaboration with Refugee Action. During this process, we’ve learnt so much about what works in terms of the framework specifically for smaller organisations, and more importantly, what doesn’t — and what needs to change and improve.
We recognise the need to increase skills in a range of digital disciplines across the organisation, but as a small-ish charity we also recognise we don’t always have the time or resource to dedicate to this. {…}
Which prompted our interest in the Digital Skills Framework — having basically a free repository of best practice guides to common digital skills, that we didn’t have to gather or collate, just seemed like a no-brainer to get involved with.
Tim Young at Together for Short Lives
What we’ve learnt
We’ve learnt heaps about what organisations need from a digital skills framework.
By using off-the-shelf tools we’ve been able to test quickly and cheaply, learning that the current content and layout largely works but is time-consuming and presents a sharp learning curve for charities to implement themselves. We know we need to create a tool that is easier and quicker for charities to set up and embed within their organisations.
We’ve seen there is demand and appetite for support with digital skills, having worked with 13 charities so far and with others waiting in the wings to get involved.
Digital skills are also very much on the social sector’s mind. The recent Charity Digital Skills Report uncovered that 53% of charities will be focussing on digital skills and confidence in the next year. A huge 79% see improving their website, digital presence or social media as the greatest priority for the next year. In order to achieve this, they will need their staff and volunteers to improve their digital skills, and to provide a way for them to do so easily. With charities reporting in the same report that their second biggest challenge is upskilling staff and volunteers, the time is right for a digital skills framework for the charity sector.
The opportunity to work on the framework came at a really opportune moment for 1625IP. We had identified the need for a way to have colleagues upskill themselves when it comes to digital and technology. A framework that contained the fundamentals but with an opportunity to create bespoke pages also felt like a good fit.
Katie Jones, former Digital Access and IT Coordinator at 1625 Independent People
In July FutureDotNow launched a roadmap for improving essential digital skills in the workforce, in response to the report finding that 60% of the UK workforce struggled with essential digital skills. The roadmap calls for a joined-up approach by government, business and the social sector to support individuals and organisations to assess their digital skills levels and upskill.
Given that the social sector is already embedded and well-trusted in many of the communities that are at most risk of digital exclusion, it follows that supporting charity workers to upskill can lead to them in turn supporting their beneficiaries with digital skills. The digital skills framework has been designed to play a role in the national drive dedicated to closing the UK skills gap.
The plan
So that we can support as many charities as possible to have their own digital skills frameworks, we’re planning on developing and white-labelling the Digital Skills Framework. We’re currently exploring whether we can reuse another digital skills tool that the Scouts have developed: their volunteer skills tool, which has been funded by Catalyst and Nominet, and together with the Digital Skills Framework for staff, was the runner up in the Digital Leaders 100: Digital Skills or Talent Initiative of the Year Award.
We’ve got a long-term plan for the digital skills framework and have figured out how much it will cost to maintain, develop and scale for the first year and beyond. We’re now actively seeking funding to realise this project.
Our ambition is to get 48 organisations set up with their very own frameworks in the first year. Each organisation will be able to add their own branding and bespoke resources, as well as gaining access to a wider repository of resources that have been crowdsourced from trusted and respected sources, within and outside the charity sector. We’re exploring a tiered payment model to enable smaller charities to benefit from the framework, which will include an optional package of support to fully tailor and embed it in organisational processes and strategies.
It’s so exciting to see the digital skills work that we have started working on with CAST, Catalyst and Nominet start to spread out and get used by other charities. We are already starting to see our digital skills tools in use across our 150,000 volunteers and 550 staff team, but it has always been our aim that the tools and framework can be used across the sector.
Lara Burns, Chief Digital Officer at Scouts
A collaborative process
We’re not doing this alone — this project started as a collaboration, and will continue to be just that. To steer and champion the ongoing development and funding of the framework, we’ve set up a steering group, made up of representatives from Scouts, other early framework testers and skills experts in the sector. We regrouped in early September to discuss our aims, ambitions and ways of working. There is a lot of energy around ensuring the sustainability of the framework and its relevance in a rapidly changing environment, especially with the rise of AI and other new tools and technologies.
As more charities start to use the framework, the aim is to bring them together to share how they’re using it, discuss any challenges they’re coming up against, and swap best practice on embedding it into their organisational processes. A sort of peer community or community of practice that sits around the framework. There’ll also be a feedback loop, so that new features and bugs being reported by the framework’s users can be prioritised accordingly and taken into future rounds of development.
Get involved
We’re aiming for the digital skills framework to be available more widely to the charity sector in 2024. If you’d be interested in learning more and exploring how you can use it within your organisation, please register your interest here.
If you’d like to support this exciting work, please get in touch with workwith@wearecast.org.uk.
We need to find a snappier name that differentiates this framework from others that aren’t specifically for the social sector. Based on what you’ve read, have you got any naming suggestions? Answers on a postcard to digitalskills@wearecast.org.uk please!
