One Digital and its Programme Director chosen as Digital Leader finalists

The Digital Leaders 100 (DL100) is a national programme that recognises individuals and organisations who demonstrate a pioneering and sustainable approach to digital transformation across the public, private and non-profit sectors. This year's DL100 is made up of 10 finalists in 10 different categories selected from the nominations by a panel of independent judges. At a time when the UK is moving to ‘digital by default’ but over 12 million people lack basic digital skills, One Digital is a unique collaboration between six diverse organisations to create a sustainable and far reaching digital inclusion solution. Age UK, the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations, Citizens Online and Digital Unite with its partners Affinity Sutton and AbilityNet have joined forces to develop the One Digital programme that is recruiting, training and supporting around 1,000 Digital Champions nationwide. Funded with £2 million from the Big Lottery Fund, the programme is helping thousands of people develop basic digital skills and is reaching a cross-sector of society including those with disability and accessibility needs, young adults looking for work, the over 65s, and third sector organisations and their beneficiaries. The experienced partners know that empowering and inspiring local people to be Digital Champions is a highly effective way to deliver digital skills and that that approach is made more efficient by working together, away from project-by-project delivery. With no previous precedent set for a digital skills delivery collaboration of this size or scale, the partners have developed their own governance structures and created a common evaluation framework to gather essential data on the role of Digital Champions in the dissemination of basic digital skills. They’ve developed a cohesive programme that includes new online training courses for their specific communities that will benefit the whole partnership. Topics include engaging older people and addressing cognitive challenges to supporting learners with accessibility needs and helping young adults into work. Since the programme went live just 14 weeks ago in January there are already over 300 Champions being trained and supported to help hundreds of internet beginners across the UK. Third party evaluation* has already shown that partners believe that what the collaboration is trying to do would be difficult for any single organisation to achieve on its own. The future of One Digital is bright. Online public voting for the DL100 2016 list is now open until Friday 27 May and the final list order and category winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on Wednesday 15 June. To vote visit http://www.digileaders100.com/vote/ For more information on One Digital visit www.digitalchampionsnetwork.com/one-digital *Independent evaluation across the One Digital partnership by Sara Dunn Associates in February 2016.