Evaluating digital participation – how hard can it be?

In its Digital Participation strategy Digital Participation: A National Framework for Local Action, the Scottish Government describes its vision of a world-class Digital Scotland where, “…everyone has the skills, confidence and opportunity to benefit from digital technologies”. As for everyone involved in working towards these goals, evaluation is a key part of the SCVO Digital Participation programme. Otherwise, how will we know that we’re making progress? Scottish Government also wants to measure progress across Scotland and make comparisons with the rest of the UK and with the recognised world leaders. It’s therefore essential that consistent measures are agreed and adopted. It’s generally accepted by key stakeholders that there are three key barriers to digital participation: lack of access, lack of skills and lack of motivation. There’s also growing agreement on the types of activities that will break down these barriers: more infrastructure, community-based access points, use of the “network effect” to increase interest and increased provision of basic online skills learning opportunities. However, there’s still ongoing debate, discussion and numerous ideas circulating about the best way to carry out consistent evaluation nationwide. Within SCVO we’ve developed a high level evaluation framework which was recently approved by our Leadership Group. This will help track progress of fundamental activities, such as the increase in access points, numbers of citizens completing basic online skills training and the number of digital volunteers provided via the Charter Signatory initiative. Although gathering this data is a key part of the evaluation process, it is of course, the easy part. What we really want to understand and be assured of is the benefits to individuals, to their community, to the economy and to Scotland. Through these richer, qualitative measures, we will gain not just a clearer picture of the benefits of getting Scottish citizens online but we will also be better informed as we develop future digital participation initiatives to ensure that we don’t just become a digital nation but stay a digital nation. We are already working closely with a number of stakeholders to try to capture these qualitative measures but are always keen to capture more ideas and enrol more help. If you would like a chat about this, find me on Twitter or send your thoughts or comments to digital@scvo.scot