The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is the membership organisation for Scotland's charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises. Charity registered in Scotland SC003558. Registered office Mansfield Traquair Centre, 15 Mansfield Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BB.
Unwrapping a year of digital support
In this blog we’re wrapping up and reflecting on a year of work helping charities of all sizes to boost their digital capability. We’ve reviewed our year internally, and shared some highlights with our funders. We decided we could share our reflections more widely, too. As always, we’re energised by the conversations we’ve had with so many charities about digital, and we’re inspired by what organisations can achieve when they ‘know what they need to know’.
2024 in numbers
- We had more than 2,000 signups for our live digital training (about 600 for our DigiShift calls, 700 for our digital masterclasses and another 1,000 for our AI workshops)
- We delivered just over 6,000 minutes of live digital training and events across the year
- By strange coincidence, we published about 6,000 words of long-form digital guides to our website
- (About 25,000 words of weeknotes written too!)
12 highlights from the year: a month-by-month overview
January: We kicked off another Digital Senior Leaders’ cohort, now in its eighth year, with around 300 CEOs and directors completing the programme since 2016
February: A great turnout for our one-day cyber conference co-hosted with ScotlandIS
March: Running our own AI masterclass which we also delivered to hundreds of organisations and networks throughout Scotland
April: Giving a keynote on AI and technology at the TSI annual conference
May: A new guide on managing website projects, including a launch at DigiShift
June: Continuing the practical theme, hearing about a great guide to CRMs and databases on a DigiShift call
July: An unusually busy season of digital masterclass training over the summer with sessions booking out
August: A revamp of our digital checkup tool, with a new set of questions
September: Lots of great sessions at our DigiNext conference in Glasgow
October: New research completed into barriers to achieving standards in cyber security
November: Launching a new digital strategy playbook
December: Wrapping up the year with our final training sessions and offering more 1-to-1 digital support sessions
What have we noticed or learned?
In person events are back with a bang – we saw great attendance at our in-person events right through the year.
Everyone wants to talk about AI – but now it’s more about ‘how could we use this well?’ rather than ‘what is AI?’. Practical topics like managing website projects and choosing a CRM system have remained popular too. Even though these seem like ‘established’ digital topics, organisations still need guidance in these areas.
Many organisations are still working out how to optimise hybrid working, and digital wellbeing was a popular topic this year. Even though a lot of organisations have sorted out the basic technical processes to enable their teams to work from anywhere, there is more to do on building good collaboration and management practices.
We were pleased to see strong demand for our training right through the year – booking out sessions in the summer holidays was unexpected. Our DigiNext event booked out very quickly, but we found that we had a fair few no shows on the day. So in future we will release event places in phases, to make sure that people aren’t booking too far in advance.
What’s coming up in 2025?
- We’ve got a strong Digital theme at The Gathering, with events on digital change, building your cyber incident response plan, and putting people at the heart of AI.
- We’ll be running another digital senior leaders cohort, with bookings closing on 12 February
- Our next long-form guide will be on how to use digital and technology sustainably.
- There will be more digital masterclasses on agile project management and how to unlock effective team collaboration
- Building on our research about cyber security, we’ll be rolling out training and awareness-raising activity to help organisations keep cyber security on their radar at all levels from boards to frontline staff.
Wishing you all the best in your digital endeavours in 2025. And remember, although there is no done with digital, we are always here to help!
