This page gives an overview of some key principles behind digital service delivery. For more detailed information of the main topics to explore when moving your services to digital channels, see our How To Guide: Digital Services
SCVO in collaboration with Third Sector Lab are also supporting organisations to share best practice through regular DigiShift zoom calls, DigiListen podcasts and blogs.
Here are some short examples of how voluntary sector organisations can use digital tools to help the people they work with. It doesn’t cover every situation, but has some tools to help meet common challenges. We've picked examples that:
It can be time-consuming to schedule one-to-one appointments, especially if your service is operating to variable hours.
SCVO use a tool called Calend.ly which allows users to book one-to-one appointments. The times listed are sychronised to a calendar and booked immediately, which means the user has confidence about what is going to happen and SCVO can pick up the call without any emailing back and forth. Another tool for this is Intercom live chat + Google Calendar.
If you are using G Suite or Microsoft Office 365, you can easily generate user-friendly flexible forms to embed on a website or send out via email or SMS. Results are automatically captured into a spreadsheet.
If you’re capturing any personal data through a form or booking system, you will need a privacy statement to explain how this will be used.
For one-to-many ‘broadcast’ communications, you need to be using the channels where your service users or volunteers are active. You should do a bit of work to make things easy for your users.
With so many voluntary sector organisations basing their work on face-to-face contact, social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic is presenting real challenges. Two big issues are: enabling users to join a video call from their own phone or device with no extra installation, and the need for confidentiality.
Embedding a short, easy survey in your outbound communication, for example in an email you send after a meeting is really easy to do. Although it’s very common in online retail, charities could make much more use of this. Capturing user insight and feedback at key moments during their journey with you is much more meaningful than sending long surveys at infrequent intervals. Some easy ways to do this:
See SCVO events calendar for details of upcoming DigiShift zoom calls, and this resource page for access to call recordings, blogs and podcasts.
If you have a query you would like some help with you can book a free one-to-one chat with the SCVO Digital team to explore issues and priorities in a bit more detail.