FAQs

Depending on the formality of your corporate volunteering framework, there are different options available to your corporate volunteers to work towards a connected and networked UK.
 
1.    If your framework is less formal, then you can encourage your employees to use their volunteering day(s) and to join the digital champion network and pass on their invaluable skills to people they know:  friends, family or neighbours. This is often the simplest and easiest way to volunteer to help people get online and recognises that individual peer to peer support is the most effective way to help people experience the benefits of the internet. There are lots of resources freely available at www.go-on.co.uk/champions and this is where your champs can also join the digital champ network.
 
2.    If your corporate volunteering framework is more formal, which will often be the case, then there are opportunities for your digital champions to be creative about what they do, either as individuals, or together in a team.

• As an individual, your digital champion can find a local event or take part in a national campaign for Internet beginners such as Spring Online with Silver Surfers', Get Online Week or Age UK's itea and biscuits.  They can use the postcode search on http://champions.go-on.co.uk/ to find a centre where they can volunteer or help a campaign.
• As an individual, or as a team, your digital champions can set up and run their own event or take part in a national campaign, taking advantage of the resources available and by being part of national PR. Your organisation could make IT training rooms available for example, to assist. Alternatively, you could assist by enabling your team of volunteers to use portable company equipment at an external public location. Alternatively, they could contact a local UK online centre (in England) or public library (UK wide) to see if the location/equipment can be borrowed for the event.
• Where your digital champion, or team of champions, have existing contacts in their communities or with charities, it is worth exploring these from the perspective of this agenda.  For example, if your volunteer already works with a homeless charity, they will likely have outreach to people who have not used the internet. Your volunteer (team) could set up and run an event to help these people experience the benefits of the internet.
• Some corporate volunteering programmes involve people working as a team as part of leadership development. A digital inclusion initiative is a suitable challenge for this. Your team could design and deliver an initiative to help people who have never used the Internet before, in conjunction with local community organisations. Part of the challenge to the team is to come up with a creative solution to identify a suitable community (e.g. sheltered housing, ethnic or minority community, low-income area) and work with them to engage and inspire people who haven’t used the internet to try it out, perhaps on an event basis, ideally with a ‘leave behind’ for the community so that the work can continue.  There is plenty of collateral to assist such a team and the skills benefit to them is clear, as there are aspects of project management, influencing, community engagement, logistics, event planning and technical assistance, all required to make the project a reality and help a target number of people get online.

3.    Fully managed volunteering programmes

If your organisation is large, you could consider partnering with service delivery providers such as UK online centres, Age UK or Public Libraries), to set up a specific programme offer for your corporate volunteers. Large or small, employee volunteering programmes can also be set up using the Do-it database, or managed by providers such as Timebank. When contacting such an organisation be clear that your goals are to help people experience the benefits of the internet. As an alternative to helping train people to use the internet, or setting up events, a valuable use of your volunteers’ time can be to deploy their expertise as subject matter experts, for example by mentoring providers’ management staff on HR, finance, marketing or governance. Success factors for such a managed programme include:

• Have clear ownership and strong nominated contacts both at the corporate and at the charity
• Develop and communicate a clear proposition for the volunteers, being specific about what they will do, who they will contact, when and where will the activity take place.
• If your proposition is about training people, ensure together with your partner that your volunteers themselves are given induction training about how best to approach the other person’s interests and skill levels, as well as how to use and access the online tools which are available on the digital champion hub.
• Include the methods for evaluating the champions' experience in the proposition up front, and consider including both qualitative and quantitative aspects.
• Introducing an element of competition among your digital champions or business areas is a particularly useful way of engaging people, e.g. highest number of participants that attend an event run by your volunteers with a prize or recognition for the volunteers; top number of events run by a business area, again with a prize for that business area.