GMCA Digital
Putting the human in digital
By Lauren Milward, January 2023
In late 2022, our communication campaign “fixing the digital divide” was crowned winner of the CIPR North West Pride award for best use of digital and social media. Judged by a panel of industry experts, this recognised the year’s outstanding digital or social media campaign in the region. I was proud to take home the award on behalf of our small comms team of two and an amazing wider team across Greater Manchester doing fantastic work to fix the digital divide.
I was surprised that the campaign won, not because I didn’t think it was a fantastic piece of work, or that it was a worthy winner but because with this campaign we took things back to basics, stripping away the “glitter” and with very little budget, we focussed our efforts on what was at the heart of our campaign – people!
Why did we need this campaign?
A 2020 report produced by The Good Things Foundation and Liverpool University suggested that as many as 1.2 million residents in Greater Manchester (GM) could be excluded in some way from accessing the benefits digital brings. We know that a lack of digital access and skills can have huge negative impact on a person’s life.
When working with the project team on GM’s digital inclusion ambitions, I heard some big numbers - that 1.2m mentioned above, plus the fact that 700,000 people in GM are only using the internet in a narrow or limited way. 450,000 are classified as “non-users” of the internet and 8% of GM households are unable to continuously afford access to the internet. Whilst our campaign did share these facts, they weren’t the story of what we wanted to tell.
Instead, we focussed our campaign on the people, those at the heart of the region’s digital inclusion ambitions. People like Bernard from Salford. His lung conditions mean he spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic behind closed doors. His limited digital skills meant he couldn’t bank or shop online or FaceTime his grandchildren.
“I didn't want to live anymore, it's as simple as that. I woke up in the morning and thought, what can I do today? I can't do anything for myself. It just killed me. I didn't have the tech know how to do anything, I just sat here getting worse every day,” said Bernard.
Bernard was put in touch with Salford-based charity Inspiring Communities Together’s Tech and Tea, who were able to teach him the basics. He's since gone from not being able to send an email to being the self-titled tech support for his street! Bernard shared his story at a digital inclusion meeting, bringing the room to tears – it was these kinds of stories we needed to tell to “bring to life” our campaign, stories that aren’t uncommon across the region but are seldom heard.
Telling the stories of our people
Most of the time our communication objectives are all about sharing the positives, the what we are doing and the why it is great! None more so than digital. When I started in my current post in 2020, we could have gone down the route of focussing our efforts on selling how great digital is, and don’t get me wrong – we do that, but we wouldn’t be authentic if we didn’t share, and campaign to overcome, the challenges too.
During the pandemic digital transformation moved at a pace never seen before, but what does that mean for those affected, or at risk of, digital exclusion? This is what our campaign aimed to communicate; by telling real people’s stories we would be articulating the scale of the challenges, demonstrating why we are doing what we are doing and encouraging other organisations and businesses to play their part in tackling the digital divide too.
After securing coverage for Bernard’s story on ITV’s Granada Reports flagship news programme, we focussed on producing our own video content to take the reach even further. We featured three varied and extremely powerful stories we felt were representative of our 1.2 million digitally excluded residents:
Zac a pupil at Newman RC College, in Oldham, shared how not having internet connectivity at home whilst schools were closed during the Covid-19 pandemic meant he missed out on education
Hadisa, who was born with a facial deformity which affected her eyesight, struggled using certain devices or face recognition tools until she received support from charity, Henshaw’s.
And Vivienne, an older resident living in Wythenshawe Community Housing, shared how learning digital skills transformed her life after fearing she would be left behind.
What’s my learning from this campaign?
Sometimes as comms professionals we feel like we have to come up with something new in our work, or test out a new method - but that’s not always the case. We’ve seen with this campaign that a simple and steadfast approach when it came to storytelling works, highlighting stories of diverse local people experiencing and overcoming digital access and related challenges, providing a platform for relatable everyday accounts from some of our seldom-heard digitally excluded residents. The awards judges praised our ‘sympathetic storytelling with a perfect cast of advocates for the cause’ as a key factor in our success.
Big budget isn’t always needed (although it would be great wouldn’t it!). A small portion of communication budget was used to produce the main campaign video, with the remaining work being delivered in-house, and by working with external media. That’s been a really important one for me, especially in current climate.
For this campaign less is more. There’s so much happening in the digital inclusion space in GM so we had to be careful not to saturate our audiences and instead select the stories, facts and stats that would be most impactful.
You also might have noticed the examples above of storytelling are cross sector - we used existing relationships to find stories from voluntary community and social enterprise, social housing and education.
Building on our success and learning
We worked with Deeplish Community Centre to share their communities experience of digital exclusion. The centre is situated within one of the 10% most deprived areas in the country. Digital Exclusion Risk Index also suggests the area has a higher-than-average likelihood of people within the community being digitally excluded.
As part of the roll out of a LFFN across GM, delivery partner Virgin Media O2 Business committed to setting up a mixture of homeless shelters, charities and community centres with free connectivity for five years. Deeplish Community Centre was one of those sites.
We worked with Deeplish Community Centre to share their community experience of digital exclusion. The centre is situated within one of the 10% most deprived areas in the country. Digital Exclusion Risk Index also suggests the area has a higher-than-average likelihood of people within the community being digitally excluded.
As part of the roll out of LFFN across GM, our delivery partner Virgin Media O2 Business committed to setting up a mixture of homeless shelters, charities and community centres with free connectivity for five years. Deeplish Community Centre was one of those sites.
The centre had existing connectivity but the connection was poor and couldn’t support the volume of required use. Post-pandemic and with the current cost of living crisis costs came into play and having connectivity became a luxury, rather than an essential part of the site’s day to day offer. In summer 2021 the community centre was setup with free connectivity for 5-years. This allowed the centre to pivot their offer and keep up with today’s digital society – leaving us with a fantastic story to tell. Again, working with Granada Reports we were able to get Deeplish featured on evening news.
The fix the digital divide campaign, has and remains a fascinating project to work on and has definitely reminded me of the value of focussing on what’s really at the heart of the what and why of our communication work.
Watch Greater Manchester Digital Inclusion film - why digital inclusion matters
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