Digital Inclusion by Stealth; engaging people through creative digital media projects

Digital Voice is a Community Interest Company set up 15 years ago. We work across the UK, delivering innovative, high-quality courses and bespoke projects which develop people’s creativity and digital skills. We aim to work with the most marginalised; and older people are some of the most digitally excluded in the country. We find that using creative digital media is an effective means of supporting people to increase their self-esteem and self-confidence as well as digital skills. We have delivered basic digital inclusion courses for some years now. But we realised there were lots of people who weren’t ready or were scared. We wanted to offer alternatives- ways of getting people interested in developing digital skills. So we have developed a range of courses and projects that engage people for a different reason, then they realise they have actually developed those skills and it wasn’t so bad. This talk takes you through ways you can introduce digital to the digitally excluded in a way that plays to their interests and gently introduces digital into their lives by completing a creative digital project that relates to their lives.