2024: Shining a light on all the Good Things

What a year it’s been at Good Things - here are some of my highlights from the last year.

1 million people supported by next Christmas!

Our strategic ambition to support 1 million people by next Christmas is on track! Working with the amazing National Digital Inclusion Network - over 5,000 local partners (digital inclusion hubs) - we’ve been engaging people in communities across the UK.  We’ve already smashed our other goal - to reach 5,000 local partners - and that number is still climbing. The life blood for digital inclusion is in these local partners - community centres, local charities, libraries, food banks, hospital wards and GPs, housing providers, local branches of Age UK and Citizens Advice, and all Virgin Money and O2 stores. Thousands of places and people who work or volunteer in them, all dedicated to fixing the digital divide. 

Incredible Partnerships

As well as the thousands of incredible local partners, our progress towards fixing the digital divide has only been made possible thanks to the support of our strategic partners: Virgin Media O2, Vodafone, Nominet and Accenture - all of which we’ve worked with to raise awareness of digital inclusion, alongside meaningful impact in communities. Together, in 2024, we’ve supported hundreds of thousands of people - through data packages, refurbished devices and our online learning content empowering people to gain basic digital skills.

Our strategic partners have enabled us to develop and deliver our strategy, including working with the network, raising awareness, and providing an essential safety-net for excluded people. As well as collaborating with us and each other to deliver the strategy, our strategic partners support this year also included:

• Working with Virgin Media O2 to expand the number of Databanks to include O2 stores, and shining a light on this essential free connectivity via their exciting Christmas campaign - helping more people than ever before find out about much-needed free mobile sims and stay connected this year.
• Our media moments with Vodafone, from their viral Mind the Gap artwork in central London and later at the Albert Docks during the Labour Party Conference in the autumn. Further, we celebrated Get Online Week together, with new research to support donating devices and reducing e-waste.
• In 2024, we launched our new strategic partnership with Accenture, supporting an AI offer, including learning content for the National Digital Inclusion Network. We kicked this off with our introduction to AI animation and hope to support many more people to safely and confidently use AI over the coming years.
• Continuing the next phase of the Data Poverty Lab, with our Research Associate Dr Sarah Knowles, thanks to funding and support from Nominet. Next year we’ll be launching the findings from the Lab, so keep your eye out for this!

All of this is just a snapshot of our activity with our strategic partners. If you would like to find out more about becoming a strategic partner of Good Things, we’re always looking for new opportunities. Get in touch: partnerships@goodthingsfoundation.org.

Collaboration is Key

In partnership with Cosmic, Connected by Change, and University of Liverpool, we successfully completed a rapid ‘discovery’ project for the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority. We hope this will be published early in January 2025. 

This month, we were delighted to announce that Libraries Connected and Good Things Foundation have signed an MOU - confirming our commitment to continue working together to fix the digital divide in England. 

Over the year, we have continued to build strong partnerships with our supporters, such as Virgin Money who provide SIMs via the National Databank in their stores, and Yorkshire Building Society who’ve enabled hubs in Bradford to provide ‘Digital Skills for Employability’ support. We’ve been the charity of the year for ISPA, MBNL, OneID, Air IT, HotTopics and BJSS Sheffield, and have been grateful for the continued support of organisations like the Metropolitan Police and Reach PLC who donated their devices to the National Device Bank. 

 

A new look and new website!

2024 saw technological advancements for the whole world and Good Things was no different. We kicked off the year when we launched our new members online area for the National Digital Inclusion Network! This long-awaited launch signalled a shift - making it easier than ever for community organisations to join the National Digital Inclusion Network and begin delivering digital inclusion services to benefit people in their communities. This one-stop-shop for digital inclusion hubs (resources, training, grants applications and more) continues to grow and develop - with big plans for 2025.

Alongside the Members Area launch, we launched our new branding, and it’s been a joy to see it used over the year on our new resources, posters in communities and on big campaigns. It was lovely to share this Group project to develop the new branding with our friends at Good Things Australia.

In July, we launched the new Good Things Foundation website, signalling a new era for Good Things.

Digital for All campaign

In March, we launched our multi-channel campaign Digital For All, running for a full month. With pro-bono billboard advertisements thanks to JC Decaux, we told the stories of people like Victoria, a refugee who sought sanctuary and a future in the UK - helped along the way with support and community connection as well as a device from the National Device Bank and data from the National Databank, Victoria said:

“I’m getting data, device and skills support which is just amazing. I’m ambitious about my life now – about where I can go and what I can achieve. It’s helped me want to live again, and helped me heal. The light has come back into my life.”

Get Online Week

Our annual campaign, Get Online Week, was bigger than ever with over 2000 events run by local partners in the UK and Australia over just one week in October. I’m proud that the stats also told us that we had a 17% increase in the number of events in communities across the UK, and a 62% increase in the number of attendees benefitting from digital inclusion services during the campaign. We saw rising usage of Learn My Way, our digital skills platform and the National Databank - helping more people during the week than ever before. I’m so pleased that our campaign had meaningful impact:

• 86% of beneficiaries agreed they felt more digitally able and/or safe
• 92% agreed they were healthier, happier and/or better off.

Starting conversations

Martha Lane Fox, AI expert Nina Schick, Rt Hon Alan Milburn, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, health leader Minal Bakhai, Trussell CEO Emma Revie, Baronesses, and more - an innovation for 2024 was our year long conversation series, Digital Futures For Good. I was honoured to speak with leading experts and thought leaders; talking about their work, about leadership, about the society we live in today as well as the society we want for the future, and of course about digital inclusion. 

We were focused on what we thought policy and politicians should do to make a better world and leave no-one behind. Our expert guests talked about their experiences, and how digital inclusion overlaps with their work - exploring the innovation, ideas, and  initiatives necessary to fix the digital divide. You can catch up on the full series here.

We’ll be launching a report of the series in January. I highly recommend the series - all of the videos are worth watching. It was such an honour to have spoken to so many impressive and insightful people about the power of digital inclusion for people, for society, and for the economy.

Evidence, evidence, evidence (in partnership, partnership, partnership)

Over the year we’ve launched some great research, with many great partners. Kicking off with the Minimum Digital Living Standard report for households with children research report. 

Throughout the year we also assembled the best and most relevant research from all the most credible UK sources. In April, we launched our Digital Nation 2024 infographic just in time for the General Election; and in the Autumn, alongside Lloyds Banking Group, Nominet and the University of Liverpool we launched Digital inclusion: What the main UK datasets tell us, to bring the evidence based to four cross-sector roundtable discussions we hosted in August with around 100 different stakeholders 

Our research evidenced the need for people and provision in communities, with our Power Up report - our fantastic programme made possible thanks to five years of support from JPMorgan, demonstrating the power of large-value multi-year funding that is much needed today!

Our AI offer began to expand and we explored the importance of media and digital literacy for people with no or low digital skills when learning about AI. 

We rounded off the year alongside Trussell and our strategic partner, Vodafone, exploring the links between digital exclusion and deep poverty, following our interview with Emma Revie earlier in the year.

Digital Inclusion - less about digital more about inclusion and impact

Further to our new and expanding AI offer, we’ve been looking at digital inclusion and healthcare:  In September 2023, NHS England published ‘Inclusive Digital Healthcare: a framework for NHS action on digital inclusion’. This was launched by NHSE Health Inequalities Improvement team, with input from Good Things Foundation, VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance members and others. Earlier this year, we launched an updated version of Mitigating risks of digital exclusion in health systems, noting that there have been some positive and significant developments relevant to digital exclusion, digital inclusion, and health inequalities.

Working in partnership with NHS England’s Primary Care and Community Transformation and Improvement team and the Local Government Association (LGA) Digital Inclusion Network, on behalf of the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) Health and Wellbeing Alliance, we launched Local authorities’ experiences of working with partners in primary care to promote digital inclusion for health and kicked off a series of webinars, exploring themes of digital inclusion and healthcare - and the enablers of success for effective and impactful partnership working.

Getting together with partners

And in late March, we brought all of our strategic partners together with members of the National Digital Inclusion Network, at our Fixing the Digital Divide online event.

We explored our impact at our annual House of Lords reception, showcasing the innovative community partners in the National Digital Inclusion Network, and the organisations tackling the digital divide alongside us: Virgin Media O2, Vodafone, Nominet and Accenture. 

Later in the year, we kicked off Get Online Week, our annual campaign, with Minister for Digital Inclusion, Chris Bryant, and our partners and supporters.

The big one - the early General Election

The summer saw the surprise general election, changing our plans for the year: Bringing forward our Manifesto launch outlining our policy asks. You can read more about our advocacy with all the main political parties over the last year in the latest Insights here. 

During the pre-election period, our work with the Labour party had a moment in the spotlight. We organised a visit to a digital inclusion hub for then shadow Secretary of State for DSIT, Peter Kyle alongside our strategic partners and a local civil society organisation. We were able to demonstrate our key role convening communities, civil society, business and Government. Just prior to this, at London Tech Week, Peter Kyle announced that a Labour Government would work with charities like Good Things to prioritise digital inclusion. 

Shortly after the new Government came into post, we began working with DSIT to run four roundtables, convening cross-sector experts to hold digital inclusion conversations and help to shape the national response to the issue.

Later in the year, we took Minister Chris Bryant to a digital inclusion hub in Newcastle, and a few weeks later, the Minister was joined by the Secretary of State, Peter Kyle, at BGfm, a digital inclusion hub in Blaenau Gwent.

In December, I’m delighted to become part of the Treasury’s committee on Financial Inclusion - bringing together the knowledge and expertise of digital inclusion into the strategic thinking on financial inclusion.

I’m sure 2025 will be even more exciting as political priorities turn into political action on digital inclusion for people, for the nation, and for the economy. We hope Good Things Foundation and our national and local partners can help the Government to fix the digital divide for good in 2025 and beyond. 

Thank you!

If you’re a big funder or Strategic Partner, a Government Minister, a hyperlocal community partner, a volunteer, a Trustee, a member of the Good Things team, a national or regional partner, an MP, a social media supporter, a new collaborator or a partner who’s been around for years - I’m talking to you all to say thank you. 

I’m so proud of everything that we accomplished this year together. We all know the challenge is big, with millions of people still excluded from the essential daily life opportunities that most of us take for granted. But the size of the prize is worth the huge effort all of you bring to the challenge. Better lives for each and every individual supported is a huge achievement. A better society that seeks to include everyone is a society I hope we all want to live in. And there’s economic benefit too - £13.7 billion back to the economy if we fix the digital divide for good.

Thank you to all our partners for everything that you’ve done this year, and I’m so excited to see what we can achieve together in 2025.