The Digital Capacity Building programme is a one-year pilot programme offering direct support on digital strategy, systems and data and is open to grantholders across Scotland. It delivers practical, working digital solutions to solve problems or enable opportunity for the charity.

• Combines triage, project scoping and delivery through skilled volunteers and corporate partners, ensuring solutions are appropriate, sustainable and affordable.

• Targets around 60 practical digital projects in year one, with at least 10 solutions identified that are suitable for use by multiple charities.

• Helps charities improve efficiency, reduce manual processes, strengthen reporting, and free staff time to focus on beneficiaries.

The programme will focus on projects that improve operational efficiency, enable new capabilities, improve the management of data or other interventions that help the charity achieve maximum impact with the resource it has.

This guide includes a number of case studies and examples of projects that have been delivered previously, for example:

• Optimisation of a charity’s CRM configuration to remove manual copying and pasting of data and automation of workflows.

• Development of a call management portal to automate the assignment of calls made by volunteers to service users.

• A digital registration and attendance tracking system for a charity that runs events for dementia patients.

In each case, these projects saved hours or days every week for the charity staff, helping them to scale their services, as well as giving them much better management information and reporting capabilities.

It’s important to note that there are types of project or support that are not in scope of this programme, e.g. :

• building or updating a web site

• ongoing IT support

• user training

We recommend that you speak with us at an early stage if you think there is an opportunity to support a grantholding charity through this programme.

In general, the aim of the programme is to help charities tackle the twin problems of rising demand and limited resources.

Digital technology is one of the few things that really does allow charities to do more with less, reducing the administrative overhead in their operations, allowing their staff to focus their time on the highest value parts of their roles.

The process we use lets the charity focus on what it does best and how it does it - it does not require any technical knowledge on their part.

We provide expertise through our volunteers that would otherwise be out of reach for the charity and our extensive experience of working with more than 500 charities on projects like this gives them confidence that the solution will be appropriate, accessible and affordable.

They can also be assured that the Scottish Tech Army will continue to support them after the project has been delivered.

In your interactions with grantholders you learn about their work, what their priorities are and what constraints they are dealing with.

National Lottery funding is very often about improving charities’ operations, growing their capacity, introducing or growing services or overcoming barriers to growth. Digital technology can support many of the same objectives.

In speaking with grantholders, there are likely to be opportunities to refer them to us. Our case studies are a good source of ideas that can be shared with charities to see if similar interventions would be valuable for them.

We are available to discuss these ideas with you and help you evaluate whether the programme is appropriate for any individual charity.

There are a number of ways in which we can support you in evaluating and recommending this programme to grantholders:

• We will be running briefing sessions for funding officers over the course of the programme - these will be interactive sessions in which we will explain how the programme works, provides examples of projects that are being delivered and give you an opportunity to ask questions.

• We will be providing material that you can share with grantholders as part of regular communications or on a case-by-case basis with individual charities.

• You can contact us by email at grantholdersupport@scottishtecharmy.org with any questions or to arrange a call to discuss any aspect of the programme or a specific project - to book a call with us please visit the booking page.

• We will also be running interactive “Ask me anything digital” sessions for grantholders to help raise awareness of how technology could benefit their organisation and allow them to ask questions - funding officers are welcome to attend these sessions. You can find the list of available sessions and book to attend on the event booking page.