Organisational Development and Achievements
In Year 13, we have continued to focus on online delivery, responding to a clear demand and need from our beneficiaries. For instance, on our South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project a participant said they most enjoyed, “Being in the comfort of my own home allowed me to relax and take in more information easily.”; whereas another participant said the workshops were, “Convenient - no travel time.”
We continue to value the importance of action learning to our participants and delivery; for instance, a participant on our South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project said:
“The workshops provides a wide arena from which to learn new skills. The facilitators provide an environment that is relaxed, safe from judgement, open to all skill levels and they are extremely knowledgeable and personable. The interaction with other members is encouraged and we often learn from each other. I believe that this way of learning in the comfort of your own home and sharing with others is fabulous.”
As planned, we have created an FAQ section regarding our delivery that is on our website, which reflects on our project evaluations and experiences, and can be sent to participants before attending our workshops, helping reduce barriers to engagement and creating a more inclusive and accessible learning environment. We also promote these FAQ during our workshops.
Also as planned, given the potential for online delivery to engage people from a wider geographical area in one space, we are currently exploring any demand we may have for our online workshops to engage people from outside of South Yorkshire.
We are moving closer to making Nextcloud a one-stop place for the organisation, where the messaging, files and forms all takes place – with plans to look at hosting workshops via Nextcloud too.
Whilst running the South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project we had participants and
previous participants email us for support. However, this experience helped us reflect on the need for a better system for responding to enquires for support. Given the organisation is run by volunteers and project-specific freelancers, with the freelancers paid for their preparation and delivery on the workshops, we find it can be difficult to provide support, especially at a standard we want to, to the people that contact us outside of workshop time – therefore, to be more sustainable as an organisation, we are going to look at implementing a system to ensure comprehensive support by providing 2 main options for assistance: 1) joining our no-cost workshops to obtain free support, but at a time when our freelancers are contracted in to help 2) by becoming a paid member of our Friends of FreeTech Project system, which helps the organisation become more sustainable.
We have continued to develop our unrestricted income, including from: donations, fundraising and our Friends of FreeTech Project membership. Regarding Friends of FreeTech Project membership, linking in with the above reflections on changes to how we provide support, we have introduced a £1 a month membership option to reduce barriers to accessing support from the organisation, whilst being sustainable. This unrestricted income has helped us with covering core running costs that we are unable to cover via grant funding, alongside enabling us to invest in resources that enhances our delivery.
There is a detailed outline below of the restricted funded projects – including examples of our three online core projects (Taking on Tech; Free Your Tech; and Tech for the Terrified) – we have run during this financial year, which have been crucial for covering costs of online delivery alongside our organisation’s core costs and key equipment/resource, stationery and marketing costs. To help make the organisation more efficient and sustainable, we are now using QuickBooks – funded by restricted grants – to do our accounts rather than the more manual system we had been using before this point. We have also focused on increasing our marketing of our services/activities, with this something we will continue to work on.
We have also found that there is increased interest in decentralised social media, known as the Fediverse, especially given Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase – the Fediverse is something we have covered for many years, but this was the first time we found a lot more interest and understanding of this topic before we even taught it in detail. Thus, it made this part of our courses even more important and it is therefore something we are going to build on in future projects.
Finally, we have added two more Directors to our Board to help with the sustainability and development of the organisation.
Projects
A summary of our projects this last year are as follows:
NB: Please see last year’s annual report for a summary of activities that took place on the following project: The National Lottery Community Fund, Awards for All, Taking on Tech/Tech Rollout Project (£9990). Whilst spending occurred for this project this year, no project activities i.e. workshops were delivered this financial year as they had been completed before this year and thus have not been reflected upon in this report.
1) Magic Little Grant via Localgiving in partnership with the Postcode Neighbourhood Trust, Promoting the FreeTech Project (£500) – This grant funded the following marketing costs, furthering our social impact: our domain renewals and webhosting costs; flyers and bookmarks to advertise our workshops, helping us reconnect and understand demand; a printed advert in Bessacarr and Cantley Today magazine (July & August issue); Facebook adverts promoting specific projects alongside our organisation in general; and, a one-quarter page advert in Active8 Magazine. Marketing helped promote workshops/activities for local residents to help improve their confidence, skills, social interaction and mental wellbeing; we engaged 30 people with an average age of 69 in workshops during the grant. The grant helped further our sustainability, reach and scale.
2) Sheffield Town Trust Subscription List (£1000 has been received so far for the first and second £500 annual payment of a total of three, thus £1500) – We are very thankful to be on the Sheffield Town Trust Subscription List for 3 years at the rate of £500 per year, with these annual subscriptions helping fund some of our core costs. This financial year we spent the first annual £500, with this going towards our accounts preparation and producing an accountants report and calculating and submitting our tax return to HMRC and purchasing Nextcloud (company cloud storage and where we create and store online workshop registration forms and evaluation surveys for participants to complete). We will spend the second annual £500 in the next financial year. The majority of our core costs are funded by restricted funding and therefore this funding from Sheffield Town Trust helps reduce the pressure on the volunteers involved in running the organisation, especially regarding writing the bids to fund the core costs in time, and create more security. This crucially means that more time and resources can go towards growing the organisation and our hybrid delivery (online and in-person) so it becomes more sustainable – including growing our unrestricted reserves and income generation, including via our Friends of FreeTech Project membership programme and donations. This grant has helped support the invaluable outcomes we have achieved through running the other projects mentioned in this report, as it has helped ensure the organisation’s core costs are funded.
3) South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project (£3891) – We acknowledge the support of South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation. The South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation Community Grants Programme is made up of several funds provided by generous local donors. This award has been made from the following fund(s): Samuel Roberts Trust Grassroots Distribution Fund. This grant funded two of our four core courses – Tech for the Terrified and Taking on Tech – engaging a total of 21 people in South Yorkshire with an age range of 44-87 and an average age of 70, with the project designed to reduce technological barriers and to promote inclusion. Specifically, through the grant, we tackled digital divides and exclusion, social isolation, disadvantage and loneliness by responding to demand and delivering the following activities: 1) Tech for the Terrified – online workshops targeted at beginners, engaging 9 people in South Yorkshire with an age range of 44-87 and average age of 68 in 5, 2-hour online IT workshops tackling five common tech fears, that ran on Friday mornings; we also encouraged participants to progress to the following: 2) Taking on Tech – our online support group for all levels, where participants can stay up-to-date on the latest changes in technology, engaging 12 people in South Yorkshire with an age range of 50-87 years and average age of 71 in 12, 2-hour online IT workshops covering set technology topics alongside utilising ‘action learning’ to respond to participants’ personalised technology needs and questions, that ran on Monday evenings. 6 participants that joined Taking on Tech had also taken part in Tech for the Terrified as part of this project.
“It felt good being back with friends in the comfort of my home, facing my fears around anything to do with technology.” - Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project Participant
4) The National Lottery Community Fund, Awards for All, FTP3: Tackling Digital & Social Exclusion Project (£9994) – Through this grant we are tackling digital divides and exclusion, social isolation and loneliness by responding to demand and engaging predominantly older people across South Yorkshire in our 3 core online projects: 1) Tech for the Terrified, running 5 times – each course involving 5, 2-hour online IT workshops tackling five common tech fears. 2) Taking on Tech – 12, 2-hour online IT workshops covering set tech topics alongside utilising ‘action learning’ to respond to participants’ personalised tech needs/questions. 3) Free Your Tech – 10, 2-hour online IT workshops focused on ethical and free hardware and software alongside privacy, security and saving tech waste. Workshop delivery will continue into the next financial year.
Partners
In this last year we have developed our connections and partnerships, including with:
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Social Isolation and Loneliness Alliance, Doncaster Culture and Leisure Trust – our organisation is a member of this alliance with the lead facilitator maintaining regular dialogue with the lead contact at the alliance, who helps promote our activities as part of this.
- Evidencing increased sustainability, reach and scale we also had increased interest in our workshops/activities, including from: an NHS Digital Inclusion programme; Lambeth Council; Doncaster Chamber; Thorne Library; and, Sanctuary Housing.
“Anyone who is nervous of using IT should join them (Free Tech Project). They make learning accessible and enjoyable for all levels of knowledge and experience.” - South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project participant
Future Developments, Aims and Expansion
We have several plans for future developments, aims and expansion, which includes some reflection on last year’s aims:
- We have found that participants have wanted more demonstrations via screen sharing, with us asking participants to provide us with topics they would want demonstrated and guided through via screen-sharing and action learning. We are going to build on this and keep working towards increasing our use of screen-sharing as part of our online delivery. Relating to this, we had lots of positive feedback from participants about how they want us to share screens of mobile devices during the workshops more, with participants finding this really helpful and mobile devices a particularly popular topic. Therefore, this is something we are going to keep building on in future workshops.
- Similar to last year, we aim to keep furthering our sustainability through growing our unrestricted income through aiming to increase the number of people who are members of our Friends of FreeTech Project alongside hopefully increasing donations to our organisation.
- We are continuing to reflect and learn to make our workshops more accessible in line with the social model of disability.
- Word of mouth continues to be an essential form of marketing, but we are always looking at ways to further awareness of our services with our Lead Facilitator planning to increase their networking with relevant community and voluntary groups/organisations next year.
- We will continue to evaluate our core projects and make sure they meet the demand and needs of our participants, including via an annual consultation survey regarding our activities and services and what our service users would like us to do differently/more of etc.
- Based on participant feedback, we are going to look into more ways of sharing the slides and information, shared during the workshops, with participants after the workshops as well – this would mean that participants can then refer to the slides (even if they don’t attend that session but are signed up to the module) and thus importantly increase accessibility and reduce barriers to learning. This is particularly relevant, based on participant feedback, for the learning of computer hardware and related specifications including via a diagram that we share during the workshops. We are going to look at sharing these slides via our company cloud storage, Nextcloud. Furthermore, we also plan to add the slides to Patreon as another perk of being a Friends of FreeTech Project member so members can access them even if they don’t attend/sign-up to the workshops/modules, helping increase the sustainability of our organisation and thus importantly the sustainability of our core modules.
- Through the South Yorkshire’s Community Foundation, Community Grants Programme, Tech for the Terrified & Taking on Tech Project, we have obtained a greater understanding of demand for our online workshops to engage people outside of South Yorkshire, which will influence our funding strategy going forward. We will be exploring with greater focus how much demand there is for our workshops outside of South Yorkshire (whilst continuing to focus on South Yorkshire, especially with our Taking on Tech course). As part of this, we are making more people aware of our waiting list survey that we now have linked on our website via our FAQ, which people can complete if they want to join our courses but are outside of South Yorkshire or if our current courses are full to evidence and understand demand.
- Reflecting on feedback from participants we will look at making the surveys to collect participants’ feedback easier to complete, as when we ask participants to rate different aspects of their learning there is one question at the end that asks them to explain all these ratings as a whole; instead, reflecting on participant feedback we will ask the participants to explain each rating separately, which will also ensure we collect more in-depth feedback too whilst importantly responding to participants’ needs.