Ayrshire Electronic Community: Initiatives

ICT Proactive Outreach Services

AEC provided outreach ICT services to support and encourage the adoption of ICT by individuals, communities and small businesses, identifying and overcoming the barriers to digital engagement and stimulating community capacity building in the context of social and economic development. Each group and business required different ‘hooks' to breakdown barriers and to encourage use and take up. Successful initiatives included:

i) Website Development - Community and Voluntary Sector: A process based approach to the development of a website ensured that individuals benefited from training in basic ICT skills, Internet awareness and searching procedures, Word Processing, Digital Imaging and email. In addition, information processing skills were acquired such as collating and editing and presentation of information. Latterly Web Templates were used which ensured a more inclusive approach involving a greater number of group members in the production and maintenance of their own websites. Confidence grew with each achievement and the websites were designed in such a way as to encourage ownership of the process. Group members were then encouraged to take part in specific ICT courses being offered locally.

ii) Website Development – Business Sector: The approach was designed to encourage businesses to not only have an online presence to enhance their business opportunities, but also to increase awareness of e-business opportunities and the benefits of broadband connectivity and ICT in general for their businesses. AEC staff found that there were mostly awareness and engagement issues where knowledge and training improved confidence and aided the decision making process.

iii) Appropriate and Relevant Content: AEC staff ascertained the objectives of each group and business and the way in which they operated by having onsite meetings from which staff developed and delivered relevant ICT content to enable them to make the most of the benefits of ICT for their organisation, for example, developing databases of customers/group members and enabling mail merge; disaster recovery procedures.

iv) One Stop ICT Support Service AEC's approach was innovative and holistic, in that a complete ICT support service offered disadvantaged communities a unique ‘one-stop' ICT support service. This service is still required in the community and voluntary sector and as such the Programme Manager is working with this sector to develop a business plan with a view to attracting funding for this service to continue.