8 minute read
Digital exclusion
For the past year, we have lived much of our lives in the digital world – for better or worse. We are still adapting but, to start with, we need to make sure the technology is accessible to all.
BY HELEN CRANE
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It is easy to complain about the monotony of working from home, or the overuse of Zoom for family quizzes, but being online has also helped us to access essential services that have become temporarily unavailable to us in “the real world”. People have attended GP appointments over video or live chat, applied for business support using government websites, and attended Job Centre appointments online when they have been made redundant.
Imagine, then, being one of the 11 million people in the UK who – according to NHS Digital – do not have the basic digital skills to use the internet effectively.
Even pre-pandemic, public sector bodies were taking their services and communications online in a bid to improve ease of access and efficiency. But there is a risk that some of the people that rely most heavily on the public sector – for example, older people, those on lower incomes, and those with disabilities – will be excluded because of a lack of digital literacy. So what are these organisations doing to make sure that no one gets left behind – and how can communications professionals help them reach the people who need them most?
Sarah Waddington is the founder of Astute.Work, a management and PR consultancy, and a former president of the CIPR. Last autumn, she launched a new title in her #FuturePRoof series of books which documented NHS communicators’ experience of digital transformation during the pandemic. COVID-19, she says, hugely accelerated the use of digital services in healthcare. “Barriers put in the way of digital transformation in terms of investment, or IT, or bureaucracy, or simply because it was in the ‘too difficult’ box – these were addressed immediately because of the nature of the pandemic,” Waddington says.
Examples include the COVID-19 test self-referral platform, which is used by tens of thousands of people every day, and improvements to the NHS App where people can book appointments and order prescriptions.
However, it would be remiss not to mention the NHS Track and Trace App, which has been fraught with problems. An Institute for Government (IfG) report, Digital government during the coronavirus crisis, says the app, which took months to launch, “shows that technology alone is no substitute for a well-designed service with a clear purpose.”
Other public bodies have responded quickly to the crisis, too. “HMRC built three new services in a matter of weeks that did the opposite of what the department normally does – paying out money, rather than taking it in,” the IfG report says.
Of course, there are challenges when dealing with such a comprehensive digital overhaul – particularly when it comes to avoiding exclusion. “When you are doing something like a digital overhaul, you have to take absolutely everyone on the journey and they have to understand what is happening and why,” says Waddington.
NHS Digital says people are more likely to be digitally excluded if they are older, in a lower income group, unemployed, disabled, living in social housing or homeless.
Older people are a particular concern. According to data published by the Office for National Statistics in August 2020, 96 per cent of households in the UK had an internet connection.
But for households with one adult over 65 years of age, this fell to 80 per cent.
Designing effective digital services for older people can be done, however. The Department for Work and Pensions’ “Get Your State Pension” tool has processed 700,000 pension claims since it was launched in March 2018, and customer satisfaction ratings have never fallen below 95 per cent. One of the reasons it was a success was that departments worked together, pooling data sources, which meant three in five claimants could complete the process without intervention from DWP staff.
Making services user-friendly is something communications teams are well-placed to help with, according to James McCollum of agency Barley Comms. McCollum is currently working on charity The Good Things Foundation’s “Make It Click” campaign, which is aimed at giving people who only use the internet in a limited way the skills they need to succeed in the workplace. “The best role comms can play is being able to look at the full user experience,” he says. “It’s not just about compelling people to sign up, but asking what you are offering and why it is valuable.”
But how do we find people with limited digital skills in the first place? Having the right data about people and how they use public services is vital, because it allows digital services to be targeted at the right people and tailored for ease of use. It also helps communicators find people who might struggle online and offer them support.
Caroline Latta is a former in-house NHS communications professional who now runs her own business, Stand, advising public sector clients on major service changes. “If we are to identify the people who may be most affected by change, we need to know about them when plans are being formulated,” she says.
Clearly there are GDPR implications here, but Waddington says that public sector organisations such as the NHS generally deal with these quite well. “One of the key things is that they know their confidential data is going to be kept safe and secure,” she says. “That has been at the heart of everything the NHS has done in making sure people feel fully informed and confident that what is being done is for the best.”
Public bodies have a legal duty to ask people who use services their gender, age, postcode, and whether any of the protected characteristics listed in the Equality Act apply to them – but people are not obligated to provide it, and can be reticent to hand it over.
“If we explain why that information is important, it helps public sector organisations plan better,” says Latta. “We can formulate better engagement and involvement plans that fit the best way of engaging with that community.”
This might mean using offline methods to communicate with limited users of the internet about service change – and that is fine.
“It might be as simple as writing to people: we might write to them with a survey, we write to them with an offer for getting involved in a telephone interview,” Latta says.
McCollum also used some less mainstream marketing tools as part of Barley’s campaign to attract limited digital users to Make It Click's skills workshops and resources. As part of the campaign McCollum and his team profiled limited users to find
out what their needs were. Some of the groups identified included young people who were not in education, training or employment (NEETs), mums returning to work who may have fallen behind with current technology, and small business owners who usually traded face-to-face but needed to promote their services online during the pandemic.
“Targeting limited users can be a challenge as they don’t give away a lot of information online,” he says. “It is important to use avenues outside of the traditional routes to go down, and to think about who else could reach them on our behalf.” For example, when trying to reach small business owners, Barley connected with the Federation of Small Businesses to get the campaign included in its email communications, and also used radio adverts. “They might not be seeing our stuff on social, but they are reading their professional email,” he says.
Barley also used peer-to-peer communications, making videos with people who had used the Make it Click tools and getting them to “tell their transformational story to other limited users.”
If you want to engage with people who aren’t digitally literate in the long term, helping them to learn could be the best way.
Pre-COVID, Latta would run large-scale public meetings where health service users would give their views on proposed changes. Since then, many events have been taken online – and she says this had the positive effect of broadening participation and improving transparency. This has also been seen in other sections of the public sector, such as local authority town hall meetings.
When she was commissioned to run an online focus group with young mums, Latta was concerned that some would not be comfortable using a video call, as most had not worked during the pandemic. She decided to run an informal session where they could chat over a coffee and learn to use Zoom.
“If you want to reach people, and you want people to feel comfortable taking part, you need them to understand the technology,” she says. “There’s not necessarily a big cost to it, it is more about time.”
To properly communicate the benefits of digital transformation, communications staff might also need to brush up on their own skills.
At Barley, McCollum works with charity clients, some of which experienced fundraising challenges during the pandemic. To reduce their costs and engage better with stakeholders, many in-house communicators needed to improve their own digital knowledge. “A lot have had to upskill in-house, and I think that is one of the big transformations,” he says. “You will see lots more people working at charities who are more proficient at using digital tools.” He says this could include anything from being confident posting on social media to shooting video footage.
In the end, communicating digital change comes back to three PR basics.
The first is bridging the gap between your organisation and the public. “The PR function helps that two-way mechanism to take place, and to make sure the organisation is really listening,” says Waddington. Communicators, she says, should gather feedback from people which can then feed into the design of digital services.
Second, it will require well-defined goals. “It comes back to what our strengths are: planning, having a clear purpose around major projects, and knowing what can and can’t be influenced,” says Latta.
Ultimately, though, it is about knowing your audience. “The engagement methods we deploy, whether they are digital or non-digital, have to be fit for the target audience,” Latta continues.
As the public sector forges ahead with its digitisation push, it is vital that it keeps this in mind.
