[#digirural]
Welcome to your Prince’s Countryside Fund Project Guide
Please keep this guide to hand throughout the duration of the project and share with any colleagues who may also be involved with its delivery.Introduction
Following a successful year one of funding from Prince’s Countryside Fund, Tinder Foundation have been awarded a second year of grants to support UK online centres working within rural communities. The grant funding for FY16/17 will cover an 18 month period and will provide funding to three of the Digital Hubs from year one with a view to building on the success achieved.
Digital Hubs will provide free and informal support and training at the heart of rural communities, engaging those who are most at risk of poverty, isolation and unemployment, and helping them develop the confidence, motivation and skills required to use digital to improve their lives and businesses. They will become established locally, providing inclusive and holistic support for the whole community, and acting as a central location providing free and informal support and training on digital skills and access to the internet.
Project Expectations:
Each hub will support 40 individuals and 10 businesses every six months (each Hub totalling 80 individuals and 20 businesses), following a three stage user journey:
- Hubs will engage individuals and businesses via local marketing/partners
- Individuals will include at least 4 young people within the total audience reached (for the purposes of this project we will define ‘young’ as being between the ages of 16-25)
- Digital capability will be assessed, identifying areas of interest and need
- Hubs will teach digital skills including:
●Basic digital skills
●Online banking
●Government services e.g. HMRC, RPA
●Social media
●Financial tools.
Every six months, each Hub will also train six volunteers as community Digital Champions, and one local training organisation (totalling 12 volunteers and one local training organisation over the length of the project). Hubs will record the number of individuals/businesses trained and skills acquired via the Client & Project record provided by Tinder Foundation, which will be held on Tinder Foundation’s central Google drive.
Hubs will be supported to develop sustainability plans through upskilling individuals and organisations. Each Hub will also be provided their own shared folder on Google drive where they can store relevant information from the project.
Timescales and milestones
The project comprises of three main periods of activity:
●1 September to 31 December: Project setup
●1 January to 31 December 2017: Project delivery
●1 January to 28 February 2018: Project summary and evaluation
During this period, Tinder Foundation will be reporting to the funder on the following timeline:
●Six month report 28 February 2017
●Six month report 31 August 2017
●End project report 28 February 2018
Other milestones include:
●6 December:The Prince’s Countryside Fund Forum
●Mid-July [dates for 2017 TBC at this time]:National Countryside Week
Funding
Funding grants will be paid out in three instalments via the UK online centres claim pages around the following periods:
●£3,000 during October 2016
●£3,000 during March 2017
●£2,000 during September 2017
All payments will be made subject to meeting our funders requirements during our reporting periods as highlighted above in the Timescales and milestones section and as per your Grant Terms and Conditions.
Communications
Throughout the project your main contact at Tinder Foundation will be your Project Manager Natalie Thorpe (), if you’re experiencing any problems or need some guidance then please do contact her in the first instance. You’ll may also hear from Research Manager Laurence Piercy (), our Content Marketing Officer Samantha Taylor () or our Funding & Performance Manager, Holly Bagnall-Bell ()at different times during the project.
During the project you will be able to view the latest public updates onTinder Foundation project pageand talk to other project participants or join in conversations on social media.
Social media
Throughout the project, we urge you to use social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.) to demonstrate activity to funders, partners and the wider public.
For anything relating to this project we’re using the hashtag, #digirural, across all social media channels. There are also generic hashtags that can be used if appropriate including #digitalinclusion #digiskills #rural and #digitalskills.
Do keep an eye out for any of our funders tweets from @counttrysidefund, specifically around July 2017 when they will be promoting their main campaign of the year which will be during National Countryside Week#countysideweek
Funders & Partners:
Twitter@TinderFdn
@countrysidefund / Facebook
The Prince’s Countryside Fund / LinkedIn
Tinder Foundation
What should I do on social media?
●Share photos of learners or sessions that are taking place, quick status updates, or links to any web pages, videos or other content relevant to the ongoing project.
●Keep an eye on the hashtag and on @TinderFdn to see how the project is progressing and retweet/reshare anything that interests you or you think would interest your followers.
●Share your thoughts about why this project is important to your organisation or what difference it’s making in your community.
●Follow our funder on their social media channels and tag them into any social media activity you do and they will be happy to retweet, like and share your stories:
○Twitter = @countrysidefund
○Instagram = @countrysidefund
○Facebook @princescountrysidefund
Case studies, toolkit and blog posts
As part of the project, Tinder Foundation will be requesting case studies to publish online, in project reports and to share with funders. We need these to demonstrate the impact of the project and will be approaching project participants in order to produce these.
Tinder Foundation will also approach you during the project timeline to write a guest blog post for the Tinder Foundation website or other sites. We’ll provide extra guidance if we ask you to do this, and will work closely with you on what content is required. A timeline of expected resource will be provided to you on the launch training event.
If you have any ideas for blog posts or case studies, please get in contact with your Project Manager. Similarly if you think you would like additional information for future project guides, then please let us know so we can incorporate your ideas in future editions.
At the end of our project, we also aim to produce a best practice toolkit for other rural organisations to use to helping scale the model across other communities. As key deliverers in the community with rural expertise, we would like to gather your input in order to produce this as evidence for our funder at the end of our project.
Training
As we are building on our previous project from Year 1, we will hold a joint face to face event with you in order to share more about the project and an opportunity to ask any questions you may have.
We would also like to discuss during this event, how we can work together to share best practice across the Hubs and Tinder Foundation, with a view to developing our evaluation throughout the project as well as collating evidence for our final best practice toolkit.
Do take a look at the other training available on and get in contact if you feel you have any further training needs which aren’t covered in this section.
For any of your project needs, please contact Tinder Foundation Natalie Thorpeon or call the Tinder Foundation office on 0114 349 1666Good luck with your project!
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