Media Trust’s Digital Skills Training Evaluation

At Media Trust, we know digital comms can be a powerful force for social good, enabling charities to more effectively connect, communicate, campaign, fundraise, reach new audiences and provide frontline support to the communities they serve.

The 2017, 2018 and 2019 Charity Digital Skills Reports all point to persisting digital skills gap in the UK charity sector, underscoring that charities need to enhance their digital capabilities or risk being left behind. However, charities continue to face barriers to accessing quality and tailored digital communications training including limited budgets, fewer regionally available programmes and limited in-house resources to implement learning from the training.

In response, starting in 2018, Media Trust launched a series of free programmes aimed at widening and increasing access to digital capacity building for non-profit organisations across the UK. Our Digital Skills Training Programme trained over 1,500 charities and civil society organisations across the UK in digital comms between 2018 and 2019.

Media Trust engaged NPC to assess the impact of two strands of the Programme: our Digital Skills Programme in partnership with Google’s Digital Garage and our Digital Leadership Programme in partnership with DCMS, The Foundation for Social Improvement and Association of Chairs.

NPC’s Impact Report includes:

• Key learnings and insights on what effective digital skills training looks like
• Media Trust’s Digital Skills Programme Theory of Change
• NPC’s analysis of outcomes relating to confidence, motivation, knowledge, skills and use of digital tools and platforms

Working with NPC gave us a really strong framework and foundation from which to evaluate not only the impact on individual programme participants but also how our work is contributing to the wider UK charity sector’s digital capabilities. It was also great to work with an organisation like NPC who share our passion for seeing the sector become digitally futureproof.