Case Study - Govan Community Project
Glasgow’s Govan Community Project is a charity that works with asylum seekers. When lockdown happened many of the people they support were unable to access any of the charity’s services online due to digital poverty. This means that people didn’t have access to suitable devices, Wi-Fi or 4G data. Although Traci Kirkland, the project’s Head of Charity, quickly raised funds as part of a digital inclusion project to buy smart phones and tablets to lend to people, there was not much capacity within the organisation to manage the devices manually.
‘I was aware that there was a mobile device management solution that could automate this process but with such a small team, we didn’t have the appropriate skills or knowledge in-house to set this up.’
Traci approached the Scottish Tech Army for help and they assigned the project to volunteer Arshdeep Jindal, an entrepreneur with his own start-up company who is currently on furlough. When he saw the Scottish Tech Army call for volunteers he didn’t think twice about signing up.
‘I build risk-management enterprise software for people and have the skills to work on projects like this so I was happy to help the Govan Community Project, who are doing fabulous work. Digital connectivity is no longer a luxury but an absolute necessity now. I set them up with a mobile device management policy so they could keep track of the devices they had lent to people and support their end users by pre-installing apps which would commonly be needed.’
Another impact of lockdown was a reduction in business to Govan Community Project’s social enterprise, Voiceover Interpreting. This usually generates between £12,000 to £15,000 a year of unrestricted income towards the cost of the Govan Community Project’s core activities. But as Traci points out, once again the charity didn’t have the expertise internally to support this. ‘Because of lockdown we weren’t able to offer face-to-face translation so many of our regular customers paused their service delivery. This resulted in a significant drop in business for us. Once again the Scottish Tech Army came up with a solution to optimise digital marketing, in particular traffic to our website.’
Traci says the quick response from the Scottish Tech Army has made a huge difference to the project. ‘The people in the teams we’ve dealt with couldn’t have been more helpful. Charities rarely have money in their budget to access IT, marketing or website development so it’s been amazing to have this kind of support on offer. Thanks to the Scottish Tech Army’s swift response, we were able to get devices out to the people who needed them and make our on-line support much more accessible.’
To watch Traci’s video testimonial please click here.