The gap between small charities and medium and large charities’ digital capability has increased in the last four years, according to a new report.
Now in its fourth year, the Lloyds Bank Business Digital Index 2017 was published earlier this week and measures how digitally capable small business and charities are and awards them a score out of 100. Just over 500 charities were surveyed for the benchmarking report.
Larger charities, those with between ten and 249 employees, scored 48 out of 100 for digital capability but smaller ones, with up to nine employees, scored 40. But In 2014 large charities scored 26 while small charities scored 23. So the gap has risen from three points to eight.
Overall charities scored 43, up one point on last year. The charity sector is still behind the small business sector, which had a score of 54, the same as last year.
Basic digital skills
This year the report found that 48 per cent of charities have basic digital skills, a slight drop on last year when it was 51 per cent.
But it said that 20 per cent were “on the cusp” of full basic digital skills, and have gained four of the five required skills.
Lloyds defines the five basic digital skills as transacting, communicating, creating, managing information and problem solving.
The skills where charities were most lacking were managing information and problem solving. This includes skills such as using and understanding analytics programmes and using digital products to reduce costs.
Barriers
The biggest barrier to charities doing more online is that “being online is not seen as ‘relevant’ for our charity”, with 32 per cent citing this.
This year saw a drop in the number of charities reporting that lack of staff with digital skills was a problem. In previous reports this has been a barrier for around one-third of charities, but this year just 10 per cent said it was.
Fewer charities also reported cost being a barrier, with this falling form 13 per cent to 5 per cent.
The percentage of respondents say that they ware “doing all we can online” increased from 11 per cent last year to 29 per cent this year.
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