Building a Digital Skills Hub: What We Learned About Meeting People Where They Are.

Published: 2022  |  Perspective updated: 2025

Alongside our Digital Learning Day, we launched a Digital Skills Hub — a set of videos and guides designed to help people build confidence with everyday digital tools. It lived online. It was free. It was, in theory, accessible to anyone.

The slight irony of building a digital resource for people who struggle with digital was not lost on us. But that tension pointed to something worth taking seriously: that the people who most need digital skills support are often the least likely to find it through a search engine.

Which meant the hub needed to be part of a wider strategy, not the whole of it.

Why content alone is never enough

There is a pattern in digital inclusion work that repeats itself: an organisation identifies the problem, builds a resource, publishes it, and waits for people to engage. Sometimes they do. Often the people who engage are those who were already reasonably confident online — the ones who could find the resource and navigate it without help.

Good Things Foundation research found that 30% of people were unaware of local access points for device access or internet connection — and that is before you get to the question of whether they knew digital skills support existed at all.

The people most excluded from digital are not typically browsing for digital skills resources. They may not have a reliable device. They may not have affordable broadband. They may have tried something digital before and had a bad experience that put them off. Design barriers and trust barriers work together. People give up.

A Digital Skills Hub addresses the content gap. It does not, on its own, address the access gap, the confidence gap, or the trust gap.

What makes digital skills resources actually work

The resources that tend to land are the ones that are specific, practical, and built around real tasks rather than digital concepts. Not “how to use the internet” but “how to set up a video call with your GP” or “how to check your pension balance online”. The specificity matters. It reduces the cognitive load of translating general guidance into a concrete action.

Government behavioural research has found that people engage better with digital support when there is a clear action to take and when the benefit to them personally is made explicit. Vague encouragement to “get online” does very little. A specific, time-limited task with an obvious personal benefit does considerably more.

Video works better than text for many people who lack confidence online — partly because it models the process visually, and partly because it removes the anxiety of having to read and interpret at the same time as trying to do something new. Bite-sized is better than comprehensive. A three-minute video on one task beats a forty-page guide that covers everything.

The reach problem

Building a good resource is the easier part. Getting it to the people who need it is considerably harder.

LINK research found that digital exclusion is highest among people on the lowest incomes — 44% of households earning under £10,000 identified as digitally excluded. These are also the people least likely to encounter a Digital Skills Hub through organic search or social media. They are more likely to encounter it through a trusted person — a family member, a community worker, a volunteer Digital Champion who can show them it exists and sit with them while they use it.

This is why the hub worked best as a tool in the hands of our Digital Champions, rather than as a standalone resource. The Champions could direct people to specific videos relevant to what they were trying to do. They could watch it with them. They could answer the questions that a video cannot answer.

Research into digital champion volunteering consistently finds that the human element — patience, empathy, and one-to-one time — is what makes the difference for people who are most reluctant or most anxious about digital. The resource gives the Champion something to work with. It does not replace what the Champion brings.

What this means for organisations building similar tools

If you are in financial services, or any large organisation, and you are thinking about building a digital skills resource for your customers or communities — a few honest reflections from having done it.

The resource matters. Good content, clearly explained, in formats that work for people who are not confident online, makes a genuine difference to the people who find and use it.

But the resource is not the strategy. Distribution is. Partnership is. The trusted intermediaries — community organisations, charities, volunteers, frontline staff — who can get the resource into the hands of people who would never find it themselves. Without those relationships, a hub is a page on a website that the people who most need it will never visit.

For every £1 invested in digital skills, research suggests a return of £9.48 in economic benefit. That return does not accrue to organisations that build a resource and consider the job done. It accrues to those who invest in the whole ecosystem — content, access, confidence, and the human connection that makes all of it reachable.