As part of its social innovation work the Building Change Trust has been exploring the role that digital technology can play in helping voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations enhance their social impact.

Tech for good is a vibrant and exciting piece of the digital puzzle, but it’s also fragmented, subscale and not yet mainstream. Can social sector folk who champion digital and developers that care about social impact work together more to create critical mass out of their individual passions?

While charities and businesses are increasingly awakening to the need to engage with digital technology, the pace of change demanded cannot be achieved one organisation at a time. Brand new solutions to particular challenges are sometimes needed, but there is also enormous potential in adapting and adopting existing tech solutions across multiple organisations working in the same field, or even from one field to another.

In light of this NPC – a leading UK charity think-tank - have developed a Digital Transformation programme to spearhead more collective digital transformation projects in the VCSE sector. In 2015 the Trust part-financed NPC’s initial exploratory research to identify technologies and sub-sectors where there is particularly strong potential.

This workshop will present and build on NPC’s initial findings exploring the potential for collective approaches to digital transformation in the VCSE sector, including an approach to working together in subsectors like ageing or advice provision. It will explore the key techniques and approaches we can draw on—from mapping the sector to defining user personas and user journeys, and from open source to common platforms—to supercharge the work people are already doing for maximum impact.

The event is open to all but may be of particular interest to digital technology enthusiasts and representatives of charities in the ageing, advice and health sub-sectors.