2024 has been a great year for Digital Candle. We've reached more charities and nonprofit groups than ever before with our free expert digital support.
What we do
For the uninitiated, Digital Candle connects charities with volunteers who have expertise in areas like:
Together, they solve digital problems the charity is facing and solve them in a free one hour call.
Bridging the digital skills gap
Small charities and organisations face a significant digital skills gap. They often don't know what they don't know.
That can make it hard to:
Our amazing funders
We’re grateful that Catalyst and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation both fund Digital Candle. Their support means we can offer our service completely free of charge.
The Esmee Fairbairn funding is granted as part of a network of seven initiatives in total: Agencies for Good, Design Hops, Digital Leads Network, Digital Trustees, Dovetail and The Curve - as well as a reuse infrastructure strand, providing support to enable reuse of open, sector owned technologies. We will be working together to align activities so that as many people as possible can benefit from all initiatives.
Yes, we really are free!
One of our biggest challenges is that people don't believe Digital Candle is genuinely free. Organisations get so many 'free' offers with hidden catches that this skepticism is very understandable.
So just to be super clear: there are no upsells, no hidden costs, and no surprise fees in getting advice through Digital Candle. Our funding means we can just help organisations solve their digital challenges.
Reaching marginalised communities
We know many marginalised organisations lack access to peer networks, financial resources, digital expertise and technical support
Our mission is to change this by connecting these organisations with the expertise they need most.
Being proactive with support
We've expanded our service this year by planning a series of webinars to broaden nonprofit digital skills.
So we will:
These topics come directly from the most common questions we receive through Digital Candle. So we think we can make the biggest impact by helping organisations with them.
Our commitment to ethical tech
We believe in liberatory tech that empowers communities rather than depleting their resources.
It’s hard work navigating ethical tech choices when the big tech players have cornered most markets.
But still, we're committed to:
Looking ahead to 2025
We're excited about what lies ahead in 2025.
We’ll be busy:
How you can help
Unlike so many support services, we have the unusual problem of having more experts willing to give advice than charities seeking help.
So if you know an organisation that could benefit from free digital expertise, please tell them that Digital Candle could be the answer to all their problems.
We have experts in digital marketing, CRM, Office365, data science, strategy, you name it. They’re ready to help you solve your problems.