How the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland can help you

To begin the Accelerator, click on the link below and enter the code: CDSA for Scotland

 

Start the CDSA for Scotland

 

Digital plays a huge role in any charity. Across functions as diverse as fundraising and service delivery, digital technology can enable us to work with agility, to punch above our weight, and make an impact at scale. Digital is a priority for 74% of charities, according to the ‘Charity Digital Skills Report 2025’. But at the same time, only 44% of charities have a digital strategy in place.

 

Using digital in an unsystematic way can lead to confusion, frustration, and wasted time, money, and effort. Charities often stay in this situation due to squeezed organisational finances, a lack of new funds for digital tech, and a lack of headspace and capacity. But our course enables charities to create a system, with meaningful involvement from service users, operational teams, and senior leadership teams, to make a bigger difference with digital.

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator (CDSA) for Scotland, an offshoot of our initial CDSA programme, specifically aims to provide help and guidance to Scottish charities, with a detailed additional module on how to tackle digital exclusion in your community. Supported by funding from OKTA and the Connecting Scotland Digital Innovation Fund, the CDSA for Scotland helps charities create and maintain a digital strategy in their own time: one that responds directly to the needs of their community.

 

Start the CDSA for Scotland

 

 

What is the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland?

 

The CDSA for Scotland guides you through the process of creating a digital strategy from beginning to end. It is a free, online, self-paced course, made up of thirteen modules, each helping you build towards an impactful digital strategy for your charity. The modules are as follows:

• Welcome
• What is a digital strategy?
• Team alignment
• Digital governance
• Understanding your current digital landscape
• Achieving digital inclusion
• Strategic alignment
• Horizon scanning
• Discovering user needs
• Embedding responsibility and ethics
• Planning your digital strategy
• Writing your digital strategy
• Delivering your digital strategy

The CDSA for Scotland is intended for teams to collaborate on creating their digital strategy. We have provided free templates throughout each module, each of which can directly improve your charity’s use of digital and help you work more strategically.

 

By following the course from beginning to end, you will create a complete digital strategy, gain approval by your charity’s leaders, and deliver impactful digital projects with confidence.

 

To begin the Accelerator, click on the link below and enter the code: CDSA for Scotland

 

Start the CDSA for Scotland

 

 

How can the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland help your charity?

 

The CDSA for Scotland enables Scottish charities to create bespoke digital strategies in a team-oriented environment, matching their unique circumstances and experiences of what works. The CDSA for Scotland helps you make a bigger impact with digital technology by discovering your users’ needs and aligning projects to your charity’s strategic goals.

 

As a free online learning platform, the CDSA for Scotland guides you through the journey of creating a robust digital strategy, tailored to your charity. The CDSA for Scotland helps you to develop projects realistically, by understanding your current digital landscape, and factoring in budgetary and time constraints alongside your charity’s ambitions. It makes you resilient, forward-thinking, and responsible for how you use tech as a charity, through exercises like horizon scanning and embedding ethics in data and AI use.

 

Building on the original CDSA course, the CDSA for Scotland also helps charities understand how digital exclusion impacts their community and remove the barriers they face. It includes practical best practice advice around supporting people who are digitally excluded and includes free access to training resources charities can deploy within their communities.

 

Throughout, you will learn the practical elements of building a strategy: how to work effectively as a team, how to lead on digital across an organisation, how to prioritise and plan projects, how to actually write the strategy, and how to deliver the best result against your plans.

 

 

How can the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland help you? 

 

The CDSA for Scotland helps you become a strategic digital leader, with experience co-ordinating teams, collaborating with senior leaders, and responding to real user needs. Skills you will learn include resourcefulness, effective communication, and strategic judgement.

 

Upon completion, you will receive a certificate to award you for completing the course. You will have gained experience leading a major digital project from beginning to end. You will have learnt practical skills across a range of functions, from maximising resources to reducing risk - from formulating digital goals to delivering them to the greatest impact.

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland helps you succeed, with digital skills and knowledge that you can take forward into the future.

 

 

What does the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator for Scotland involve?

 

The Accelerator involves working collaboratively in your team to produce a digital strategy. We give guidance to support your collaboration, but ultimately how you approach the course is up to you: it depends on how your team works best. We have been diligent in building the Accelerator in the most beneficial way for charities. While the guidance is thorough and extensive, we have made it interactive, with a variety of engaging ways to take in the information.

 

We have organised it in short bursts, so that you can easily read through and complete one module or page at a time. When you pause the course, it will remember where you left off. We have made it seamless to navigate through the course, giving you the ability to move freely through the modules in your own time.

 

 

To begin the Accelerator, click on the link below and enter the code: CDSA for Scotland

 

Start the CDSA for Scotland