Introducing the Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator 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.

 

The Charity Digital Strategy Accelerator (CDSA) for Scotland, an offshoot of initial CDSA, specifically aims to provide help and guidance to Scottish charities. Supported by funding from OKTA, as well as funding from the Connecting Scotland Digital Innovation Fund, the Scottish CDSA helps charities create and maintain a digital strategy, regardless of the time.

 

 

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 twelve 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 Scottish CDSA 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.

 

 

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

 

The CDSA for Scotland will engage with Scottish charities and enable them to create bespoke digital strategies in a team-oriented environment, matching their unique circumstances and experiences of what works. The CDSA 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, CDSA for Scotland will remove the financial and geographical barriers to digital inclusion many individuals face. It will include best practice advice around engaging people who are digitally excluded and include free access to training resources charities can deploy within their communities.

 

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.

 

And it helps you with 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.

  

 

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.

 

We have explained every step of how to create a digital strategy in plain English, using direct and simple language that gets to the point of what you need to know. The design of the course is clean and colourful, using multimedia to make the experience enjoyable and motivating for you.

 

All charities that take part in the CDSA for Scotland will have access to the Charity Digital Digital Inclusion Hub, which offers loads of great resources, including articles, podcasts, checklists, reports, and webinars.

 

You can find best practice advice on the Hub, alongside information and case studies provided by charities involved in bridging the digital divide.