Bridging the Digital Divide: Community TechAid’s Journey with Smart DCC Volunteers

Mar 2025

Community TechAid is a grassroots charity in south London working to end the digital divide through repair and reuse. Its mission is to enable sustainable access to technology and education to increase digital inclusion.

Stephanie, the Partnerships and Engagement Manager from Community TechAid joined our Flash Consulting event with energy infrastructure company Smart DCC in June 2024. The organisation wanted to strengthen their approach to partnerships and relationship building and to refine how they communicate with companies to involve with them as partners, maximising impact.

Link UP London matched Stephanie with two senior managers from DCC — Steph, Head of Sustainability and Jinmi, Head of External Communications. Together, they had a wide-ranging discussion and brainstormed ways to create reusable resources such as email templates and impact reporting materials and videos that the organisation could use to present their work to companies.

Community TechAid followed the advice and redesigned their impact reports, moving from static PDFs to slides that businesses can easily present in meetings. These were reviewed by both Steph and Jinmi after the session, ensuring they were as effective as possible. Their feedback improved how Community TechAid demonstrates its impact to partners and has helped attract more support. Steph was inspired and happy to provide additional support including drafting an impact report template to bring additional richness to the ideas from the Flash Consulting session.

“Working with Steph and Jinmi was incredibly valuable. They helped me draft clear, engaging communications that I could send to businesses that addressed common misconceptions with a clear call to action. We also discussed ways to create maximum impact with minimal effort, which led to ideas like impact videos, something we are now working on.” Stephanie, Community TechAid.

Steph also reported getting to know her fellow DCC volunteer Jinmi better following the event, showcasing the value of Flash Consulting to build team connections, alongside community impact and effective use of professional skills in a new context.

“It was a pleasure to connect with such a dedicated charity from the local community – they inspired me to think about how we could embed social value further into DCC’s ways of working and I hope we helped them improve their corporate engagement and ultimately increase the number of people they can help provide devices to.” Steph, Smart DCC volunteer

“The Flash Consulting session gave us practical tools and insights to strengthen our partnerships. It provided us with expert guidance that we could action immediately. The support from Smart DCC volunteers helped us refine our communications, making it easier for businesses to engage with us. It was a great experience, and we are very grateful for all the support!” Stephanie, Community TechAid