The digital challenge

Asmerom says "After the pandemic we were working with many different organisations for support and when we first talked to Superhighways it was mostly about data, how do you collect data, how do you process it, how do you present it to stakeholders, so we attended these training sessions and learnt that Superhighways could help us in other areas."

After the pandemic, our whole teams and our clients were dependent on this new technology, working and collaborating through Zoom and Teams etc. Our beneficiaries and clients, they sometimes didn't have this software, they didn't have the devices to run them, and they lacked the IT skills as well, so it was a struggle.

Reconnection had a website, but in common with many charities, it had been developed by someone outside the organisation who was no longer available, making updating the website and keeping it up-to-date difficult.

When you rely on other people to do it for you don't control it, if you want to update something, if you want to change something, you call them and they are not available, so that was frustrating.

Asmeron had a number of old laptops and tablets that were no longer working

Superhighways organised these Bring Your Tech Days, we attended twice with the computers, about 4 computers in total, and they managed to rectify them, it was fantastic.

Reconnection were also paying for an email service and Office software

When we transferred the website the emails had to be transferred as well, so that was to Outlook, it's seemed very technical to transfer, the language I learned, honestly,  so we migrated the emails in just a couple of meetings I think, with Paul's help.