What Is Digital Fife?
What Is Digital Fife?
Digital Fife is an online community providing free websites for community groups in Fife. It has been operating for over 15 years and there are currently over 280 organisations with websites. Fife Council supports Digital Fife by supplying a development worker and the server and maintenance costs of the platform.
Digital Fife has, as part of our support, a voluntary Digital Fife Management group whose members come from the Digital Fife family of community organisations. Among the thirteen objectives of the Committee, one is to help the editors in the use of bespoke software, in order to build attractive websites, and by their creation and use, promote the benefits of being online. This crowdfunding page is an example of another of the Committee's objectives, ‘to fundraise to assist in taking forward actions which will benefit the work of Digital Fife.’
Digital Fife is also supported by Digital Guides, volunteers who are mostly editors from the Digital Fife Family; they assist at training sessions and also help groups to get their websites online.
What We Do
Digital Fife promotes the use of digital technology through work with community organisations. We offer free, bespoke software to community groups across Fife, allowing them to build their own self-controlled websites. The software creator worked hand-in-hand with Digital Fife family members and it is this community involvement in the development of the software that has been one of the keys to its success. Digital Fife also supplies free hosting of the websites, along with all the training and support required. This means there is no need for technical skills; the website building tools supplied allow a quick and easy way to develop an up-to-date, dynamic website. Groups receive free comprehensive training on building and maintaining their website, either in group sessions or on a one-to-one basis; this is achieved with the aid of our volunteer Digital Guides.
In addition to face-to-face training, Digital Fife offers access to free public online learning opportunities via their website www.digitalfife.com . There are twenty-two modules in all, ranging from ‘Setting Up A Group’, to ‘Management Committee Skills’ to ‘Net Safety’. And through licence from Digital Unite, we host four hundred free ‘How To’ guides, covering topics such as ‘Digital Photography’, ‘Shopping and Banking’ and ‘Social Networking and Blogs’.
Why Do We Need To Raise Money?
Up until now, when the websites were made public, we also supplied them with free domain names. Having a domain name means community groups can use their websites more effectively to spread their message, keep in touch with their members, attract new members, run surveys, and publish documents and videos. It also allows them to publicise their website, be easily found on search engines and generally be in touch with the wider community.
But with an ever increasing number of websites joining us and the growing cost of domain names, covering the cost from our budget is rapidly becoming a problem.
Digital Fife wants to continue to offer this great benefit to all members of the Digital Family, so that the work put into creating their websites can be shared with the rest of the world.
But we need your help to do that…...
How Can You Help?
Domain name costs are annual and are at present £10 plus VAT, so £12 in total per domain. As an idea of the potential cost, from January to July 2019 alone, we had eighteen new community organisations joining the Digital Fife family, all of whom will eventually require a domain name for their website. We will also need to consider the cost of renewing any expired domains for our existing 280+ members.
All money raised will be put directly towards these costs, to allow as many community websites as possible to receive a free domain name. Please help us to help them get their message out to the community. You can pledge via the buttons on the right side of this page - any amount you can give will help the cause; a pledge of £12 will allow one community group to receive a free domain name for a whole year. And as a token of our, and the Fife community’s everlasting gratitude, your name will be added to a dedicated ‘Thank You’ page on the Digital Fife website.
Thank you for your support!