Member Article

National campaign highlights digital project in Durham town

A new project that aims to improve and increase digital activity across the town of Stanley, County Durham, is to be featured by a nationwide campaign signposting small business owners around the country towards freely available assistance.

The project will be featured by “Do It Digital”, an independent, not-for-profit campaign that focuses on promoting opportunities for assistance available to small business owners as part of its “100 Days of Digital”. The Smart Stanley project aims to build a brand for the town, develop and launch a town centre website, improve Wi-Fi availability across the town centre and make it easier for visitors and shoppers to connect to the town digitally. In addition, it aims to support local businesses in developing multi-channel shopping opportunities, develop Smart Apps to support business interaction with their customers and develop and deliver a programme of digital-focused support and training for small businesses across the centre.

Cllr Neil Foster, Durham County Council’s Cabinet member for economic regeneration, said: “We’re committed to helping local businesses to thrive and Smart Stanley is one of a number of ways we’re supporting our high streets and town centres. As well as the website, which – when launched - will help businesses better connect with customers and attract new ones, we’ll also be offering local firms bite sized sessions on how they can make the most of the opportunities becoming more digital can provide.”

According to a report commissioned last year by domain hosts GoDaddy, 60 per cent of businesses with five employees or less are not digitally engaged. That could be as many as 80,000 small businesses* in the North East missing out on the potential benefits to their business of digital engagement. In the same report, 60 per cent of smaller companies who have their own website said that they expect their revenues to grow immensely in the next three to five years.

The Do It Digital campaign aims to help the digitally un-engaged take their first steps online whilst promoting opportunities for those already online to engage further and expand their digital horizons. The focus of the first “100 Days of Digital” will be to highlight opportunities both in the “real world” and online for small business owners to access help, advice, inspiration and support. The initiative will positively promote the benefits of digital engagement for small businesses, from having a simple web presence to taking the first steps towards selling online. The campaign says that digital engagement is crucial for all aspects of business, from marketing and recruitment to banking and accounting, and is only likely to become more so. Digital engagement will become increasingly central to the development of competitive, profitable and growing businesses.

For more information contact media@doitdigital.co.uk and see online at www.doitdigital.co.uk , on Twitter @doitdigitaluk , and at www.facebook.com/doitdigitaluk

Ends.

* Source: BIS, Business Population Estimates 2015

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Howard Robinson .