Charity Digital and Consortium Launch Commendable and Timely Heritage Digital Initiative for UK Heritage Organisations

With help from National Lottery funding, Heritage Digital is a 4-way consortium comprised of Charity Digital, The Heritage Alliance, Media Trust and Naomi Korn Associates. They’ve come together to help leverage their digital knowledge and expertise for the heritage sector. The Heritage sector has been much impacted by the Coronavirus pandemic, and this is just the right time to come together to help the sector get back on its feet.

Charity Digital specialises in training up charitable institutions and organisations and passing on its digital skills and expertise - to better connect these historical and cultural institutions with the increasingly digital audience. Whilst many heritage institutions are charities, Heritage Digital serves the entire sector including for profit, government, religious and national parks.

Heritage Digital Vision

 

Heritage Digital’s vision is to grow the heritage sector’s skills and increase the adoption of digital. We aim to transform the mindset of the UK heritage sector, with insightful, inspiring and practical training and resources that provides inspiration for how to engage and inspire wide audiences with and through heritage.

What’s remarkable about this project is its timeliness, and it’s speed of deployment. This is the second Charity Digital site implementation Affino has collaborated on, and from a standing start on May 27th the site was in place for launch on July 1st - barely a month later.

This is just Phase 1, as there is more content and more activities to come through - particularly around and extended events programme. The Charity Digital and Affino teams have put in place a full infrastructure to enable and empower super-rapid deployment and growth of the next phases - as and when that content is ready to go live.

Much of the success of the project is down to how well the Affino Team is attuned to Jonathan Chevalier and the team at Charity Digital. The already established close collaboration meant that a fairly complex project could be readied within such a short timescale.

Many of us at Affino are members and regular visitors of the National Trust and greatly value the Heritage side of the culture of these islands - and are thus doubly delighted that so much is being done to keep these places of culture alive and accessible. We wish the Heritage Digital Initiative every success here and look forward to seeing this evolve and its beneficial impact on the sector.