Get Online Week: Why our approach to digital inclusion is changing 

To mark Get Online Week 2026, VodafoneThree’s Corporate Affairs & Sustainability Director, Nicki Lyons, outlines how – and why – the company’s digital inclusion approach is evolving. 

Communities are what makes Britain great, even on the smallest of scales.

Groups of local people, sharing with and supporting each other. They turn strangers and neighbours into friends and family and help give us a greater sense of belonging, especially when times turn tough.

I’ve seen the importance of community repeatedly during my time at Vodafone, and now VodafoneThree. It helped inspire our initial pledge to connect 2,500 people in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged areas, when we first joined up with Good Things Foundation back in 2021. A pledge that quickly grew into helping more than one million people.

To date, our partnership with Good Things has focused on helping individuals overcome the immediate barriers to participation, through access to connectivity, devices and skills. This has allowed us to support groups of people from all kinds of backgrounds – from the elderly to survivors of domestic abuse.

The issue of digital inclusion has evolved significantly since then, however, and it’s clear to me that this one-on-one work isn’t enough by itself. Communities must become the heart of our partnership as we extend and renew it into 2026 and beyond.

From digital access to digital participation

Perhaps the biggest change in the digital inclusion space over recent years has been the shift from prioritising people’s access to the online world, to enabling their participation in it.

Of course, online access does, and always will, remain an important part of digital inclusion work. But the impact of devices and connectivity on people’s lives is diminished if they don’t have the skills and confidence needed to use them safely and effectively.

This need to bolster people’s skills and confidence is becoming more urgent, given that the pace and scale of technological change has never been faster or bigger, with AI the most obvious example.

But these changes should not be a reason why even more people get left behind on the wrong side of the digital divide. It should be a rallying cry to ensure they have the same opportunities as everyone else.

A strategy designed to make an impact

In line with this shift, our own focus at VodafoneThree is increasingly centred around a community-led approach, which actively encourages greater participation in today’s ever-digital society.

It’s an approach that we outlined when sharing our new everyone connected strategy, as part of VodafoneThree’s inaugural Sustainability and Social Impact Report.

The  report also celebrates the longstanding success of Three’s Discovery team. A free, inclusive programme designed to break down barriers to digital participation, Discovery has been addressing the main challenges of digital exclusion – skills, trust and motivation – since 2014.

In doing so, it gives us a great model to work from when it comes to focusing on people’s participation in the online world.

And, now that the programme falls under VodafoneThree’s remit, we are taking the excellent foundation they have built and scaling their on-the-ground training to more communities throughout the UK.

The importance of community-based assistance

This forms part of our wider plan to build on successful national programmes with a greater focus on local needs and local leadership.

Though we’ll still use national data to identify the areas that most need assistance, this support is most effective when it reflects the needs of the people and the places it is supposed to help. Which is where our renewed partnership with Good Things comes into its own.

While VodafoneThree is already bringing improved connectivity to specific regions of the UK through its network rollout, Good Things will convene local partners across these regions to ensure digital inclusion is embedded within local strategies and services.

In industry-speak, this represents a ‘place-based system change’. More simply put, we’re combining immediate support – like access to connectivity and devices – with stronger local capability, as local organisations have a deep understanding of the barriers that their communities face and how best to help people put new skills into practice.

Creating long-term support networks

Our long-term goal is to move from helping individuals on a one-off basis to creating more comprehensive systems that can support entire communities, long after the individual interventions have run their course.

The key ‘system change’ we hope to enact by doing this is to create the conditions necessary to ensure digital inclusion becomes a permanent feature of local communities.

What this will look like in practice will vary from place to place, community to community. This is why it is vital that those places and communities are empowered to become agents of change, not victims of it –

All of which means we will design the change with the community itself, based upon its needs, rather than imposing our own assumptions or models.

Because, ultimately, it is these trusted community networks that often make the biggest difference in our lives. And the more we can do to support them, the more connected we can become as a nation.

Key information about the VodafoneThree and Good Things partnership