Free Support for Businesses to Embrace Digital

Lancashire County Council with the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership have announced a series of webinars, workshops and 1:1 support for local businesses, focused on embracing digital tools.

Embrace Digital will run across 4 weeks in September and October, offering fully funded training for Lancashire businesses to help them to identify digital platforms to support their future growth. The programme covers four topic areas: Productivity, Selling Online, Digital Marketing and Cloud Accounting.

Ann Dean MBE DL, Chair of the Lancashire Digital Skills Partnership and board member of the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership said, “We’re delighted to launch Embrace Digital to support Lancashire businesses in choosing and accessing digital tools. The pandemic has forced almost all Lancashire businesses to move more of their operations online, and much of our Covid recovery funds have been requested to pay for new software from Zoom video conferencing, to Xero online accounting, to EKM online selling. But for many businesses it can be hard to know where to start. This programme offers much-needed, impartial advice on the right software programmes to choose.”

Local SMEs can sign up for introductory webinars, in-depth workshops and 1:1 calls to enable them to explore the options available and choose the right tools for their business. Training will be delivered by digital experts, including Lancashire-based EKM, Door4, KW Digital, DigiEnable and Moore and Smalley.

“Digital productivity skills are a key aspect of ensuring remote and flexible working benefits all involved, retaining the quality of output, without intruding on the valuable downtime of our teams” said Liz Hardwick from DigiEnable.

The range of digital tools available to SMEs is immense and can help with a variety of tasks, for example “In the world of digital marketing, we use tools to assess the competition, understand our clients’ customers, develop strategies and analyse impact. Not only this, but digital tools have now become so sophisticated that they have the power to automate mundane tasks and revolutionise business owners’ and marketeers’ time, so that they can focus on what they do best: strategize and innovate” explains Rachel Wilson from KW Digital.

The programme is fully funded by Lancashire County Council and will run from 27th September to 8th October 2021.

Further information on Embrace Digital events and booking can be found via: http://embracedigital.eventbrite.com/