Digital exclusion remains a significant challenge nationwide impacting one in five Australians. Communities and organisations are working on the ground to address the digital divide but often are not resourced to measure and communicate the changes they are making at a program or initiative level.
Seedkit received an auDA Foundation Community Grant in 2025 to support digital inclusion measurement. As a self-managed outcomes and impact reporting platform, Seedkit supports social enterprises and other for purpose organisations to better understand, measure and communicate their organisational characteristics, operations, and outcomes in a consistent manner and for a variety of stakeholders. A not-for-profit initiative, Seedkit is free and publicly available for all to use.
In order to test and refine draft indicators developed to measure and communicate digital inclusion in programs and initiatives, our team facilitated two user validation workshops in August to seek feedback from potential users.
There is great diversity among organisations and communities working on digital inclusion, reflecting different approaches and diverse needs in their journey to measure, track and communicate digital inclusion activities and impacts.
Representatives from ten organisations based in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland joined the Seedkit team across the workshops. These organisations are working in dynamic contexts: they engage with communities, businesses and schools; they are implementing a range of initiatives, from providing devices to delivering training activities, creating digital products, content, and/or services, or providing financial resources to other organisations or initiatives; and there is great diversity in target cohorts and scales of these initiatives. This means they have different audiences and purposes for measuring and communicating their digital inclusion activities and impacts.
While participating organisations are a very small group and are by no means representative, the diversity of these organisations and digital inclusion initiatives observed from such a small sample mirrors the dynamic broader community working in the digital inclusion field.
Key insights and reflections on measuring digital inclusion at a program level
Workshop participants told us they appreciated the digital inclusion indicators in the Seedkit Library. They found these draft indicators relevant to their work, offering new perspectives to measuring digital inclusion, or supporting a “sense check” for existing measures.
As Sarah Pain from the Greater Shepparton Lighthouse Project put it, “We have never looked at the impact of our Laptops with Love program with the lens of the indicators your team have developed. Certainly an area for us to continue exploring.”
Diversity in the digital inclusion initiatives leads to a wide range of expected or desired project/program outputs and outcomes. For example, compared to device- or training- based initiatives, those offering access to educational resources, tools or digital products would require different indicators. There were keen interests to measure confidence in using technology, to measure capacity building for a specific cohort or sector, or at a community level, and to explore measures for AI literacy and online safety. Some programs providing access to devices and digital training would like to track longer term education or economic outcomes.
Seedkit supports users to select and modify indicators from its Indicators Library and to create custom indicators. For more information about the digital inclusion indicators, see ‘Measuring digital inclusion in programs and initiatives’.
