Spring Online 2012: 23-27 April – see you there!
Silver Surfers’ Day is the biggest national campaign to promote the use of digital technologies by older people and was launched by Digital Unite in 2002. Each year we support people and organisations all over the UK to open their doors and give local older people a taste of what the digital world has to offer them. We estimate that over the years over 150,000 older people have engaged with digital technologies in this way. Not bad eh?
In August 2011 Silver Surfers’ Day won the national Nominet Internet Award in the category’ Building a Networked Nation’ in recognition of its achievements. Read more here.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Silver Surfers’ Day in 2011, we extended the campaign to a week-long activity, Spring Online, 16-20 May, to encourage more people than ever before to take part. The ever-popular Silver Surfers’ Day took place on Friday 20 May as a celebratory finale to the week’s activities. In total a phenomenal 2,500 free digital taster events were held this year, making this the best ever ‘silver surfers’ campaign for Digital Unite .
Some of our fantastic event holders were commended at our Spring Online Best Event Awards Ceremony in Westminster on 5 September 2011, which was hosted by the Right Hon. Iain Duncan Smith MP. Read more here.
With an average of 20 people attending each event, this incredible event tally means that around 50,000 older people, at least, would have been personally helped to use computers and the internet during Spring Online 2011.
The events reached all corners of the UK, from Pontypridd to Belfast, Edinburgh to Truro with no venue proving to be out of bounds for hosting a digital taster session. From housing associations to hospitals, paper mills to pubs, village halls to libraries, museums to offices, the variety of locations, large and small, was extensive.
NHS Choices run their own Spring Online event
Stories we received from some of the participants include a lady who learnt how to email her soldier grandson in Afghanistan and was amazed to get an instant reply, and Joyce, aged 73 years who was moved to tears when she saw photographs online of where she used to live. “I never knew you could see things like this on the internet, this is wonderful, coming here today was the best thing I could have done.”