Municipalities can support citizens who need help with digital applications by offering a combination of assisted digital services, accessible design, and community partnerships. The most effective approaches meet people where they are, whether that means providing in-person help at a local office, telephone guidance, or proactive outreach to vulnerable groups. This article unpacks the key questions local governments face when building meaningful digital support for their residents.
What barriers stop citizens from completing digital applications?
Citizens struggle to complete digital applications for three main reasons: limited digital skills, lack of access to devices or reliable internet, and poorly designed government services that assume a level of digital confidence most users do not have. These barriers compound each other, meaning a person with low confidence online is also less likely to seek help when they get stuck.
Beyond skills and access, language barriers and low literacy levels make complex application forms particularly difficult to complete without support. Many government digital services still use bureaucratic language, long forms with no save function, and error messages that do not explain what went wrong. For older adults, people with disabilities, and those from lower-income households, these friction points are not minor inconveniences but genuine obstacles to accessing essential services.
Understanding which barriers affect which groups in your municipality is the starting point for any meaningful digital support strategy. Generic solutions rarely work because the barriers are not generic.
What types of digital support services do municipalities typically offer?
Municipalities typically offer digital support through a mix of in-person assistance, telephone helplines, and community-based services. The most common formats include drop-in sessions at libraries or community centres, one-to-one appointments with trained staff, and partnerships with local charities or volunteer organisations that provide digital skills coaching.
Beyond reactive support, some municipalities also offer:
- Digital champions programmes, where trained volunteers help neighbours and community members navigate online services
- Telephone and video call assistance for residents who cannot travel to a physical location
- Printed guides and step-by-step instructions available in libraries, GP surgeries, and post offices
- Dedicated assisted digital counters within council offices where staff complete applications on behalf of residents
- Online tutorials and video walkthroughs tailored to specific local services
The most effective municipalities combine several of these approaches rather than relying on a single channel, recognising that different residents need different types of help.
How can municipalities identify citizens who need digital assistance?
Municipalities can identify citizens who need digital assistance by analysing service usage data, running community surveys, and working with frontline staff and local organisations that already have contact with vulnerable groups. Residents who consistently use paper or telephone channels for services that are available online are a strong indicator of unmet digital support needs.
Proactive identification is more effective than waiting for residents to ask for help. Many people who struggle with digital applications do not self-identify as needing support because they are unaware that help exists or feel embarrassed to ask. Useful identification strategies include:
- Reviewing drop-off points in online application journeys through analytics tools
- Engaging social workers, housing officers, and benefits advisors who regularly interact with at-risk residents
- Partnering with GPs, food banks, and community groups that serve digitally excluded populations
- Running targeted outreach in areas with known digital exclusion risk factors, such as high rates of older residents or low average household income
Combining data-driven insight with on-the-ground community knowledge gives municipalities the clearest picture of where support is most urgently needed.
What’s the difference between digital inclusion and assisted digital support?
Digital inclusion is the long-term goal of ensuring all citizens have the skills, access, and confidence to use digital services independently. Assisted digital support is a shorter-term, practical service that helps people complete a specific task online when they cannot do so on their own. Both are necessary, but they serve different purposes and should not be confused.
Assisted digital support is transactional: a council worker helps a resident submit a housing benefit claim. Digital inclusion is transformational: that same resident learns enough to submit their next claim independently. Municipalities that focus only on assisted digital support risk creating dependency rather than capability. Conversely, municipalities that invest only in long-term skills programmes leave residents without help for immediate needs.
The most effective government digital services strategy combines both: provide assisted digital support as a safety net while simultaneously building digital confidence through skills programmes, so that over time fewer residents need the safety net.
How should municipalities design digital applications to reduce the need for support?
Municipalities should design digital applications around the needs of their least confident users, not their most capable ones. This means using plain language, breaking long forms into manageable steps, allowing users to save progress and return later, and providing clear, actionable error messages. Good design reduces the volume of support requests before they arise.
Plain language and clear structure
Every question in a digital application should use the simplest possible wording. Avoid jargon, acronyms, and legal language unless absolutely necessary, and always explain technical terms in plain terms when they must appear. Structuring forms into logical sections with progress indicators helps users understand where they are in the process and reduces the anxiety that causes people to abandon applications.
Accessibility and inclusive design
Accessible design is not a feature; it is a baseline requirement. Applications should meet WCAG accessibility standards, work on mobile devices, and function with screen readers and other assistive technologies. Testing with real users, including older adults and people with disabilities, surfaces usability problems that internal teams rarely spot on their own. Municipalities that invest in user research before launching a service consistently see lower support volumes and higher completion rates.
Which partnerships help municipalities scale digital support effectively?
Municipalities scale digital support most effectively by partnering with libraries, housing associations, NHS services, charities, and local businesses that already have trusted relationships with the communities they serve. No single organisation has the reach or resources to address digital exclusion alone, so coalition-based approaches consistently outperform isolated municipal efforts.
Strong partnerships typically involve:
- Libraries and community centres that provide physical access points, devices, and trained staff
- Housing associations that can identify and reach digitally excluded tenants directly
- NHS and social care services that interact regularly with older and vulnerable residents
- Voluntary and community sector organisations that run digital skills programmes and champion networks
- Technology providers and IT consultancies that help design, build, and improve the underlying digital services
Formalising these partnerships through shared data agreements, co-funded programmes, and joint governance structures turns informal cooperation into scalable, sustainable support infrastructure. Municipalities that treat digital inclusion as a shared civic responsibility, rather than a council-only task, make faster and more durable progress.
How Bloom Group supports municipalities with digital applications
At Bloom Group, we work directly with organisations that want to build digital services that genuinely work for all citizens, not just the digitally confident. Our team of highly educated developers and UX/UI specialists designs and builds applications with inclusion, accessibility, and usability at the core, reducing the burden on support services from the very start.
Here is how we can help:
- User-centred design: We conduct real user research, including with digitally excluded groups, to ensure applications are intuitive and accessible before they go live
- Accessible front-end development: Our developers build to WCAG standards and test across devices, browsers, and assistive technologies
- Application development for the social domain: We have specific experience building applications in the social domain that serve complex citizen needs
- Data and analytics integration: We help organisations identify where users drop off and use that insight to continuously improve the application journey
- Team as a Service (TaaS): We embed experienced consultants directly into your team for as long as the project requires, scaling up or down as needed
If your municipality is ready to build digital services that reduce exclusion and support every citizen effectively, get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we measure whether our digital support services are actually working?
Track a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics: online application completion rates, volume of assisted digital requests over time, drop-off points in application journeys, and user satisfaction scores collected after support interactions. Qualitative feedback from frontline staff and community partners is equally important, as it surfaces barriers that data alone cannot reveal. A successful programme should show gradually increasing self-service completion rates alongside decreasing dependency on assisted support, indicating that residents are building genuine digital confidence.
What's the minimum viable digital support offer for a small municipality with limited resources?
Start with a partnership-first approach: rather than building your own support infrastructure from scratch, identify which local libraries, charities, or community organisations already provide digital help and formalise those relationships with a modest co-funding or referral agreement. Complement this with a clear, well-publicised telephone helpline for residents who cannot access in-person support. These two steps alone, done consistently and well, deliver more impact than a larger but fragmented in-house programme.
How do we train staff and volunteers to provide effective assisted digital support without creating long-term dependency?
Train support staff to use a ‘supported independence’ approach: rather than completing tasks on behalf of residents, they guide residents through each step so the resident retains agency and builds familiarity with the process. This means asking ‘what does this question mean to you?’ before explaining it, and encouraging residents to click or type themselves wherever possible. Pairing each assisted session with a brief signpost to a local digital skills programme gives residents a clear path toward independence rather than a reason to return for every future task.
What are the most common mistakes municipalities make when rolling out digital support programmes?
The most frequent mistake is launching support services reactively, only after a digital service has gone live and complaints begin to surface, rather than building support infrastructure in parallel with the service itself. A second common error is designing support around the channels the council prefers to operate, such as a single telephone line with limited hours, rather than the channels residents actually use and trust. Finally, many municipalities underinvest in promotion: a well-designed support service that residents do not know exists will be used by almost no one.
How can we make digital applications more accessible for residents with disabilities without a large redesign budget?
Begin with a free or low-cost automated accessibility audit using tools such as Axe, WAVE, or the Lighthouse panel in Chrome DevTools to identify the most critical WCAG failures, then prioritise fixes by the number of users affected. Quick wins, such as adding descriptive alt text to images, improving colour contrast, and ensuring all form fields have visible labels, can be implemented by a single developer in a matter of days and immediately improve the experience for screen reader users and those with low vision. Even modest improvements made incrementally and tested with real users deliver measurable gains in completion rates among residents with disabilities.
At what point should a municipality consider rebuilding a digital application rather than adding more support services around it?
When the volume and nature of support requests indicate that residents are consistently failing at the same points in an application journey, and design fixes have not resolved the issue, that is a strong signal that the underlying architecture or logic of the service is the problem. If your support team is effectively compensating for a broken service rather than helping residents with genuine complexity, the cost of sustained support will quickly outpace the cost of a rebuild. Conducting a structured usability review with real users, including digitally excluded groups, provides the evidence base needed to make that investment case to decision-makers.
How do we ensure digital support services remain inclusive as technology continues to evolve?
Build continuous user research into your service governance rather than treating it as a one-off project activity, so that emerging barriers, such as those introduced by new AI-driven interfaces or mandatory app-based services, are identified before they become systemic problems. Maintain standing relationships with community organisations that serve digitally excluded groups, as these partners will flag real-world friction faster than any analytics dashboard. Reviewing your digital support offer annually against updated digital exclusion data for your area ensures your services remain calibrated to the residents who need them most, not the residents who needed them most five years ago.