Race Online 2012 claims as I write that 669 partner organisations have committed to help 1,736,673 people get online.
Any organisation can sign up and pledge to do something that will help others get online. There’s a sign up link at the home page at
www.raceonline2012.org. Part of the process of signing up is to say how many people an organisation aims to help get online. I suppose the totals delivered in that headline statistic are the sum of those signed up and the sum of people those signed up aim to help.
We can debate how rigorous the approach is, but there is no denying that the whole campaign shows very successfully how organisations large and small can be given the tiniest of guidelines and then pitch in to help with a cause in their own way. Look through the list of partners and you’ll see local authorities, schools and community groups sitting alongside national and local businesses all with their own pledges of how they will help.
From a business point of view there is a very positive case for wanting all of us to be online. Electronic payment, electronic invoicing, and electronic statements if implemented universally, can cut costs dramatically. Providing self service facilities for basic information via a web site is more cost efficient than having someone answer the phone or respond to individual requests whether made via old tech such as letters or new tech such as email.
At the Race Online 2012 web site you will find a manifesto crammed with statistics and information about who is not online and what they are missing out on. It is very much worth reading.
But don’t get too excited. Even if millions more of us go online between now and 2012 a substantial proportion will continue to want their statements on paper, their phone calls answered by a human being, and the ability to make payments by phone rather than online.
Which means businesses are going to have to offer parallel services for a considerable time to come.