Becoming a Smart village is simple
A digital community promoting enterprise support and connectivity for rural businesses.
Connecting people in rural areas, supporting new and existing enterprises and creating a network of digital champions – all working together to build a vibrant, creative and sustainable rural economy in Scotland.
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When we work together to build your Smart Village we will follow the step by step process below:
Discuss
1. Discuss
Please get in touch and discuss your proposed Smart Village project with our SV Project Manager.
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Choose from: face to face, telephone, email, Skype or Zoom
01828 627790
or contact us here
We will discuss what makes your community amazing and how it could be even better! We will explore whether your community could become a Smart Village under this project and how it can be sustainable beyond the initial stage of funding.
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2. Meet
Who are the movers and shakers that make your village awesome? Who can help you make your community a great place to live, work, do business, visit learn and play? We would love to meet them!
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As well as understanding the local business and community ecosystem at this initial meeting, we will help you start to identify possible Digital Champions who will be the local point of contact for Smart Village Scotland.
3. Discover
With a wider group of stakeholders we will try and discover what makes your community tick. What is your story or stories? What makes your village special and specifically what information can we pull into your portal? How can your village improve and how can Smart Village Scotland help?
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Smart Data
What Smart data do you have to better inform visitors or local businesses and residents?
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We will also start to help develop your collaborative business support network and train your Digital Champion to maintain the portal and develop a team around them.
4. Design
Once we understand the goals for your Smart Village we will design the portal to help you achieve them.
Portal Design
The Digital Champion and their team will need to pull together artwork, images and copy for our developer and make them available to us through our simple to follow process.
Business Support Programme
Our support team will also design a business support programme to add to the existing offering, using the award- winning GrowBiz model for rural enterprise support.
5. Develop
We have contracted an experienced Wix developer so you do not need to worry about design. They have the skills to adapt the basic templates and integrate widgets as required.
There is a really simple process to upload your images and copy to get everything in the right place. NB: these have to be of a certain quality.
We will manage the site on completion - you do not have to worry about domain registration and we can even take care of small changes. You will have the ability to update the site.
We can usually create your portal within a few weeks of the design meeting, but remember you need to provide the copy and images!
6. The future of your Smart Village
We want to make sure you stay awesome, so we want to build this to last!
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We use the Wix platform because it is really easy to use, safe and affordable! It also means, when you are ready, we can hand you the keys.
Your Digital Champion is key to the longevity of your Smart Village, as is the team they have around them to keep the great work going.
Smart Village Scotland prefer to deal with a constituted organisation or association - more hands make light work and the local business association does not usually get a job and leave town!
The GrowBiz model is sustainable too, it is built on an evergreen local ecosystem, with peer support at the core and networking groups and meetings run by local business people for local business people
We can also help you find funding to grow your project or develop in different ways.
