Digital Grandparents – Nonni Digitali - Arezzo
Arezzo (Italy)
“Digital Grandparents – Nonni Digitali” project is an initiative of the Municipality of Arezzo aiming to facilitate access to its online services and other digital tools mainly to citizens who, because of their age (such as the over 65s) or for other reasons, are vulnerable. The project, implemented in 2022, involved several municipal departments and local organisations and associations and brought the older generation in touch with youngsters bringing an impact on digital and social transition at a local level.
The project “Digital Grandparents” was created to support mainly grandparents in dealing with the PA digital transition tools increasingly affecting citizens daily lives: SPID, CIE, Electronic Health Record, AppIO, PagoPA. In order to facilitate the project implementation, the municipal staff organised 8 meetings in the Social Aggregation Centres (SAC) to personally teach elderly people how to deal with the above digital tools. A team of authorized SPID operators, communication experts, and young civil servants working in the SACs assisted aprox. 70 citizens in:
- activating their SPID and learning how and where to use it;
- accessing the Electronic Health Record and learning how to make an online payment with PagoPA;
- accessing and using the AppIO several online services activated by the Municipality of Arezzo;
- using the CieID app online services from the smartphone;
- accessing the National Institute for Social Security (INPS) online services by using SPID.
A capillary digital training activity was delivered, carried out one-on-one, in an individual and personalized way.
The user centricity aspect has a great importance for the City’s digital transformation to really occur. For this reason, Arezzo administration is committed to provide more accessible and personally customized public services to citizens with the help of digital tools, with particular focus on the accessibility facilitation to vulnerable groups of citizens. “Digital Grandparents” project definitely facilitated access to the PA online services for many citizens belonging to vulnerable categories.
For the “Digital Grandparents” project, the Municipality of Arezzo was awarded the 2022 Italian “Smartphone d’Oro” third prize for PA digital innovation and communication best practices.
“Digital Grandparents” is a validated municipal best practice of user-centric digital innovation, which can easily be replicated by many other territories throughout Europe and beyond.
From the citizens’ point of view, “Digital Grandparents” project has contributed to consolidating the relationship between the Municipality and the citizens themselves, bringing the public administration to the meeting places of the elderly people. In addition, the project facilitated digital education to many people enabling them to use digital technologies and to have a digital identity and to make them familiar with the main online services of the PA.
The final satisfaction survey showed that 87,5% of the respondent citizens appreciated the service provided by the “Digital Grandparents” project and 93,5% of them would appreciate a follow-up meeting aiming to further develop their digital skills needed to use the PA services.
Following the successful implementation of the “Digital Grandparents” project, in 2023 the Municipality of Arezzo promoted a new initiative named “Digital Ambassadors” which is being already implemented in collaboration will the association CUPLA (Unitary Coordination of Self-Employed Pensioners, composed of eight national associations of Pensioners) and which has the ambition to become a long-term digital transition service. This initiative aims to deliver to some representatives of CUPLA association three digital training courses of two hours each on specific themes such as: basic knowledge on the use of PCs and smartphones; Digital identity (SPID and CIE) activation, credentials’ recovery and use; Cyber security; etc. At the end of the digital training course, participants become “Digital Ambassadors" spreading lessons learned and skills built to the other members of the association. Also young students are involved with the task of disseminating the lessons learned to the other associates and thus creating a chain of information which aims to enable elderly people to enjoy autonomy and independence also in older age.
