Embracing Advanced Digital Services in the Charity and Voluntary Sector: a response to Covid-19

Abstract

Charity and voluntary services require significant human-to-human interactions alongside integrative offerings inclusive of core and complementary services to yield value and improve the wellbeing of their often vulnerable service users. The Covid-induced digitalisation of such services can pose a challenge to the productivity and resilience of the charity and voluntary sector as the extent to which human interactions and holistic offerings are replicable in digital services can be limited and can diminish the wellbeing outcomes of offerings. This research employs a transformative service research lens to study the digital transformation of charity and voluntary services. It does this in accordance with the concept of advanced services to generate insight into the capabilities necessary at the organisational level, and quality of interactions required at the interactional level, that can enable the sector to offer digitally enhanced advanced services. By identifying the antecedents of advanced digital service in the charity and voluntary sector, this research provides new opportunities to the sector to capitalise on the advantages of digitalisation while responding to their service users' multiplex needs, which in turn improves the sector's resilience and productivity.