UK Digital Intervention Grant Funding for Individuals and Small Businesses (UK DIGIS)
Providing Grants to Help Individuals, Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses in the United Kingdom Hire Virtual Support, Get Online, Grow the UK Economy and Achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
What Is UK DIGIS?
UK DIGIS, the UK Digital Intervention Grant for Individuals and Small Businesses, helps freelancers, start-ups and small businesses across the UK pay for digital support such as virtual staff, a website or social media management, among others.
It works as a part-funded subsidy.
If your application is approved, UK DIGIS covers between 10% and 40% of the cost of the service, and you pay the rest. You don’t receive cash. Instead, you get a grant code to redeem with one of the approved service providers in the UK within a specified duration.
The grant does not need to be repaid, and it costs nothing to apply.
UK DIGIS is run by PASDO, an international non-profit and non-governmental organisation that runs targeted interventions in specific countries to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
UK DIGIS is designed to contribute to Goal 8 (Economic Growth) and others.
Programme Justification
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Many small businesses and individual entrepreneurs know that a professional online presence and the right digital support can help them grow, but not all of them have the skills, time or budget to put it in place. Some struggle to find people with the digital skills they need, and others have little or no meaningful digital presence at all. Cost is a common barrier. For many small businesses and start-ups, paying for digital tools and support can be out of reach, particularly in the early stages, and support that eases the cost of going digital can make a real difference. Left unaddressed, this gap holds back productivity and growth, both for the businesses affected and for the wider economy. UK DIGIS is an initiative of PASDO created to help close this gap.UK DIGIS and Sustainable Development
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SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth
This is a primary goal behind the UK DIGIS grant. By helping individuals turn business ideas into functioning ventures, and helping existing small businesses professionalise and expand their operations, UK DIGIS contributes directly to job creation, productivity and inclusive economic growth across the UK. A business that can afford to hire a virtual assistant or launch a proper website is a business better placed to take on customers, create work for others and contribute to the wider economy.SDG 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
Access to digital tools and services, from websites to virtual staffing platforms, is a form of digital infrastructure that small businesses increasingly need in order to compete. By subsidising access to this infrastructure, UK DIGIS helps small UK businesses adopt the technology and working practices that support innovation and long-term resilience.SDG 1, No Poverty
By helping individuals, including those testing a business idea alongside full-time employment, access the support needed to get a venture off the ground, UK DIGIS contributes to broadening pathways to income generation, particularly for people who may not otherwise have the resources to hire support on their own. UK DIGIS also connects to other goals in various ways.What the UK DIGIS Grant Supports
The UK DIGIS Grant supports applicants in accessing digital interventions that can:
- help increase productivity in any meaningful endeavour that has the potential to contribute to economic development in any part of the United Kingdom,
- directly contribute to economic growth in the UK, or
- help in achieving one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Most applications fall within a set of common categories.
The following information comes from service providers that applied to the programme and were carefully screened and approved as implementing partners under UK DIGIS. It explains the common types of service, how they may benefit you, and typical price ranges.
Note: The services below are supported by the programme in general. See Current Priorities in the next section for what is open this round
Virtual Assistants for Admin, Personal and Executive Support
Virtual staffing is one of the most common uses of the UK DIGIS Grant.
In the UK, virtual staffing support is generally sold in monthly plans, and typically falls into a few broad categories:
General or administrative support
This covers structured, task-based work such as inbox and diary management, data entry, document preparation, filing, scheduling and general correspondence. This is usually the starting point for most small businesses and individuals new to using virtual support.
Personal assistant (PA) support
This covers a broader remit than general admin, including closer day-to-day coordination with a specific individual, such as diary and inbox management, meeting preparation, travel booking, client follow-ups and event planning.
Executive assistant (EA) support
This is a more senior level of support, typically for founders or business leaders juggling complex schedules, and can include strategic calendar management, board or meeting preparation, high-level correspondence and project coordination.
Typical monthly pricing for general admin, PA and EA-type virtual staffing, based on the rates shared by our approved partner providers, is as follows.
10 hours per month: £250 to £400
20 hours per month: £500 to £800
40 hours per month: £1,000 to £1,600
60 hours per month: £1,500 to £2,400
This covers hands-on, ongoing social media tasks such as making or scheduling posts, basic content creation and responding to comments and messages, and is priced differently from general admin support, as set out below.
Social media management support in the UK, based on the packages offered by our approved partner providers, tends to be priced as a monthly package rather than by hours, and generally falls into three broad levels, distinguished mainly by how many platforms are covered, how often you post, and how much content is created for you rather than supplied by you:
- Basic social media support, typically £250 to £500 a month.
Usually covers 1 to 2 platforms, around 3 posts a week, and uses images or content you supply yourself or simple stock imagery. Suited to a business that mainly wants a consistent, active presence online. - Standard social media support, typically £500 to £1,200 a month. Usually covers 2 to 3 platforms, around 5 posts a week, custom-made graphics, basic community management, meaning replying to comments and messages within a day or two, and a monthly performance report.
- Full social media management, typically above £1,200 a month. Usually covers more platforms, daily posting including formats like Stories and Reels, custom content creation including video, active same-day community management, and detailed monthly analytics and strategy input.
Digital Marketing (Paid Advertising)
The UK DIGIS grant provides support towards the cost of hiring someone to run paid adverts for your business on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and Google.
In plain terms, this means paying a specialist to set up and manage adverts that are shown to people who are likely to be interested in your business, rather than relying only on people finding you naturally. The person’s job usually includes deciding who the adverts should be shown to, designing the advert itself, and adjusting the campaign over time based on what is and isn’t working.
It’s worth noting that the cost of managing your adverts is separate from your actual advertising budget, which is the amount you pay directly to the platform (for example, Facebook or Google) for your adverts to be shown, and is on top of any management cost. What UK DIGIS supports is the cost of hiring someone to handle the paid adverts and not the cost paid to the platforms.
Typical UK pricing, for the management side of this service (not including your advertising budget) is approximately £500 to £1,500 a month for adverts on a single platform, rising above that for campaigns run across multiple platforms at once. As with the figures above, this is a general guide, not a fixed price.
Website Design and Development
The UK DIGIS grant provides support towards the cost of having a website built, giving you or your business a proper online presence. This includes both a standard informational website and an online shop, for example built on WordPress with WooCommerce, for businesses that want to sell products directly online.
Typical UK pricing for professional website development is:
- One page website: £300 to £600.
- 5-Page Website (Standard Brochure): £800 – £3,000
- 10-Page Website (Growing Business Site): £1,000 – £6,000
- E-Commerce WordPress Website (WooCommerce): £1,500 – £10,000+
- Ongoing Costs: £50 to £200 per month covering reliable hosting, domain renewal, SSL security certificates, and WordPress maintenance plugins
Google Business Profile Setup and Maintenance
The UK DIGIS grant provides support towards the cost of setting up a Google Business Profile.
Typical pricing for Google Business Profile setup and maintenance service in the UK is:
Setup: £150 to £300, covering initial profile creation, category selection, verification guidance, and map optimisation.
Maintenance: This runs in the range of about £50 to £500 per month per location, broken down into several packages such as the entry level of around £50 – £95/month for basic listing monitoring, minor updates, and safety-net support, around £95 – £250/month for regular Google posts, photo updates, profile optimization, and basic local SEO checks, and around £300 – £500/month for comprehensive content creation, intensive review monitoring/handling, citation building, and advanced local ranking strategies.
Search Engine Optimisation
This is commonly known as SEO, and is something done to help your website appear higher up when people search on Google for a business or service like yours, without paying Google for adverts.
A website built by a competent provider should already include basic SEO foundations as standard, such as a clear structure and mobile-friendly design, but dedicated SEO support goes further than this foundation. It typically involves ongoing work such as researching the words and phrases your customers search for (which you may not reliably know until after your website has existed for several months, has been properly understood by search engines and has some tracking data that you or an SEO specialist can analyse and use), creating content around them, and steadily improving your visibility over time.
Typical pricing for ongoing SEO support is approximately £300 to £500 a month for a single local business focus, rising to £500 to £1,500 a month for broader or more competitive SEO work.
You can be supported under UK DIGIS grant to hire a specialist to handle the SEO work on your website for a period of six months, giving you enough time to begin to reap its benefits (or begin to see strong signs of improvement).
Email marketing and newsletter setup
Email marketing and newsletter setup covers setting up the tools and templates needed to regularly email your customers with updates, offers or news.
This typically involves a one-off setup fee from around £150, plus an ongoing monthly subscription to an email platform, which usually starts at around £10 to £15 a month for a small contact list and increases as your list grows.
You can be supported under UK DIGIS grant to hire a specialist to handle the setup of email marketing and newsletter system and its maintenance for a period of 6 months.
Graphic design and branding
Graphic design and branding covers the entire work that goes into creating a professional logo and other visual branding materials for your business, which includes market research and strategy development to ensure your logo easily stands out in the market, conceptualisation and sketching, and versatility and practical testing, among others.
A professional logo typically costs between £250 and £1,000, while a fuller branding package that also includes simple brand guidelines, such as your colours and fonts, typically costs between £1,500 and £5,000.
Other Digital Services
UK DIGIS also supports a range of other digital services that you, the applicant, can reasonably show is in line with the programme’s objectives.
Current Priorities and Application Closing
For the current application round, only applications for the following services that cost a minimum of £200 can be accepted:
- Virtual Administrative support
- Virtual Personal Assistant support
- Virtual Social Media Assistant support
- Website Design services
Applications are processed as they come in, and this round closes once the grant funds earmarked for it are used up. There is no fixed closing date, so if you are eligible, apply right away.
Eligibility And Who Can Apply
The UK DIGIS Grant is open to individuals and small businesses in the United Kingdom.
This includes freelancers, sole traders, start-ups, content creators, people testing a new business idea alongside a job, and established small businesses.
- Applicants must be based in the UK and have a UK address.
- Applicants must be 18 or over.
- A small business must apply through an individual who is its owner, director or another person authorised to act on its behalf.
- For this programme, a small business is one with fewer than 50 employees.
What we look for
Every application is assessed on the purpose of the support you are requesting. Your application should show that the service would do at least one of the following:
- Increase productivity in a business, freelance, self-employed or start-up endeavour that has the potential to contribute to economic development in any part of the UK.
- Directly contribute to economic growth in the UK.
- Help achieve one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
When you apply, tell us which of these best fits your request and explain why. You do not need to meet all three.
Meeting one of these purposes does not guarantee a grant. Applications are also assessed against the funding available at the time and the strength of your explanation, and awards are made at PASDO’s discretion.
UK DIGIS Grant Timeframe
UK DIGIS Grants are designed for support that can be arranged and delivered within specific durations, depending on whether the service applied for is one-off or recurring.
One-off services such as a website build or Google Business Profile setup, must be capable of being set up and completed within one month of your grant being redeemed with an approved service provider.
For ongoing support such as virtual staffing, the delivery of the service must be able to commence within one month of redeeming your grant with the approved service provider.
How To Apply and Things To Note
To apply for the UK DIGIS grant, please follow the steps below and take note of the points.
- Click the apply button at the end of this page to complete the UK DIGIS Grant application form that loads up.
- Follow the instructions to fill out the form and submit.
- If you already know the ID of a PASDO-approved service provider for what you want, you can include it in your application. If you do not have one, you can still apply, and, if your application is approved, you will simply be matched with a general approved service provider under the UK DIGIS programme.
Things to Note
- Applications are assessed against the programme’s eligibility requirements, available funding, and the relevance of the request. Being eligible to apply does not guarantee that a grant will be awarded. PASDO reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to award, decline, or withdraw a grant offer at any time.
- Applications are accepted in rounds a few times a year. Within each round, applications are assessed and grants awarded on a first come, first served basis among applicants who qualify, until that round’s funding limit is reached, at which point the application form is disabled until the next round opens.
- If your application is approved, you will receive a notification specifying your grant percentage for the service you applied for, your approved service provider, a grant code to be used on the website of the approved service provider, an expiry date and any other relevant information.
- You will need to accept the grant offer by redeeming your grant code with your approved service provider. If you were matched with a provider, you can take up to two working days to review their services and clarify anything before proceeding. If the code is not redeemed within two working days of approval, it expires and is reassigned to other applicants in the queue.
How Much Can You Receive Under UK DIGIS, And Do You Have To Pay Back?
The UK DIGIS Grant provides a maximum of 40% of the eligible cost of an approved virtual support or digital service.
The exact percentage may differ based on the type of service.
The following are the current percentages by type of service:
Virtual assistants: typically 20% to 40%, recurring, for up to six months.
Website design and development: typically 20% to 40%
Digital marketing: typically 15% to 25%
Social media management support: typically 20% to 40%, recurring, for up to six months.
Google Business Profile setup: typically 10% to 20%
Other digital services: assessed individually, within the overall 10% to 40% range
These are typical ranges, published as a guide, and the exact percentage awarded within a given range depends on the strength of your application, the funding available at the time, and PASDO’s discretion.
For example, if an approved service costs £1,000 and you receive a 30% grant, UK DIGIS would contribute £300, leaving you responsible for the remaining £700.
UK DIGIS grant does not come with any cost of application.
You never have to pay back the grant amount, and you never have to pay any fee to apply.
Responsibilities of Beneficiaries of UK DIGIS Grant
Accepting a UK DIGIS grant comes with a few simple responsibilities. These help PASDO and its donors confirm that grants are reaching real people and businesses, and making a genuine difference.
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Progress report
Beneficiaries agree to submit one short progress report/brief after receiving the grant.
This is a brief update covering how the grant has been used, what it was used for, a couple of screenshots or photos where available, links to any public acknowledgement you made about the grant, and any challenges encountered.
Public acknowledgment
Beneficiaries are encouraged to acknowledge PASDO’s support publicly. Beneficiaries who choose to post about their grant on social media should set the post’s visibility to public rather than restricted to friends or followers, and include a link to that post in their progress report.
By submitting photos or a testimonial, beneficiaries grant PASDO a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use that content, at any time, in PASDO’s own promotional materials, reports and communications.
No endorsement or affiliation
Receiving a UK DIGIS grant does not create a partnership, sponsorship, endorsement, employment relationship or business affiliation between the beneficiary and PASDO. Beneficiaries are not authorised to speak on PASDO’s behalf or use PASDO’s name or logo beyond the acknowledgment described above, and PASDO is not responsible for how a beneficiary subsequently uses, operates or represents the supported service beyond what was approved.
Compliance
Applicants must provide accurate information and use approved grant support for its intended purpose. A grant approval may be withdrawn if information provided is found to be inaccurate or materially different from what was presented in the application.
UK DIGIS Grant Timeline
1. Apply for a grant
You complete and submit the UK DIGIS Grant application form, including your details, what you are applying for, and the justification.
2. Approval decision
PASDO's UK DIGIS Grant team reviews your application and aims to respond within three working days, though some applications may take longer.
3. Redeem your grant
Once approved, you may redeem your grant code with your approved provider straight away if you applied with a provider ID. If you were matched with a provider, you can take up to two working days to review their services and clarify anything with them before proceeding. A code that is not redeemed within two working days of approval expires and is reassigned to another applicant.
4. Complete your transaction
You and your partner provider complete the transaction.
5. Progress brief
After some time (specified in your email) of completing the transaction with your provider, you write and send us a short progress brief.
Social media management support