Digital adoption programs create economic value. That value flows well beyond the participant, to sectors and local economies that see cost savings, new revenue, better outcomes, and more resilient infrastructure.

Consider how this plays out for one person we’ll call David. David, who is unemployed, completes a 24-hour digital skills course at his local nonprofit, learning how to fill in online applications, use email professionally, and navigate a video interview. Within a few months, he’s working again, earning more than he did before.

The benefits don’t end with David. The workforce agency that referred him hits its performance metrics and protects its funding. The state no longer pays him SNAP benefits and starts collecting tax on his income. His new employer has a worker who already knows tools the job requires, saving training costs. His health insurer gains a covered life. The local economy gains a spender.

Now multiply that by the millions of Americans these programs serve. But while these benefits diffuse widely, the costs have traditionally fallen to philanthropy and public grants. Today, with grant funding under increasing strain, the critical work of supporting connectivity and adoption is at risk.

This asymmetry is the starting point for the Alt Funding Field Guide, a new series from Connect Humanity. Across a framework chapter and six sector guides, the series reframes digital adoption programs from a charitable expense into a shared investment — and sets out how the sectors that benefit can become co-investors in its sustainability.

Financing for a more sustainable field

The sectors featured in the guide — healthcare, housing, workforce development, education, local government, and telecommunications — have a direct stake in the work digital inclusion programs do. When more people have an internet connection and the skills to use it, these institutions can serve more users, more quickly, and at lower cost. But while these sectors have the means and the financial incentive to help sustain digital inclusion programs, they’ve rarely been invited in. That’s what we’re looking to change.

What the translation looks like

Workforce

In the Workforce development sector guide, you can read about Byte Back, a D.C.-based digital skills nonprofit which ran a free 24-hour foundational course for participants facing serious labor market barriers — most unemployed at intake, most on public benefits. Within two months of finishing the course, employment among participants nearly tripled and the share earning above $20,000 rose by more than half. 

In a labor market where 92% of jobs require some level of digital skills, foundational digital skills programs offer essential pathways to work and are hugely beneficial for state finances, employers, and workforce agencies. Yet, Byte Back closed in 2024 due to a lack of funding. Without solutions to sustain this work with co-investment from the sectors that benefit, the programs that create these benefits will continue to disappear.

Healthcare

Healthcare is undergoing rapid digital transformation — portals, telehealth, remote monitoring — with solutions for better, more responsive care and opportunities to prevent avoidable, high-cost treatment. But these tools only deliver value for healthcare systems when patients can use them. Those without the tools and skills to engage can’t use any of it and the clinical value and the cost savings are lost. Amy Sheon’s chapter builds an illustrative ROI model arguing that much of the return health systems stand to capture from those investments depends on community-based digital inclusion work which the sector should help sustain.

Housing

A public housing authority managing a thousand units has measurable exposure to whether its residents can transact online: rent payments, benefits renewal, work order submissions, program recertification. Residents with broadband and basic digital skills move through those processes faster and more reliably. That means more efficient operations, greater renter stability, and lower operating costs for housers. These patterns repeat sector after sector.

The question that opens new conversations

The series is built around a question community technology leaders can take into any sector meeting: which outcomes are you willing to pay for? It’s a different question than “will you support digital inclusion?”, and it tends to get a different answer.

Making this work requires a more rigorous kind of program design, one where the program has to deliver, measure, and demonstrate the outcomes a sector partner is paying for. That’s a harder bar than much grant-funded work asks of us. It’s also the bar that turns a sector partner into a long-term co-investor rather than a one-time funder.

The framework chapter sets out the underlying logic: what the work costs (Uses), what value it returns and to whom (Repayments), and what mix of capital can fund it (Sources). Each chapter then takes up a specific sector, making the case for why digital adoption matters to that sector, surfacing emerging partnerships, and pointing to the kinds of programs most likely to attract co-investment.

Where to start

The Alt Funding Field Guide is published today, with a foreword from Blair Levin setting out why this shift in funding model matters for the field and the country. If you work across sectors or want the underlying framework, start there. If you have a specific sector partner in mind, jump to that guide. Either way, the Field Guide is built to help you have the conversations that have been hardest to start.

Read the Alt Funding Field Guide →