Lloyds Bank International hosted its second ’Google knowhow’ event as part of the company’s ’Helping the Isle of of Man Prosper’ strategy.

More than 100 people attended the event at the Broadway Cinema, Villa Marina.

Organisers said it was a great attendance which included island charities, small and medium-sized enterprises and government agencies.

Mark Temple from Lloyds Bank’s Digital UK Insights and Partnership team started proceedings by highlighting some key statistics including:

Some 99% of small and medium enterprise (SME) firms and charities are now online, compared to 2014 when 8% of SMEs and 24% of charities were online.

However in the UK there is still an £85 billion productivity gap that can be closed by charities and SMEs improving their digital capability.

There are currently 60,000 (30%) charities and 655,000 (16%) SMEs with low digital capability.

For example 10 million of the UK online population have a registered disability however 96% of SMEs and 95% of charity websites do not meet international web accessibility guidelines.

Bill Dale then gave a short insight into how he has used social media to raise the profile of Beach Buddies.

Bill started the charity 12 years ago with a handful of volunteers which has increased to nearly 12,000.

A recent feature on the BBC TV programme The One Show has had nearly 300,000 views on his site.

David Sime from Google delivered a presentation on how charities and businesses could maximise social media to develop their charity or business.

Mr Sime focused on business analytics and used some recent business examples.

He outlined how a tool available at analytics.google.com shows you how visitors found your website and measures:

Who are your visitors

How did they find you

What are they doing i.e. buying or viewing

What are they worth to me

Where they are located across the globe

Neena Shukla, fraud risk manager at Fraud Education and Controls, delivered an informative presentation on the very topical subject of cyber security and staying safe online.

Ms Shukla advised there was £2.3 billion worth of fraud against UK charities in 2017.

Neena then highlighted the five most common SME fraud cases in 2018:

Invoice fraud

Chief executive fraud - impersonate by hacking into email accounts

Vishing fraud

Malware

Overpaid fraud

Ms Shukla then went on to talk about cyber enabled fraud including phishing, vishing and smishing.

She outlined the importance of enhancing staff awareness across organisations and for colleagues to be alert to these threats.

The event was judged to be a great success.