Executive Summary

Overview

Older adults (aged 60+) remain one of the most digitally excluded demographics in the UK, facing compounding barriers related to skills, confidence, accessibility, and trust. This exclusion severely limits their access to essential healthcare, welfare, and financial services. There is now a clear opportunity for hyperlocal approaches that embed digital support in services and places people already know and trust, enabling support that reflects the abilities and motivations of people, and illustrates the opportunities that digital tools and services can bring. 
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Method

Councils and key third-sector partners representing five neighbourhoods participated in a series of four workshops to develop a behavioural systems map of the digital inclusion system in their target neighbourhood. This behavioural systems map was used to develop a set of intervention blueprints: programmes and policies that could be developed further to tackle key behavioural barriers emerging from the mapping exercise. 
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Findings
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• The Value of Behavioural Systems Mapping and Collaboration: Behavioural Systems Mapping is an effective diagnostic and design tool for understanding neighbourhood-level digital inclusion for people aged 60+, offering the significant added benefit of bringing stakeholders together to collaborate and build a shared understanding.
• Uncovering Systemic Behavioural Drivers: Behavioural Systems Mapping reveals that superficially similar local challenges are driven by distinctly different behavioural systems. It highlights that digital disengagement in older adults is not only a lack of individual capability, but is driven by system-level factors like poor service design, fear, and fragmented institutional support.
• Shifting Policy to Place-Based Action: When supported by expert facilitation and mixed-methods data, Behavioural Systems Mapping generates actionable, highly targeted interventions. It demonstrates that future policy and funding must move beyond generic skills provision toward holistic, place-based approaches that leverage trusted local actors and accessible service design.
• Methodological Limitations and Complexities: While valuable, Behavioural Systems Mapping produces highly complex maps that can be difficult for stakeholders to navigate without simplification. Furthermore, the maps largely reflect stakeholder perspectives and critically require direct community engagement to stress-test interventions and validate behavioural assumptions.

Behavioural Systems Mapping highlights the role of different neighbourhood actors in shaping digital inclusion - through the services they offer, and the relationships they hold with different groups.