New Digital Transformation Grant program provides grants for main street businesses to embrace technology

Building on the success of a pilot program run in Toronto late 2017 / early 2018, the Digital Transformation Grant Program has officially launched, providing grants to main street business owners. This grant program seeks to help small main street businesses across Ontario improve their adoption of technologies to better promote themselves online, sell online and even run back-office processes online.

The program was built with two key objectives in mind:

• To provide main street business owners a comprehensive plan to guide their digital transformation
• To provide main street businesses with the digital literacy skills they need to execute their digital transformation either through a do-it-yourself approach and/or being a smart consumer when purchasing these services.

Expanding the reach of the initial Toronto pilot program, the Digital Transformation Grant program has been built completely online through a learning management system. It is composed of 8 core modules, all broken down into sub modules covering the various topics. The course totals eight (8) hours of content, but can be done wherever and whenever is most convenient for the business owner as all video lessons are between 8-13 minutes in length. 

“The structure of the new online grant program will allow us to not only reach businesses across the province in a scalable way, but it also allows users of the program to continually refer back to the content and video modules providing them a channel for continued learning as they work through their Digital Transformation Plan. Along with this, even though businesses are only eligible for a single one time grant, they can have multiple employees take the online training modules – further extending the reach of the new program” said Darryl Julott, Senior Manager with Digital Main Street.

Hear what other businesses had to say about the program:

“I signed up for their eight [module] course and feel like I learned so much from it. I learned what I was doing right which was a relief and what I needed to do to bring the online side of my business to it's next level. DMS will be providing grant funding to us and this money will be an amazing benefit with our advertising campaign through social media and online ad's. I would thoroughly support and encourage DMS and their work as it is very insightful, [and] beneficial.” – Sinead Clarke, Owner – Irish Design House in Toronto

“Simply wanted to commend you and the work you're doing! As my business is just over ONE year [old], the video lessons are very informative and helpful!” – Tanya Farlinger, Director – Exhalo Spa in Ottawa

Main Street businesses from across Ontario can register online and create their Digital Main Street account to get started today. 

Découvrez https://digitalmainstreet.ca/digital-transformation-grant/ for any additional information.