About Us

A Business for the Modern Age

You are probably wondering why a traditional CVS, nestling in the hills of the Peak District, would find itself running a company at the cutting edge of technology and web design, providing web design services to local, regional and national organisations. It's been quite a journey! Here's our story.

First, we have to go back to 2003 (the 'dark ages' of web development), when High Peak CVS set up an initiative, funded by Capacity Builders, to offer IT support, including Web Design to its own membership. For the next few years, our knowledge and expertise in Web design support became more and more recognised nationally within the third sector, and in 2006 the brand of 'Digital Umbrella' was born. The name came from the nature of the 'umbrella' organisation, High Peak CVS, which conceived it. Whilst Digital Umbrella is a separate commercial 'arm' of the CVS, we don't keep a penny in profit – these are given back to our parent organisation to support its charitable work in the High Peak.

So where are we now?

We still work almost entirely with the not-for-profit sector, although we also do work for local businesses as well now. We have 6 staff at Digital Umbrella who are all very proud of our charitable ethos. To date, we have a portfolio of over 70 local, regional and national organisations. We are well placed to work for charities - because of our heritage we completely understand the pressures and constraints of the third sector. We present a 'human' face to our customers – we won't blind you with science and we stay in phone contact with all our customers. We understand how confusing IT can be!

Our commitment to our customers in evidenced by the fact that we enjoy high levels of repeat business and our biggest source of new work is from existing customers and recommendations. Our customers are spread through the country – from Somerset County Council to Cumbria CVS. In addition, our customers range from a small local toy library, through to national organisations, including the Home Office and the Confederation of the Heads of Young People Services whose which recently launched at the House of Parliament!