Social enterprises are increasingly recognised, by the European Commission’s Action Plan for the Social Economy and by OECD analyses of the sector, as structural drivers of inclusive growth and territorial cohesion. Their role is particularly significant in rural areas, where public services and market actors tend to be less present and organisational resilience becomes a decisive factor for local development. Within this context, digital transition is not a matter of adopting tools in isolation: it is a process that touches governance, internal processes, skills and strategic decision-making alike.
To understand how this process is unfolding on the ground, the LEADER-CE project surveyed 20 social enterprises operating in rural areas of Croatia, Italy, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The survey combined a structured Likert-scale self-assessment with open-ended questions, later analysed through qualitative coding in QDA Miner. This mixed-methods design allows what organisations declare about themselves to be read alongside what emerges from their own detailed accounts.
The survey examines digital maturity across four interconnected pillars. Digital Transformation captures the overall level of digital adoption in tools, infrastructure and internal practices. Human-Centred Design concerns the extent to which digital solutions are developed together with beneficiaries, rather than designed independently of them. Data-Driven Organisation refers to how systematically data is collected, managed and used to support decisions and measure impact. Marketing, Communication & Fundraising covers the organisation’s digital capacity to build visibility, engage stakeholders and reach donors or supporters.
Structural barriers behind these needs. The constraints noticed by respondents illustrate to what extent needs are structural rather than purely technological. Limited organisational size and internal capacity emerged as recurring, cross-cutting barriers, closely associated with dependence on external consultants and with the fragmentation of information systems. Financial constraints reinforce this picture: 80% of organisations explicitly stated a need for funding to sustain their digital transition. Taken together, fragmented workflows and the absence of a clear digital strategy also appear linked to weaker visibility with donors and to less structured approaches to collecting feedback from beneficiaries.
Convergence around integrated management systems. One need is shared almost universally: 85% of organisations expressed a need for more integrated digital management tools, including systems such as CRMs, ERPs or shared databases, able to bring together information on beneficiaries, volunteers, activities and communication. In the qualitative material, the strategic dimension — encompassing the need for a digital strategy, a roadmap and integrated systems — accounted for 18.7% of all coded words, rising to 23.6% once the related need for impact-measurement tools is included. Few results in the survey are this consistent across countries, organisational types and sizes.
Conclusion. Taken as a whole, these findings describe a sector that is actively seeking direction rather than starting from scratch: organisations report a genuine, shared demand for strategic and organisational tools, set against real constraints of size, capacity and funding. Gathered directly from the organisations surveyed, this evidence offers a common starting point for shaping capacity-building activities that reflect the actual conditions of social enterprises in rural areas, to be refined together with partners and organisations in the project’s participatory phases.
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This article summarises findings from the LEADER-CE Research Report (D1.1.2) on the digital needs of 20 social enterprises in rural areas of Croatia, Italy, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Given the small, purposively selected sample, results are descriptive and exploratory rather than statistically representative.
Sources: European Commission, Building an economy that works for people: an action plan for the social economy, COM(2021) 778 final; OECD, Social economy and social innovation