SOLE Scotland

SOLE Scotland is the platform that allows individuals, organisations, and businesses in a community to interact, engage and transact with each other. It provides a single online environment for the community that allows residents and visitors alike to access everything that the community has to offer, including news, events, community groups and businesses. For citizens within the community, SOLE Scotland overcomes the scatter of information that exists both online and offline, bringing everything together in a single place that presents that information in a simple, consistent way both on the web or via the mobile app. As a community platform, it enables local organisations to publicise their activities and events, offering the ability to sell tickets, take appointment bookings and engage with members of the community. It brings together local news from a variety of sources and presents it in one place in a consistent way. SOLE Scotland gives people an easy and appealing way to support their local businesses, something that many are keen to do but have found difficult or almost impossible to do because there is no single and consistent place to do so. As an online trading platform, SOLE Scotland solves the problem faced by many businesses of the cost and time involved in setting up, maintaining, and promoting their own online presence and giving them access to a ready-made local audience to which they can promote their business. Those businesses with an existing online presence can use SOLE Scotland to showcase their business to local consumers and drive traffic to their website. It offers citizens and consumers a unified and consistent way to find, access, and buy locally. It overcomes the challenge and wasted time of having to find and use multiple websites that all look and operate differently, a frustrating and time-consuming shopping experience. SOLE Scotland also enriches the cultural life of the community, providing tools to help citizens learn more about and experience more of what makes their community unique. The trails capability allows the creation of guided explorations of the cultural, historical, and economic facets of the community. People following trails can check in to locations on the trail and can be rewarded by means of offers and promotions relevant to the points of interest on the trail. SOLE Scotland will be deployed to communities across Scotland and will become increasingly familiar as the online hub that both complements and strengthens the heart of Scotland’s communities.