East Dean and Friston is a small village of about 2,000 inhabitants in East Sussex with an elderly bias to the population.

In late 2003 residents began to get frustrated by the apparent delays in getting broadband installed at the local exchange and so Academy Internet, some of whose employees live in the village, offered to accelerate the project.

There was a twist. The Broadband Project team, which included Jason Woodford working in collaboration with Henry Branson (the village webmaster) and Tony Rix (the leader of the local computer club), realised that if everyone in the village signed up to broadband with BT, there was a potential to raise more than £1,000 in "Forward to a friend" rewards for the village.

The team therefore went about setting up a "Broadband Community Chest" with an aim to raise funds for village projects that could be voted for on the village website.

And so local residents could now help their village as well as benefit from broadband at no extra cost to themselves.

On August 18, the village exchange went live and the first broadband connections were made. This was followed up by a briefing to about 100 villagers in the beautiful village hall where the benefits of broadband were explained, together with the risks.

A number of applications were demonstrated and many questions were answered. The first "Forward to a friend" cheques were also received by the Broadband Community Chest.

The mechanics of the project required more than 200 signatures from villagers on the BT Broadband site in order to hit the infamous "trigger level" that had been set by BT for their East Dean exchange.

This was achieved by a combination of local email campaigns, promotion on the village web site, posters in local shops and the pub and word of mouth.

The trigger level was hit in less than seven weeks from a standing start and the exchange was readied in record time due to lobbying of BT by members within the project team.

You can find out more about the East Dean Village at www.eastdeanvillage.org.uk. Academy Internet would be pleased to help other communities struggling to hit their trigger levels by providing an Action plan modelled on the East Dean campaign - call 01273 733433 for more details or see www.academyinternet.com/about_us/News/rural_broadband.htm.

Academy Learning Ltd,

Kingslake House,

-1-5 Union Street, Brighton