Phones for Living: What does provision of smart technology change for people experiencing homelessness and what are the digital skills gaps?

Thames Reach works directly with homeless people and rough sleepers and works hard to stop vulnerable people from becoming homeless. This idea is about digital skills. We have given phones out to clients - 60 phones were given out in January 2021. We want to know what difference this made and carry out some research in this space. For example: what impact has there been to handing out phones? How did this change peoples life? Did they improve digitally - get a job? connect with family?
We have thought about interviews, testimonies, surveys. We wondered if working with a research student could lead to more honest feedback possibly than if we did it ourselves?
We did a survey of clients around digital skills of 700 people (did they need a lot, a little, or no help with digital skills).

We hoped the results might help us find the levels and kinds of real need. The kind of things we are thinking about...
barriers - we find these out to in great detail
smartphones V laptops
are staff a barrier - no time to refer clients for support
volunteers how they can help?
do we need to do this in costa? a community group? a temple?

We have also been thinking about equality - how does this affect this research? Around disability and ethnicity for example.