Sharing The Children’s Society’s guidance on using digital tools with young people
By Adam Groves
Last Thursday my colleague Ellie Fairgrieve blogged about the approach The Children’s Society has taken to adapt our face-to-face services so that we can offer digital support to young people during the Coronavirus outbreak. Ellie outlines the context The Children’s Society operates in, and how the organisation developed guidance on different digital tools that our services can use.
Through the learning work we’re undertaking during our response to Coronavirus we’ve seen several instances where colleagues have shared The Children’s Society’s digital guidance with other children’s charities — both large and small. Those colleagues have all had feedback that the guidance was useful to inform other organisations’ efforts at responding to the crisis.
This type of collaboration is something that we’re keen to encourage. We know that thinking and working ‘in the open’ wherever possible is good practice. As well as enabling others to benefit from your efforts, the more people who see a piece of work, the more opportunities there are to point out errors and to make suggestions for improvements. Ultimately the bar is raised for everyone, and young people get better support.
With this in mind the small team that is leading our learning work proposed that we put the digital guidance online for anyone to see and use. The cross-organisational group that developed the guidance agreed.
We share this humbly. We’ve had feedback from others that the guidance has been useful. But as we’ve noted in previous blog posts (linked above), The Children’s Society’s digital transformation is nascent, and our process for developing this guidance was accelerated. We know our approach wasn’t perfect and nor are the outputs we’ve created. We are still iterating the guidance, including making it more accessible. We would really welcome your constructive feedback to improve it (we’re linking to a live folder of the latest versions of our documents, so any feedback we incorporate will benefit everyone). Please email Nerys Anthony with your suggestions, and she’ll connect you to the best person in our team. We’d also really appreciate a quick email or tweet letting us know if you find it useful — it will help us demonstrate the value of ‘working in the open’ and further strengthen our organisational commitment to generous leadership.
Now that’s all said: Here is the guidance The Children’s Society has developed for practitioners and young people, on the current digital tools we are using within our services.
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Adam is Design Lead at The Children’s Society. Get in touch with him on Twitter via @adgro.
