Improving digital support for young people: emerging themes
A young person's hands typing on a laptop keyboard
Following on from our last post, this post shares our emerging thinking about some of the big themes we found through our research, and how they point towards areas for change.
Our overall aim for the project is to understand how and why young people are using online services and support to help them with their essential needs, like health, housing and money, and to identify where there are opportunities for strategic change to make support more accessible and youth-led.
Seven areas stood out to us from the interviews and workshop as opportunities, where either practical intervention in the short to medium term, or more systemic change over the longer term, could make a tangible difference.
1. Making support accessible
We saw widespread commitment to the principle of accessibility across the sector, with the vast majority of organisations we spoke to saying they had already or were in the process of updating materials, content and websites to make them more accessible.
However, there was also a strong view that lots of information, advice and support online isn't accessible. For example, one senior manager in a leading disability charity that we spoke to reflected that “services are not necessarily following guidance or best practice around accessibility - they don’t always know or understand how to apply accessibility principles.”
Cost or lack of resources was the biggest barrier to having more accessible digital support, with a sense that smaller, volunteer-run nonprofits in particular are struggling with capacity to do things to the highest accessibility standards.
2. Navigating online support
We heard from youth organisations that services tend to be a bit linear and siloed, whereas a young person’s pathway into and through support is often quite organic and networked, very different to how services are set up. These differences and young people’s support journeys could be better understood and mapped.
For example, one organisation that works with parents said that “you might search for something you’re worried about but quickly end up at the sharp/acute end of services available. So there’s a step between [searching and acute services] which gets lost in online searches."
The development of some kind of easily searchable database of services was discussed during the sector workshop, but there was some uncertainty over whether this was the right solution. For example, how would it be resourced long-term? How up-to-date and comprehensive could it ever be? And why have other, similar efforts failed previously?
3. Involving young people
During the interviews, we heard from many organisations about the benefits of doing extensive research and co-design with young people, ensuring young people’s views and experiences are included in the design of their support.
We also heard how organisations, often but not exclusively smaller charities, wanted to do more of this, but lacked the resources and / or expertise to involve young people as much as they would like in developing, designing, and testing digital tools.
There could be value in supporting organisations to understand how to do involvement and consultation with young people well, and how to manage relationships with young people. This could also be a particularly good area to facilitate peer learning and sharing between organisations.
4. Engaging young people where they are online
Almost everyone we spoke to recognised that young people typically use different channels to services: young people tend not to like voice calls or email, but many services aren’t actively using young people’s preferred platforms like WhatsApp, TikTok or Instagram.
We found significant divergence between organisations in social media use and levels of confidence in how to mitigate privacy and safeguarding concerns. It is clear from our interviews and the workshop that some organisations are very risk-averse when it comes to using social media, whereas others have embraced it and are seeing the benefits.
We heard great examples of organisations using digital platforms such as youth workers' effective use of Whatsapp to engage with young people, or successful use of TikTok to engage young people and provide them with bite-sized advice.
The challenges lie at three levels:
Helping decision-makers understand the real (as opposed to perceived) risks and how to mitigate them, as well as the benefits of overcoming them
How to resource the day to day management of new ways of engaging with young people based on their preferences and demands, managing risk and operationalising safeguarding, and preparing and adapting content
Helping organisations to understand the potential of social media, how best to use it, what different platforms are all about. This in particular is where involving young people is beneficial.
5. Discovery, feedback and listening to young people
Organisations’ access to, collection of, management, analysis and sharing of data underpin many of the issues that emerged during the interviews and discussed in the workshop. This is a cross-cutting issue that could unlock better outcomes and practice in a number of areas.
We suggest that data could particularly be an enabler in relation to navigation, online safety and privacy:
Solutions that help young people navigate and find the right support would undoubtedly involve data at some level - both within organisations and between them.
Referrals and signposting between organisations: how do young people move between organisations? What data do they need to share? What could be put in place to facilitate young people to ‘own’ their data and manage it for their own benefit? How does Nominet’s existing work with Signpost+ link in here?
How does data collection that is required by funders relate to what is valuable and beneficial for young people?
Money, resources and funders
6. Money, resources and funders
Probably the most common barrier identified was the need for more funding and resources, for all sorts of activities from developing new digital provision, to consultation with young people, and ongoing maintenance of digital resources.
Funding and commissioning models were identified by several interviewees, as well as during the workshop, as making the integration of digital support into the everyday functioning of services difficult. The gap between developing a brand new digital product and integrating it into everyday use is particularly difficult to fund.
Related to this was a lack of enough time to properly develop and test resources or tools before funders expected to see concrete results. It was felt that too many funders were interested in quantity not quality, or were too vague and just asked for ‘something digital’ without considering what, or how it might fit into (or not) wider strategy and activity.
7. Peer learning and support
Finally, there was a strong desire from many people we spoke to for better infrastructure and processes that allows each other to share what they are doing, share and understand best practice, and learn from others. We heard over and over again that there isn’t enough collaboration and peer sharing to learn what works from different organisations across the sector.
For example, one organisation which is struggling balancing safeguarding concerns and adapting new channels said they wanted to learn from others “so we can work with safeguarding concerns but not lose out on opportunities that digital offers."
Another said "we need some way to develop a shared governance and working practices and approaches and alliances in terms of funding the right pieces of work".
In our nextpost, we will share our final thoughts on the most impactful opportunities and levers for strategic change.