What will it mean for The Children’s Society to deliver digital era services?
The digital era has dramatically increased our everyday expectations of good service. From banking to shopping to medical care, features of service delivery that just a few years ago might have amazed and delighted us, we now expect as the norm.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for young people’s expectations of children’s services. In a context of spiralling demand, austerity saw a 29% cut in government funding for Council’s children’s departments between 2010 and 2017–18. In place of elevated expectations, major charities have warned that “services are at breaking point”. Covid has further amplified pressure on the system.
It’s against this backdrop that The Children’s Society received £500k from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Digital Fund in 2018. The Fund’s aim is to “help established organisations use digital to take a major leap forward … changing the way the organisation serves people and communities”. The money is for “organisational redesign and transition (from one model to a fundamentally different model)… not just a new service, or upgrades to basic digital infrastructure.”
At The Children’s Society we stand on the shoulders of a founder who fundamentally challenged his era’s assumptions of what disadvantaged young people could expect from society. When the norm was for orphaned children to be placed in workhouses or large institutions, Edward Rudolf insisted they deserved small, loving homes. Rudolf was an entrepreneur and a norm entrepreneur — he designed an organisation to deliver on this vision, contributing to radically raised societal expectations of the support that disadvantaged children deserved.
What does it mean for The Children’s Society to honour this heritage in the digital era?
A year into our Digital Fund grant, a year on from the start of Covid, and with an eye on the year ahead — which will see The Children’s Society align its operating model behind a new strategy — a number of colleagues from across our Children and Young People’s (CYP) Directorate have been considering this question. What do we mean by digital-era services — and what are the implications for designing and delivering them?
It’s a question that has been the source of some anxiety in the context of Covid. Twelve months ago, all of The Children’s Society’s services for young people relied on face-to-face contact. The lockdowns have demanded many services shift entirely to providing remote support, including via messaging apps, video and voice calls — as well as smaller experiments we’re starting using online gaming as an engagement tool. While for some services and young people this has worked well, in many other cases digital poverty has proven a fundamental barrier, online services have raised accessibility issues, or remote working has inhibited essential relationship building. Understandably then, colleagues have worried that the desire to embrace ‘digital’ might lead us to lose sight of reality: at its core — and at its best — our work is relational.
To allay this anxiety, senior leaders have begun framing the challenge as creating a ‘blended service offer’. That is, blending our existing expertise and experience in face-to-face work with the culture, practices, processes and technologies that enable effective modern service. Embracing digital will enhance our face-to-face work — not replace it with technology. In one conversation, colleagues searched for analogies to describe this aspiration:
Maybe we want to be a bit like John Lewis… John Lewis can help you in person, over the phone and online — it’s all one seamless offer. They’re renowned for focusing on their customers — it’s always a personal service. They stand out for the quality of their service, rather than simply price, but they are competitive on price: they’re never knowingly undersold. They weren’t always ‘digital’, but their business model has adapted to the rise of digital — it’s core to who they are now. They’re not ignoring it like other high street stores who got left behind.
In another conversation, a practitioner highlighted it’s essential the organisation start with young people’s needs:
For face-to-face work we empower practitioners to decide where to meet young people. We know it’s important to be flexible so we can meet young people where they feel comfortable. If we want to work effectively in the digital world, we need to carry that flexibility into our digital working. We need to be able to meet young people where they’re comfortable — not require them to come to Microsoft Teams because that’s what suits us.
In a similar vein, it was observed that youth workers have used traditional games (ping pong, football, pool… etc) to engage young people for decades. Can we equip ourselves to engage young people who are active online in much the same way?
Lots of games are now played online (Minecraft, Fortnite, Fifa… etc). Ensuring we have the capabilities to engage young people through games isn’t about innovation or even about service improvement — it’s about maintaining proven ways of working that we’ve relied on for decades. It’s not about expanding our toolkit for engaging young people — it’s about stopping it from dramatically shrinking.
—
The conversation, and more importantly the work to realise our aspirations for digital-era services continues. But of course we know that precipitating a ‘major leap’ in what young people can expect from us will demand changes that go far beyond evolving our service offer.
Tom Loosemore, part of the much-lauded team that initiated the UK Government’s Digital Transformation, once observed that “before you can make a great thing you need to work in the right way. And before you work in the right way you need to create the conditions inside your organisation to be allowed to work in the right way. It’s the last bit that’s the hard bit”. The temptation simply to layer technology onto old approaches and cultures is real, when the alternative — changing the very foundations of an organisation — or “transitioning from one model to a fundamentally different model”, as the Digital Fund describes it — is genuinely scary. “Feel the fear, and then do the right thing anyway”, Tom urges.
Having committed to a new strategy that puts designing for young people’s needs and aspirations at its heart, we are on the right path. The work ahead, to “feel the fear” and then align our operating model behind this strategy, will benefit from our recently reaffirmed values of ‘bravery’ and ‘ambition’. Exactly 140 years after our founder first designed The Children’s Society to fundamentally challenge assumptions about the levels of care disadvantaged young people could expect, there is scope — with The Digital Fund’s support — to do the same again for the digital era. What better way to honour Edward Rudolf’s legacy?
