Six graphs that show how The Children’s Society embraced digital tools during Covid-19

By Michelle Davidge, Bill Griggs and Adam Groves

In previous blog posts covering The Children’s Society’s work during Covid, we highlighted that the pandemic prompted our organisation to embrace new ways of working. This has including colleagues increasingly using digital tools to collaborate with one another and with young people. Here are six graphs that help tell the story of their adoption so far…

Growing use of video calls to connect with children and young people

Before lockdown in March 2020, The Children’s Society’s case management system had no way of logging video calls between practitioners and young people — because video calls were not a routine part of our practice. This graph illustrates their role during lockdown, showing how use of video calls grew (alongside continued voice calls and face to face support) in three of the geographic areas where we work.

Our Essex hub of services particularly embraced use of MS Teams. Mark Munday (Area Manager East of England) explains they requested internal training on Teams at the start of lockdown, which proved invaluable to understand its versatility. Teams was favoured over other video call software because of its functionality including screenshare and the ability to blur out backgrounds (useful for practitioners and families joining from home). The software continues to be used for weekly timetabled sessions with young people, for targeted groupwork, and for family sessions and peer support work.

Whilst usage of video calls has declined since August with more face-to-face work being possible, it is now established as a part of practitioners’ communications toolkit in these three areas. Building on the learning from widespread use of digital tools across our services, The Children’s Society is looking to default to a ‘blended offer’ of digital and face-to-face support for young people. This means offering services which young people can access via whatever combination of integrated ‘channels’ (face-to-face, digital, phone… etc) works best for them.

The rise and fall of Skype… Long Live Teams

An unsurprising trend is the significant growth of conference calls to enable internal meetings at The Children’s Society. Bar August (when school holidays prompted a drop in activity), The Children’s Society is now averaging over 6,000 virtual meetings a month, compared to less than 1,000 in February.

In the early months of the pandemic, Skype was the most popular tool — it was was critical to enable colleagues to get themselves up and running virtually at the start of lockdown. However, the more sophisticated capability offered by Teams has seen it displace Skype as the tool of choice across the organisation. Teams was already being piloted at The Children’s Society and was available for people to download. This meant it could be rolled out quickly and effectively. Following the development of guidance and virtual training sessions, by June the majority of colleagues had made the switch from Skype to Teams.

Sharing by default

Alongside the adoption of Teams, the organisation has seen increased use of Sharepoint and OneDrive to enable file sharing and collaborative working on documents. There are now upwards of 400 specific documents shared across teams each month. More significantly perhaps, the use of ‘collaboration sites’ (within which all documents are shared by default with specified groups of colleagues) has more than doubled since February.

Our organisation-wide update is now more organisation-wide!

Our organisation-wide update has traditionally taken place at our National Office (in London) and been broadcast to other teams around the country. Since lockdown, the updates have been entirely virtual (via Teams), and attendance of the live update has more than doubled. This likely reflects colleagues’ increased familiarity with Teams, greater attention being paid to the experience of participating virtually, and colleagues’ desire to hear from leaders and peers regarding The Children’s Society’s response to Covid.

Where we share messages…

Usage of email and Yammer has remained more or less stable — and in Yammer’s case, limited. A brief uptick in Yammer reads during March suggested Covid might prompt its more widespread adoption across the organisation — but this was not borne out. Important department-wide and organisation-wide updates continue to be sent via email at The Children’s Society, whilst Yammer tends to be used for more informal sharing and chat. Consequently, Yammer has yet to gain momentum as a core communications tool for most colleagues.

This contrasts with the striking growth in Teams’ messages, with over 45,000 sent in the month of September- up from near zero in February. While email is still the communication channel of choice (reflecting its role in external communications), it is encouraging that the more collaborative capabilities of Teams are increasingly being used.

And one thing that has stayed (more or less) the same

One final thing it’s worth noting hasn’t changed significantly is the number of tickets posted to our IT service desk. A ticket is a request for IT support from a colleague who is experiencing difficulties. This suggests that colleagues and IT systems have adapted reasonably well to a home-based virtual working environment. It perhaps also reflects the ‘mixed bag’ of infrastructure that exists across The Children’s Society’s different offices around the country. It may be that the ‘baseline’ of support required by colleagues working in offices with older IT infrastructure was already significant, meaning homeworking — enabled by new Surface Pros and laptops with the Office 365 platform — has not led to additional demand even whilst requiring colleagues to adapt. It also indicates that providing a virtual, cloud based, work environment may be easier than a hybrid home/office based set-up.

There is a meme that has been doing the rounds, sketched beautifully by Business Illustrator above, that suggests Covid has led the digital transformation of companies. We’re not under the illusion that the changes described above amount to a transformation, but, with the support of the NLCF Digital Fund, we are determined to build on and learn from the shifts precipitated by Covid — to ensure young people get the best possible support from The Children’s Society’s services.