Blog
CDI Network Annual Meeting
Posted by admin on January 23rd, 2012
Luisa Gockel reviews her last trip to Brazil, for the CDI Network Annual Meeting.
The 13th CDI Network Annual meeting took place in November 2011 at Itaipava, Rio de Janeiro. Sixty leaders from various CDI regional and international offices discussed pressing issues such as electronic waste, the role of mobile technology in our programmes, social media, cloud computing and changes to our methodology. For the first time in 13 years, the agenda was 100% built by their participants using Facebook. Tim Berners-Lee bless the social media!
Two task forces were created; one to look at e-waste and the other one at the revision of CDI’s methodology. The network unanimously decided that we need a unified plan led by the headquarters to tackle the e-waste issue. CDI Brasilia is leading the advocacy efforts to pressure the Brazilian government for more regulation on who should be responsible for discarding electronic waste such as computers and mobile handsets.
CDI Campinas is leading the efforts to publish an updated version of our renowned 5-step methodology. The idea is to bring ICT training and community action to the 21st century trough the use of social media, blogs, mobile, tablets and video. The work is very advanced and CDI Campinas’ presentation was one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting.
All leaders left Itaipava with the commitment to improve the information flow between all CDI offices and to make a better use of the different expertises present at CDI network. Because we are stronger together!
CDI was recently selected as one of the Top 100 Best NGOs in the world by The Global Journal, once again showing the strength of the CDI as leading NGO.
CDI Europe at WISE 2011
Posted by admin on December 6th, 2011
In November Interim CEO and Head of Partnering Debbie Forster attended the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). WISE is an international initiative and platform for a multitude of established and new educational actors to collaborate proactively all year round. Here is her round up:
Going to Doha, Qatar was an exciting change for the start of November and I think I’m still working through all the things I saw, learned and people I met. CDI Europe was invited to give a presentation at the World Innovation Summit for Innovation. It was a great opportunity not just to share with others what we were doing on Apps for Good, but a chance to listen, learn and work with education innovators around the world.
With over 1200 people in attendance, every session, workshop and even the coach rides to and from the conference venue gave me an opportunity to talk about what was happening in education, what problems different countries were facing and the exciting innovations which were taking place to address those problems around the world. This year’s theme was “Changing Societies, Changing Education” and each day had a different focus. The first day looked at how innovation and change happen in different sectors, the second focused on innovation in the education sector and the final day explored a vision for the future.
It was both comforting and daunting to realise how universal the problems were, how much everyone agreed that most education was not preparing young people for the challenges for tomorrow and how hard it was to change direction for education systems. More inspiring was seeing the many programmes and initiatives which were springing up around the world to address this. Apps for Good fits in that overall drive and it was great to see how much interest there was in the our programme outside the UK. This opens some exciting opportunities for us in future.
It was also interesting to see how many programmes around the world are starting to focus on teaching young people about problem-solving, innovation and entrepreneurship. Everyone seemingly agrees that this is what is needed to address the increasingly complex set of problems facing us; there is growing concern that current education systems are rarely developing this in our young people. The key challenge discussed by all centred around how to scale these programmes, how to learn from each other and to leverage this to get the maximum impact from these innovations.
The discussions of innovation and scaling going on throughout the conference made the conference worthwhile in its own right. But what it really resonated was the fact that this was Doha, in the Middle East, after the Arab Spring. This flavoured every discussion, challenged assumptions and offered both hope and threw down a gauntlet to all at the conference. The status quo is no longer unchallengeable–talk of an “education spring” echoed throughout the week to varying optimism, caution and cynicism, caution and cynicism mostly from the middle-aged attendees (like me!?). More interesting was the input of the younger attendees. One young woman, a newly qualified doctor in Doha, offered the challenging observation that these innovative programmes did not empower people so much as accepting and helping the young people see how much power they already possess. We hear that echoed from the young people who have completed the Apps for Good course. Many admit they come to the course lured by the exciting technology but what makes the real difference is the realisation that they can find, define, and create solutions themselves…and “the real world” listens to them and takes that seriously. It is a powerful concept for young people, and one we want to continue to build on in Apps for Good.
To find out more about Apps for Good visit our website.
From NEETs to schools: a shift in channels
Posted by irislapinski on April 18th, 2011
Disclaimer: Please take this post with a pinch of salt. I’m German and like focusing on the things that are not working perfectly and can be improved. We are now very much on track to train 1,000 students in 30 locations/ schools by the end of this year. This makes us one of the fastest growing charities in the UK and probably in Europe, so we are very excited and optimistic about where we are heading! : – )
It’s been a while since my last blog post about LWF in January, but apart from us running courses , Dragons Den and pitch events (see our Apps for Good blog), we have had to navigate a significant change in channel strategy.
So let’s give you some context…
Local Marketing challenges
When you start a new project or venture you always encounter unexpected problems. Over the past year a surprising number of things have gone right for Apps for Good (massive expert support, public attention, interesting app ideas like Stop&Search, huge growth in public market awareness and use of apps, etc.), but there was one key thing we kept struggling with: local marketing and the number of young people applying to our open courses at High Trees.
(Once we got them to apply and come to the course, our educators worked their magic and few dropped out, but just getting people onto the course was a huge issue)
So during January and February 2011 we put things to the test and ran 2 “taster workshops” at community locations in Central London and Brighton in order to see whether our challenge was South London specific or whether there was a deeper cause.
The turn-out of both workshops (5 and 1 young people attending) made it really clear that this was not specific to one local organisation or area, but far more systemic: getting young people who have dropped out of education and are not in employment or training onto a new technology course (or event taster workshop) is hard and tedious work.
System challenges
On top of that, we had to learn that the overall system of employment advice and support is also not working in our favour:
(1) Local Job Centres refused to refer young unemployed people to our courses as we were not a preferred and pre-paid supplier; they were also worried about the potential issue of benefit fraud if unemployed people earned an income through apps; they wanted to see more employment advice as part of the core course time rather than the plug-in; and the list of concerns went on and on…
(2) We were not able to incentivise intermediaries or other social organisations to refer young people to us on an ongoing basis, since we could not provide sustainable value in return: Apps for Good is a free course, so we cannot pay financial commissions. And even if the course is very successful, intermediaries referring do not see any direct benefits from young people succeeding, e.g. better results, more indirect impact which translates into more funding. Collaboration is therefore always driven by personal enthusiasm rather than tangible benefits for referral organisations. And in a time of severe funding cuts, this is a hard sell to make.
The way forward
The result of all this learning, we are now primarily focusing our expansion for 2011 on the area where we are seeing most demand and where there is the biggest potential for scale: schools.
At Central Foundation Girls Schools more than 40 girls applied for 20 places on the September 2010 Apps for Good course, so far the only time that we have been strongly over-subscribed. And as we are in conversations with dozens of schools to run the course as an after-school activity (and in a selected few cases we will be testing it as part of the curriculum) we are taking Apps for Good to where the demand is.
Sounds too opportunistic?
I don’t think so. Our aim is to bring leading-edge problem-solving and technology skills to as many young people as we can. We had to realise that, for the moment at least, we just don’t have the marketing muscle or budget to compete with commercial brands and get mindshare of young people outside existing high-volume marketing channels like schools.
We haven’t completely given up on NEETs and continue conversations with different youth organisations and networks. But we now think that getting young people excited about Apps for Good when they are 13-17 years old and haven’t yet dropped out of school is not a bad place to be either in terms of long-term impact.
As our public visibility, branding and the number of app success stories grow, we will actively look at the community space again – probably from 2012 onwards.
I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts and comments about this issue, and if you have ideas we can use to address this channel problem then please let me know.