Blog
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.
Learning without Frontiers & BETT
Posted by irislapinski on January 31st, 2011
2011 has been off to a furious start here for us at CDI Europe: in the first week we were lucky enough to be involved both at Learning without Frontiers as well as BETT.
At LWF we had the honour of speaking right after Karen Cator, Director, Office of Educational Technology, US Department of Education. Pretty nervous, but well-prepared, I climbed the stage which I shared with two of our students, Amarah (13) and Ahmed (23). They did amazingly well in front of an audience of nearly 1,000 people to share our current thinking on what we are about and what we are trying to achieve. I won’t write it all up here, but if you want to know what we are all about just watch the video:
Once I had given my speech I could relax and really listen to the great speakers Graham had lined up. Speakers as well as delegates at LWF seemed to fall into two groups:
- People who are using technology to improve, but equally sustain traditional learning models
- People who are using technology to re-invent learning and challenge traditional learning roles.
While there are justifications for both approaches, I obviously got more excited about the latter. But then, at Apps for Good, we are currently not restricted by the ICT curriculum.
There were many things that resonated with me: Keri Facer speaking about the importance of embedding technology practice in communities and Lord David Puttnam speaking about the need to increase productivity in learning rather than class hours. This is currently one of the things we are investigating as part of our work to continually refine and improve the Apps for Good course. Towards the end, Jimmy Wales spoke about scale as a key challenge for learning initiatives and again this felt very familiar as we are now gearing up to scale significantly over the next few months.
It was inspiring to see how many teachers are passionate about technology and education. I was only annoyed that I had not mentioned our plans to opensource our full content via an online platform during the course of this year to allow anyone anywhere to run their own Do-it-yourself Apps for Good course. If I had, I wouldn’t have had to explain this 20 times afterwards….
But now I know that people from Australia, to the US and UK would find it useful – and that’s a huge motivation for me.
Nominet Trust grants funding to launch Apps for Good open source platform in 2011
Posted by katiefyfe on December 22nd, 2010
Good news! We are thrilled to announce that after the success of our first year, and lots of hard work, CDI Europe has been awarded £150,000 from the Nominet Trust to build an online open-source education platform that will allow organisations anywhere in the world to run their own Do-it-Yourself Apps for Good courses. Our vision is to create a platform that is used by hundreds of partners and thousands of young people over the next few years, and we are very grateful to the Nominet Trust for their support.
So what is the Nominet Trust? The Nominet Trust is a UK charity that provides support to organisations who are contributing to an accessible, safe and diverse Internet used to improve lives and communities. It is passionate about supporting imaginative uses of web technology that help to solve social problems.
Dell remains our key strategic partner for Apps for Good, and have granted us a Dell YouthConnect award of £300,000 to continue our Apps for Good programme in 2011. Dell has been a strong supporter of CDI and Apps for Good from the start (Michael Dell even tweeted about us recently!) so we are very happy to be continuing our partnership with them.
