Childline uses tech to track impact of its online support
Nina Jacobs
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Childline Online Services aims to empower children and young people to use its range of internet-based resources in ways that will benefit them individually.
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Childline Online Services provides children with advice and support on social and emotional issues
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It uses digital tools to analyse how users engage with resources and gather comments from young people on gaps in support
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The site receives more than two million visits each year
ACTION
Since its launch in 2009, the charity Childline Online Services' website has attracted increasing numbers of visitors keen to access content and support on a variety of social and emotional issues affecting young people – it receives around two million visits per year and up to 600 pieces of user generated content a day.
In its submission to the CYP Now Awards 2022 – for which Childline Online Services won the advice and guidance category – the charity, which since 2006 has been run by the NSPCC, said the website's success lies in its ability to enable users to choose how and in what way they want to interact and receive support.
“It's important that we offer as much choice as we can to children and young people and let them establish their own help-seeking journey,” says Cormac Nolan, service head, Childline Online Services.
He says traffic to the site is “huge” and as such his team is aware of the responsibility it carries to those repeat visitors accessing their content.
“It's not two million unique children and young people coming to the site every year – we know that a number are repeat visitors, so we need to renew and refresh our content and that's where the feedback we gather becomes even more important,” he explains.
The process of evaluating the website is split in two main ways: using digital technology to analyse how it is used and direct feedback from service users as well as other professionals and organisations.
Using these different approaches is crucial for a resource which is not as “clear cut” as other conventional services where actual numbers of children and young people engaging is known, says Nolan.
“We can measure the number of views we have on a piece of content but that only tells us the number of times the page has been viewed,” he explains. “We also have the technology to tell us how the visitor has focused their time on the page, where they have clicked the most and that gives us an insight into user behaviour around particular pieces of content.”
The second strand of evaluation involves gathering feedback directly from children and young people once they have engaged with the content.
There are various points across the website, including in each piece of content, where children and young people are asked to give suggestions for improving web pages.
Message boards are routinely used to collect feedback with a dedicated section entitled ‘Your site, your say’ that invites users to add comments.
“Children and young people are quite active in telling us what they think around potential gaps or improvements but also complimenting us on how a piece of content has resonated with them and how they have found it useful,” says Nolan.
While the site is clearly intended for a “child-facing audience”, feedback is also received from professionals such as teachers and support workers, parents and grandparents.
Feedback is also received from external organisations representing children and young people that might be experiencing specific issues.
“Sometimes very small charities will come to us and say you don't have any content on this topic,” says Nolan.
“Where it's appropriate we will then create content often in collaboration with subject experts to ensure we have the best-informed content we can provide.”
IMPACT
Collecting “hard data” on the impact of the website remains difficult despite its ongoing evident success, Nolan admits.
He says the most obvious ways in which the team measures the impact of its work is to identify a particular need, develop content around it and then test its effectiveness.
Page views can offer an indication of areas that are visited more frequently: content on LGBTQ+ issues last year gained nearly 5,000 views in the first month of going live, indicating a clear need for information on the topic.
Nolan says the team continuously looks at trends in society and those reported back through its service centres and school services.
“This means we can identify how needs vary in different regions across the country. But we also benefit from focus groups which we hold with young people around particular pieces of content,” he adds.
