Managing motivation is key to building digital resilience in young people
Chris Martin, CEO of The Mix, a multi-channel online support service for young people, reflects on how the pandemic has tested our understanding and approach to digital resilience
“Can we give our beneficiaries digital resilience like a gift or do they have to earn it?”
The nationwide experience of lockdown has been an extraordinary opportunity to test many of the questions we have about digital resilience. Our sudden loss of freedom did much to amplify both the real-world challenges we face and the role of the online world in supporting people at scale. This has been particularly true in the case of young people who were not only heavy and natural users of digital tools before the pandemic but also inversely affected - losing individual agency, the critical support of peer groups as well as access to traditional sources of learning and support such as schools and youth clubs.
My charity, The Mix, was at the front line of this unwanted but invaluable social experiment. We only work virtually - delivering advice, crisis support and information to millions of young people across the UK via social media, the internet and a multi-channel helpline. As real-world support services for young people closed, we continued and saw demand for our online services rise by as much as 200% on the back of anxiety fuelled spikes in activity driven by the start and end of each lockdown.
It is not surprising that external factors drove young people to seek help via our services – we saw an increase in young people contacting us about domestic abuse and financial problems for example. But additional demand was also driven by pressures based on internal factors such feelings of anxiety about the future, loneliness and pressures to improve themselves to keep up with social influencers during lockdown.
“Lockdown has been an extraordinary opportunity to test many of the questions we have about digital resilience.”
It should be noted that few of the conversations we had cited digital life specifically as a challenging factor. Online bullying was perceived in the same way as playground bullying while feeling of loneliness - while amplified by social media - were driven by physical isolation or “skin hunger”. However, I am realistic that the young people who use The Mix regard the digital support it offers as a positive actor in their lives and are less likely to hold a negative view of the online world – at least when they are talking to us.
Our approach already followed the four basic principles of building resilience captured in the UKCIS Digital Resilience framework.
Understand – through social campaigning, published research and information provision on everything from body image to budgeting we help young people understand and contextualise the challenges they face
Know – through information articles and expert signposting via our helpline we help young people understand how and where they can get support
Recover – through providing a choice of support channels from web chat counselling to a 24-crisis text service we allow young people to access our services driven by their need or preference.
Learn – through promotion of our brand and content as holistic and diverse, youth ambassadors sharing their stories and our peer community we encourage young people to return to our service as new issues arise.
Does this approach work?
We have reasonable evidence to suggest that this approach works. The two graphs below illustrate the activity of repeat users of our helpline. Graph 1 shows their propensity to access our service again for a different issues while Graph 2 shows the time period between contacting us extending. For me, this demonstrates that young people accessing The Mix have learned a reliable method of accessing support and their dependence on us reduces as overall resilience builds.
Graph 1 - Propensity to access the service again for a different issue
Graph 2 - The time period between repeat contacts
Assuming that The Mix has effectively applied the key principles of digital resilience, lockdown offered us a unique opportunity to test it with both old and new users to ask, simply, did it work at scale?
What have we learned
The picture is mixed. Comparing our outcomes surveys between 2019 to 2020 we see the following:
What I have found most interesting is the relatively large drop in young people committing to positive change as a result of engaging with our services. In a hopeless situation, it is harder be hopeful.
This motivational factor in building digital resilience is one we must all consider in our future work. We can make our services safe, trusted and constructive but we must also motivate people to take advantage of them if we want them to make an effective contribution to long-term wellbeing.
“Learning is the key to building long-term resilience ”
In the digital world where interactions are by necessity shorter and attention is earned, this is especially true. Learning is the key to building long-term resilience – when we structure new services we must always keep a focus on ensuring our beneficiaries are encouraged to recognise and understand what they take away if they are to act on the intervention and value the skills they have learned to do this more effectively in the future.
This post gives the view of the author(s) and does not represent the position of Digital Resilience Working Group, nor of UKCIS.
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