Aiimi Giving – It’s On launch event

Yesterday was the official launch of the It’s On website.  The launch event was a celebration of a 12 month working partnership between Aiimi, Southwark Council and four Southwark schools – Walworth Academy, St Saviour’s & St Olave’s, St Michaels and Sacred Heart.

We are confident that It’s On will be the start of an amazing journey into the world of local government, cross sector partnership working, data and youth participation.  We’ve got huge plans for taking forward the excitement and energy that the project has harnessed but at this juncture we wanted to share our story and think about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

What is It’s On?

The It’s On project is corporate social responsibility re-imagined!

Aiimi are a local Southwark business and we have a long standing relationship with Southwark Council. Gone are the days where local businesses were simply expected to clear up community allotments or paint school walls. We wanted to do something different; something that really counted.

Our expertise is technology and we think we know a thing or two about the educational importance of the subject. Together with the Council we devised an innovative programme of activities to work with 12 young people and help them develop the IT skills and awareness that will benefit them not only in school – but in their adult lives as well.

Over the course of the 2011-12 academic year, we ran monthly after school sessions to design and roll out the project. The core sessions involved pupils developing an online survey to rate local activities for young people. The reports on the It’s On site analyses how young people in Southwark participate in local activities and we are pretty sure that our survey was one of the largest electronic surveys for young people in Southwark’s history (nearly 800 respondents)! And the unique thing about it?  It was designed, developed and rolled out by the pupils themselves!

Where did the idea come from?

Like all true optimists, we got so excited by our early conversations with the Council that we said “yes” before we knew all the details!  Of course, once we started, we quickly had to decide what we would actually do.  Luckily the Council came to us with a real world problem.  Like all public sector organisations they collect an enormous amount of data but find it difficult to see the wood for trees.  One area in particular was a concern – youth participation in local activities.  We were alerted to the fact that an existing council website listed youth activities in the borough.  The website had been developed in conjunction with young people and was ‘magazine’ style – and in theory allowed users to rate the listed activities.  However, users did not have to register their personal information so we quickly realised that there were unrealised opportunities to gain a richer source of intelligence from the same underlying dataset (the activity listings).  With this in mind we planned to collect additional demographic data to allow for a richer analysis and segmentation.

How did you involve the pupils?

Although the issues around youth participation were important, our main priority was to create a realistic and enjoyable project experience for the pupils.  We wanted the monthly sessions to cover the entire lifespan of a typical technology project – but with a few differences!  Our highlights were:

• Project interviews – each student was asked to complete an application form to apply for one of the three project roles – designer, developer or project manager and each student. Students were interviewed and also had the opportunity to meet with Aiimi consultants and discuss CV tips with recruitment specialists from Aiimi’s sister company – ReThink Recruitment.
• Dragon’s Den/ business case – each created a presentation to pitch their business ideas about It’s On in order to secure investment from a panel of potential ‘investors’ (in this case, Graeme Gordon – the Director of Corporate Strategy at Southwark Council, Catherine May- the deputy headteacher of St Saviour’s & St Olave’s school, and Steve Salvin –Aiimi’s Managing Director.  Each school group brought to the pitch creative and logical selling points with astonishing and ingenious animations, videos and graphs.
• Webform/ online survey development – one of main objectives was to give the students first-hand experience of coding so we worked with them to develop an online survey using an HTML web form.
• The launch event – on the night we handed over the reins to the pupils and they presented to the audience and demonstrated the It’s on site.

So, what have you learnt?

• The young people continually surprised us with their critical thinking and ingenuity.  We started with a fear that the complexity of the project would be too much but ended with the worry that we weren’t challenging them enough?  We simultaneously smiled and hung our heads in shame when one of the pupils handed over a list of errors he had spotted in our own development work!
• We thought we understood that technology should be at the heart of all academic subjects but this truth really hit home during the project.  As one of the pupils said on the launch night “I never thought much about IT but now I realise how important it is for everything I do at school”.  Perhaps the most important realisation for the schools was that technology need not be taught solely in the classroom.
• Local data is not necessarily difficult to get hold of and it doesn’t take much to transform it into real and actionable insights.  It’s On took a basic data set and added a simple demographic layer.  The stories and insights immediately jumped out and the main question we had was why hadn’t this been done before?
• It’s On has provided an opportunity for a different model of local partnership.  Furthermore, at a time when the role of local government is continually being questioned, the It’s On project has demonstrated the important role that Councils can play in facilitating these new collaborations.
• We think we have proven that local business really can get involved with local communities and share their expertise and resources.  We didn’t start this project with the intention of ‘selling’ our services or winning work further down the line.  We didn’t even do it because we thought it would be ‘the right thing to do’.  We did it because we thought it would be fun – and it was!

What’s next?

We can’t be specific right now but we can say that Aiimi, Southwark Council and some of our high profile business partners are committed to building on the ideas and energy within the It’s On project.  It’s On was an amazing achievement in its own right but we know that the real excitement and benefit lies in the world of mobile and social technology…

Watch this space…!

You can visit the It’s On website here… https://itson.aiimi.com/southwark/

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