Getting Digital - The First #TeamDigital Meeting

On Saturday 28th July, I set out to London for the inaugral meeting of #TeamDigital - a panel of about 15 young women from Girlguiding with an enthusiasm for all things digital. The team is just one of the many ways that members and non-members can get involved in the development of Girlguiding's digital strategy. If you'd like to get involved too you can find out more on the microsite and blog at digital.girlguiding.org.uk.

The day started out with the inevitable mix of ice breakers then, having discovered we had a pilot, several cat owners and a number of people with bizarre connections to famous comedians, we could start work proper. We took a whistlestop tour of the digital strategy for Girlguiding so far with its three pillars of Involve, Enable and Champion, and were so eager to contribute we were coming up with ideas and suggestions even before the questions had been asked.


Next we were handed over to the team from YooMee to take on the website personas in an ultracompact version of the workshops they've been running up and down the country. Advice is available here is you want to run one of these workshops with your own group too! The five different personas we considered each had a different level of engagement with Girlguiding from the no-nothing to the passionately involved young woman. I think it is perhaps testament to the complex nature of how members aged 16-24 are engaged with Girlguiding that we found our comments of what was needed from the website didn't fit neatly into the categories of 'girl member' or 'adult leader' - what more could you expect from an age group that is technically invovled as both?


At the end of this session we had to pick out the suggestions we wanted to highlight and I choose to explain my reasoning and thoughts around providing an acitvities database that isn't locked away within a members area. My personal feeling is that at its core Girlguiding is an organisation that exists to provide activities that empower girls and young women. As such the aim of the website should be to provide those opportunities, not to have the sole purpose of converting interest into another record on our database - the website should be the start of the journey in the movement, the place where the first acitivities are discovered and completed. So to achieve this I advocated a database of activities, which could be added to, commented upon, rated and tagged into categories by visitors to the website. It should have a section of related activities (in the style of Amazon's 'customers also purchased' feature) that could be personalised to be age specific and linked to awards and badges if the user was logged in. That way we could also facilitate members moving easily between the activities of one section and another e.g. Brownies to Guides, rather than the compartmentalised section websites that exist at the moment.

From there it was time for lunch and onwards to the 'Inspirational Speaker' slot. Kajal Odedra from Change.org spoke to us about her job, how she got there and her motivations. It was interesting to note the higher percentage of women winning petitions on Change.org than men (even though men start more petitions) and I'd be really interested to see further research as to how platforms like this can help women and minority genders to become more successful advocates and campaigners. It was disheartening a little to hear about the route into the sector being via internships and london-centric, but I am optimistic for the role of digital tech in taking campaigning to the regions and beyond.

Then it was time to tackle social media. We brain stormed and quickly polled the networks that we used amongst us with familiar big names coming out on top. Discussion started on how Girlguiding could better use the various platforms and I was struck by the different interpretations of this statement. Some (myself included) took 'Girlguiding' in the question to mean the office staff who manage the national accounts, whereas others included how unit leaders and girls themselves could use the platforms. I guess pragmatically it was the social media manager who would read our flipcharts, but then programme resources and articles in Guiding magazine could begin to reflect our digital age and give volunteers these case studies of how they can facilitate their involvement in Guiding with social media technologies.

For the last session of the day we gave some digital inputs into an exciting forthcoming new THING in Girlguiding. It's top secret for now so I can't say more but it's going to be AMAZING!

We rounded off the day with a summary of what we want the group to do going forward and concluded to use a Doodle poll to set the date of our meeting in the Autumn - oh how digital of us...

I'm excited at the shape and scope of the project going forward and much of what I thought about during the day will feed into the redevelopment of the Girlguiding Anglia regional website that I am currently working on - particularly taking an agile approach to make sure what we end up with is just right! If you want to get involved in the Girlguiding digital strategy, head over to http://digital.girlguiding.org.uk and sign up to become a digital champion!