INSIDE CAMDEN
Championing the community of Camden
Inside Camden began as a research project to understand the needs of the community of Camden, which took a pivot to accommodate the lockdown and urgency to connect with the community.It translated into a scalable service pattern modelled around social media engagement methods to include different members of the community.
In collaboration with Camden Council
OVERVIEW OF PROJECT
ROLES PLAYED
This was a team of two, we nearly always divided work equally:
Research and Data gathering
Synthesizing client feedback
Ideation and co-creation
User Testing
Prototyping and Refinement
Engagement and scaling strategy
Creating service patterns
Script writing
Video editing
CHALLEGES AND INSIGHTS
We resorted to social media due to lack of access to the vulnerable community during the lockdown, and truthfully, a shift in priorities for youth groups who had to focus on other ways of providing support for vulnerable youth.
Through trial and error, we realised that:
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Vulnerable youth were part of a larger community
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The community started reaching out and doing a lot for their neighbourhood during the pandemic
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While there is no shortage of goodwill and good intention in the community, what is missing is an accessible, approachable central resource to direct people to the services they need.
THE APPROACH
What arose as a research prototype to understand the kind of support youth services needed during these difficult times, turned into a showcasing platform for all types of active community members who were doing a lot to support each other and make positive change. The positive output from this rototype and the community engagement that had arisen as a result, became an opportunity
The question becomes:
How do we use social media to mobilize participation and active engagement in the community?
1. Feature and Connect
We continued with our online support and conversations with the community.
Camden is close knit. There is value in engaging different stakeholders in this community and we used interconnected supported networks to our advantage to help the Council identify future change makers.
2. Empower
What if the Council wanted to create more engagement with other stakeholders in the same way when we are out of the picture?
We created cards which act as templates to help break down the social media journey.
Then they suggest an engagement journey that can be used based on the goals. We also prototyped this and refined our questions based on the feedback
3. Sustainability and Accessibility
We created a website with all the information mentioned. This acts as a documentation of our process and is a tangible delivery of our efforts so that it can be replicated and scaled to meet the Council’s needs.
This includes:
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Recommendations on how the engagement can be adapted to different stakeholders
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Strategies which can be leveraged in a way that benefits our users and client
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Self sustaining social innovation tool to empower the user and be scaled.
SERVICE MODEL
IMPACT
We channeled our prototypes to create an onboarding + research tool via social media.
The outcome :
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We engaged more people and laid the groundwork for more collaboration in the community
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We created a scalable, accessible model to share our engagement journey for the
Council to use in the future -
As the client wanted to use a specific platform (MS Teams), we’ve also recommended ways to leverage the collaboration between them and the changemakers in the community.
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This engagement and participation by community members could be used as an opportunity to co-create more and to understand needs better