KIDS’ VOICE

A service helping kids to get their voice heard in social services

Overview

Client

Sijaishuoltopalvelut
Eloisa, South Savo wellbeing services county


Concept & Design

Adventure Club

Production

Adventure Club
Boutique

Traditionally social workers meet the kids in meetings where the limits of time and social situation might cap the ways the kids can express themselves.

One of the strategic goals of Eloisa is to develop ways for the child customers of social services to improve opportunities for active participation in the processes of finding on the most suitable support for them.

The active participation boosts the actualisation of  children’s rights e.g. the rights for care and protection against abuse and discrimination, the right to play, education, privacy and equal opportunities.

Taina Paananen

Eloisa — South Savo wellbeing services county

The Kids’ Voice solution is a scalable service useful for multiple areas, designed flexibly with extensive co-creation.



Its primary goal is to amplify the voices of children in foster care, ensuring their needs are clearly heard and addressed.

Children have a modern digital platform to tell about their lives, wants and hopes at their convenience, enhancing the collection of their insights and experiences.

The problem to solve

Traditionally social workers meet the kids in meetings where the limits of time and social situation might cap the ways the kids can express themselves.

How might we .. involve the foster kids (and other kid customers) with a somewhat fun and effortless activity that also provides the social workers with the data they need and is easy to use, robust, safe and easy to maintain.

Approach

We built the concept together with hands-on social service experts, validated the approach with foster kids, build it for reals and piloted it with foster kids and social workers. It worked!

With the potential of the first case, we applied the same tool to another target group and process, the evaluation of needed services    (palvelutarpeen arviointi) at Family Services, the pilot will be done spring 2023.

Social and Health Ministry’s strategy for 2035 has a strategy for 2035 that highlights using Data and Digitalisation to support the new ways to working with a customer-oriented mindset, so as part of the work we identified few possibilities, including using AI models for optimising the questions being asked.

3

Prototypes built

2

Concept sprints

10

Workshops

Approach

Kids’ Voice - tool is a gamified survey that covers key themes for the target audience in as simple & effortless and fun way as possible.

The survey tool improves the quality of the services, by getting more data directly from the kids. The data collected from surveys will inform research, product development and the overall management of social service processes.

In the future iterations, the tool could use AI models to help optimise the questions and support the development work.

Key benefits

KIDS

Kids can pick a suitable time & pace for answering questions.Thoroughly tested, easy to answer questions.Some things are easier to describe in private & outside social situation.

SOCIAL 
WORKERS

Better preparation for meetings
The survey results are painting a picture of the kids’ lives already in advance of the meeting .

More focused meetingsThe survey highlights the needs, the positives and potential alerts - the social workers can customise the meeting with the insights.

"For kids it is easy and simple 
because it is visually appealing”

Social service worker

AI models concept

Equality by digitalization

For a bigger picture, we identified opportunities for using data & potentially also AI/ML for providing more impactful services. To inspire thinking we identified potential approaches for  improving services, sharing knowledge on most impactful approaches in multi-variable environment and
managing services.

Survey with 5 themes of questions

The questions are divided into sections each covering array of questions.

Some of the questions are “tuning questions” - creating the mood and building trust and paving the way to the “red flag questions” that are highlighting a need for change. 



Some questions are for discovering the positive & the strengths in the kid.

Gamification in the heart of the survey experience

The survey experience is designed to be as delightful and inspiring for the target audience as possible. 



The user can unlock the themes, see progress and get feedback from completed sections.

“For once we have a solution that is very simple and easy to use.”

Social service worker

Snippets of education on childrens rights

Each section starts with with a snippet of children rights* to give the kids an idea what they should be able to have.

* Based on UN’s declaration of children’s rights

Easy and effortless

The questions are designed to be answered in minutes. They are mostly selections, with some questions triggering additional questions but having also open questions to able the kids to elaborate their experiences.

Impactful answers

We made the social workers’s experience as simple & easy too. They can send the surveys and review the answers.

"A much-needed method for gaining understanding of the child’s experiences."

Social service worker

"An excellent way to assess the child’s situation and get acquainted.”

Social service worker

KIDS’ VOICE

Scaling the service

With the promising results from foster care case, 
the same approach was applied to Family Services and the process designing the support for each case.

Foster 
Care

Family
 SERVICES

“ Even Schools would benefit from a survey like this."

Boy, 16 years old

Design Process

We run a typical concept process.  Starting with the UNESCOs children’s rights and walking through the themes with the expert social workers, we made multiple versions, tested the question to make sure they are easy to understand and useful for the social workers.


On top of the questions, we build a slightly gamified experience.

Privacy & anonymity in the heart

Another major consideration and design constraint we had, is keeping the kids’ data safe and private. Public sector has very strict policies on how data is handled and it is especially important when dealing with people in vulnerable situations.

When designing the survey, we needed to make sure we minimised the gathering of personally identifiable information (PII),  e.g. by not saving the phone numbers used for sending the survey.We included the anonymity to the design process too:  We conducted all interviews with the kids in using remote meetings with only audio connecting to the social workers’  email.

impact model

Input

  • Expert social 
workers’ knowledge
 & experience

Output

  • Service for sending surveys

Outcome

  • Kids have the opportunity to express themselves
  • Social workers get a better understanding of the kids wants & needs
  • Better meetings, better 
plans, more targeted support.

Impact

  • The quality of the service increases and the kids get the support they need, faster.
  • Enabling the kids from challenging homes to get an equal footing in life.

Results

Results so far are based on first pilot with social workers and foster kids. The Impact is evaluated by the usefulness of the answers to the social worker, the response rate of the kids = did they think it was worth their time.

100%

Usefullness of the answers for the social worker

100%

Response rate of the foster kids

3

New organisations interested in using the tool

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Kid’s Voice is  a survey tool helping kids to get their voice heard in social services