The Children's Society and NSPCC both said last week they plan to revamp digital services for young people, while vInspired said it is engaging more young volunteers after changing its online form.

The Children’s Society wants to provide digital services 24 hours a day for young people after switching its focus from young children to those aged between 10 and 18, its head of digital has said.

In the last few months the charity has changed its focus on older children. Karina Brisby, director of digital at the Children’s Society, said that because “digital is a way to reach more young people with our services” the charity “decided to up our game”.

She was speaking at the CharityComms Digital transformation conference last week.  

The charity’s ambition is to “become an organisation that is always on,” she said “so that if someone needs support from us at 3am the digital service is on and able to respond.”

Brisby said: “Digital is for everyone – it has to relevant to everyone so that staff don’t see it as an additional burden.”

The Children’s Society has been running six-week, informal lunchtime sessions for staff to improve skills across all departments.

NSPCC plans to launch a new ChildLine website

NSPCC is in the process of building a new website for its ChildLine service, which it hopes to launch in October as most of its users come from mobile devices.

Helena Raven, head of digital at NSPCC, said: “The current site, which was built on Sharepoint, doesn’t work on mobile devices.”

She said that she was able to argue against the thinking that ‘Well kids are using it – do we really need to change it?’ by presenting trustees with analytics which showed that “almost every single child is coming from a mobile device”.

Raven said having “really strong analytics” was important to proving the need for change.

vInspired increases volunteers after changing its sign-up form

Youth volunteering charity vInspired has increased the number of people signing up after listening to concerns from young people.

Damien Austin-Walker, head of digital at vInspired, said: “It transpired that young people were very suspicious about giving out any kind of personal data.

“We changed our sign-up form to explain why we need each piece of information.”

Conversion rates increased to 48 per cent which will mean an extra 4,300 applications per year.