Dr Kath Edgar explains how government-funded project Plings is helping to standardise the collection of impact data on youth activities.

At Youth Dynamix, a young people’s charity in Hull, teenagers will be taking the reins when it comes to IT. “Most things we do are young-person-led”, explains Tina Robinson, area youth and community development worker at the charity. “We want young people to own our sessions. So, to promote what we do, we’re going to ask young people to help input data about our activities on to the central database, using the laptops. We’ll be encouraging them to take responsibility for collecting and managing information. As a consequence we hope they’ll see just how many activities there are out there – loads of things for them to do.”

This collecting and managing of data is part of a major new government-supported programme called Plings, which is helping to standardise activity information for young people. Agreeing what information is essential when promoting youth activities has never been done before, despite the fact that since 2006 every local authority has had a legal and civic duty to make activity data ‘comprehensive, accurate and accessible’ to teenagers.

Martin Brabazon works for the Content Management Service at Hull City Council. It’s his team’s job to collate all the data provided by charities such as Youth Dynamix right across the city and make it available to young people and residents, through call centre staff and a range of promotional routes.

“It was all pretty confusing in the past”, Brabazon says. “Charities providing sessions and events for young people would publicise them through different websites and newsletters, leaflets, word of mouth and notice boards. We recognised that maintaining a number of websites was unsustainable and a nightmare for parents trying to find out what was on.”