"How do you get young people to engage with political debate, and more specifically the concept of the Big Society?" this was the conundrum vInspired, the National Young Volunteers’ Service, brought to us at the beginning of 2011.

vInspired engages with in excess of 115,000 young people up and down the country through their volunteering platform, vinspired.com, but they wanted to foster wide debate on this topical issue in safe and controlled environment.

vInspired knew we had a social discussion platform waiting in the wings to be customised to their requirements, but first we needed to come up with a strategy. We were aware we’d be competing with Facebook and a whole host of other distractions for young people’s time, so the solution had to grab their attention, and then hold it. So, great usability and ongoing user engagement through game mechanics were deemed key to the site’s success.

Moderation was also a big unknown at the outset. No national youth organisation had previously sought to initiate such a wide-ranging conversation online with this age group, and naturally there were associated risks to consider. Rather than employing a team of moderators to sit and scan the conversation as it developed, we decided the website should take the strain.

This demanded considerable upfront investment in developing a sophisticated moderation tool to integrate with our existing platform which would monitor language, inappropriate and potentially offensive, content. Our extremely comprehensive solution took a light touch approach with users, by flagging and challenging anything deemed offensive as it was posted. But behind the scenes moderators receive immediate alerts identifying rogue content and providing them with a wide range of remedial actions. A moderation dashboard provides a range of statistics pulled from across the site. 

Once vInspired had conceived the idea for Big Society’s Big Mouth, the race was on to get the site up and running to capitalise on the discussion whilst the Big Society was at its most topical. Our Agile way of working really came into its own, allowing us to take baby steps forward with constant input from vInspired to ensure the project evolved in line with their thinking. Structured user testing with young people from the target age range was built into the project plan, allowing us to receive and respond to feedback immediately. According to Henry Mackintosh, vInspired’s Digital Manager “This was probably the quickest turnaround on any project that I have ever worked on”.

Over the past 8 months Big Society’s Big Mouth has been visited by young people from 97 countries across the globe. It’s sparked 215 different lines of discussion and prompted numerous responses and lines of debate. The innovative and risky approach adopted by vInspired brought praise from young people and politicians alike. We’re glad to have played our part in making it happen.

Related links
Blog post about project results