Reconstructed Living Lab » Marlon

Why Social Services should go Mobile

Marlon — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:24:59 +0000

It has been one month since we’ve re-launched our Angel support service a partnership between Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) and MXit. Since then the service had over a 100,000 subscribers with just over 47,000 regular subscribers. Organisations who are working with youth should consider the use of Mobile phones as part of their programmes and below you will find reasons why:

- Most of the users of the service is youth (82% aged 25 and younger)
- Our LIVE mobile counselling service on average receives 200 queries per hour with approximately 92% being identified as youth.
- Most youth request further support, but prefer having it via the Mobile medium. Even when we recommend centres to attend or websites to visit they want a solution that they can access via their mobile phone.
- We’ve developed Mobile virtual support sessions with experts or professional counsellors and achieve 100% referral rate compared to 26% when referral is telephonic and/or face-to-face.
- Most youth are expert mobile phone users and would be able to transfer relevant information in required formats (text, audio, video, images)
- Youth tend to promote mobile services faster and easier to their friends/buddies/contacts via their mobile phones.
- The average number of contacts/buddies/friends youth will actively chat to daily is 19 (based on mobile interviews with LIVE conversations). Most youth would have more than 50 contacts/buddies/friends in their Mobile Instant Messenger (MXit).

As we are continuously trying to improve our Social services through the use of mobile phones, it is advisable for organisations working in this space to start considering the more active use of mobile phones.

Latest Social Media in numbers

Marlon — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:52:08 +0000

AS we continue seeing the rise and growth of Social Media accross various industries, it is clear that we are seeing large volumes joining the bandwagon. Below we share some of the statistics proving that Social Media is still breaking ground. How long this will last will depend on how its being used by businesses, non-profit organisations, governments, communities and youth at large.

Facebook:
- It is estimated that Facebook has reached over 500million users.
- People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook and the average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events
- More than 500,000 active applications are currently on the Facebook Platform
- Approximately 250 million users log into Facebook daily
- More than 100 million active users currently accessing the site via mobile technology.

Twitter:
- Twitter indicated that it has more than 190 million users tweeting with more than 65 million tweets a day. (South Africa has 55,000 active twitter users as indicated in a recent study.)
- The use of an open API ensures that 75% of Twitter traffic is generated from outside of twitter.com
- Approximately 65% of the world’s top 100 companies have a twitter account
- Twitter’s search engine gets more than 600 million queries a day. Monthly, this is proportionately more than Bing and Yahoo.
- There are more than 70,000 applications currently using Twitters API

MXit (South African based Mobile Social Network):
- More than 20 million users in South Africa growing at 4000 new users per day.
- Estimated 25 million users log into MXit daily
- Approximately 350 million messages are share via MXit per day.

The above is just an indication of how Social Media is still growing and being adopted by users hungry for sharing and engaging via the web and increasingly more so via mobile.

Reconstructed Living Lab: supporting drug users and families through co-operative counselling using mobile phone technology

Marlon — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 18:28:31 +0000

Latest research by RLabs and the JamiiX Mobile Drug Counselling support system provided the following evaluation:

- In practical terms, the advisors have the capacity to help more people (n = 27) in a two-hour session than advisors at helplines (n = 4).20 The DAS system aggregates the conversations for the advisors, allowing them to respond to the requests more easily and faster.
- The DAS system enables multiple advisors to assist during a given session.
- When an advisor does not have the necessary experience or skills to deal with a case, it can easily be transferred to someone with the necessary skills.
- The advisor receiving the reassigned conversation can view previous conversations with the client, so questions need not be duplicated.
- The advisor can refer a person in need to any other organisation, and maintain a help directory of available services.
- The service proved to be particularly useful for families of drug users, and they were offered family sessions and help if required

The full research paper was publsihed in the South African Family Practice journal.

RLabs Vision and Mission Statements

Marlon — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:56:11 +0000

Last week the RLabs team went on a day retreat to plan for the future as well as looking at the Vision and Mission of this vibrant and growing movement. Below is the Vision and Mission of the Reconstructed Living Lab that captures the heart of what we stand for:

Vision:
To impact, empower and reconstruct local and global communities through innovation

Mission:
- To create an interaction space for collaborative design, creation, dissemination and application of knowledge
- To develop and empower champions in communities through innovation
- To give hope and make a difference
- To be leaders in innovation continuously adding value

RLabs joins Youth Research Partners

Marlon — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:12:03 +0000

This week was another exciting week for the RLabs family as we officially joined the Youth Research Partners Network. Youth Research Partners are a global partnership of youth research and marketing specialists in Africa, The Americas, Europe and Asia. We collaborate to share insights, best practices and better serve clients. We are really honoured to be part of this dynamic and excited partnership and looking forward sharing more about this collaboration that will change the future of youth marketing. For more information about Youth Research Partners at an upcoming Young Ideas Salon webinar and read the official RLabs announcement here.

RLabs features in The Star Newspaper

Marlon — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 10:40:58 +0000

Celebrating the partnership between RLabs and MXit during the Drug Awareness Week, The Star newspaper featured the Angel project that was initiated by RLabs. This service is FREE to all MXit users and provides them the opportunity to access information and LIVE counselling in the area of substance abuse. Read more about the LIVE Counselling Service on Technology for Community Empowerment.

Virtual Rehab on MXit

Marlon — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:32:06 +0000

The collaboration platform Reconstructed Living Lab (RLabs) has created a live counselling portal, JamiiX, on mobile social network MXit called ‘Angel’. According to RLabs, the portal is for South African youth in need of substance abuse counselling, and is being released in conjunction with Drug Awareness Week (21 to 27 June). Currently Angel have over 40,000 subscribers with more than 1,000 of those subscribers accessing the LIVE Counselling services via their mobile phones. More about this collaboration can be read in the IT Web (22 June 2010) article.

Mobile Phones for Social Change reaches 130,000

Marlon — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:27:36 +0000

With the celebration of drug awareness week in conjunction with MXit, RLabs increased its counsellor capacity and had a massive growth in the Angel user numbers. Angel is an information portal providing support to users in the areas of substance abuse, abuse, depression, stress and coping. Today the Angel information service passed the 40,000 subscriber barrier and in conjunction with RED HIV/AIDS information service (60,000+ users) by Cell Life and our various Mobile Counselling services (30,000+ subscribers accross services) RLabs with its partners have reached over 130,000 users via mobile phones for Social Change. This is only the beginning as many more services will be deployed over the next few weeks (via MXit and JamiiX) to bring about social change in Communities in Tension.

Source: Technology for Community Empowerment

Angel on MXit supports over 23,000

Marlon — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:15:05 +0000

Another exciting project that RLabs have been involved in has been the Angel on MXit project where we offer people support and advice in the areas of substance abuse, abuse, depression, debt counselling,stress and coping via their mobile phones. This partnership with MXit Lifestyle will allow us to scale our services and also provide much needed access to all MXit users. The Angel project allows MXit users to “find their Angel” where they can get help for the social issue they are dealing with.

Over the next few weeks we will increase the capacity of our mobile counselling support centre and grow it to support thousands of MXit users across South Africa. Since starting our new campaign yesterday we’ve already attracted more than 23,000 users to the service.

Mobile Journalism with youth

Marlon — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:24:37 +0000

The collaboration between RLabs and Cape Community Newspapers to bring Mobile Journalism to the community have been going well with the last few weeks having a focus on technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and blogging to share stories via their mobile phones. The learners from 3 high schools in Cape Town have been taught some basic journalism skills the first few months ranging from writing, editing, ethics to photography. The next few weeks we will focus on how the learners can use their mobile phones to share stories in real time using available technologies such as Social Networking tools.

Source: Technology for Community Empowerment