Digital Skills
Digital Skills
ON THIS PAGE you will find two digital skills case studies.
This scenario might be different to your organisation or context, but are based on our research with sexual and reproductive health practitioners and offer insight into what digital skills can look like in practice.
What’s the problem?
During a planning day for the board, steering group and executive of Sexual Health Organisation (SHO), the leadership team sets ‘increase online outreach and engagement with young people’ as an organisational goal.
During a SWOT analysis, the group uncovers a shared assumption that ‘youthful’ staff (ie those aged under 30) are inherently capable of leading and managing digital projects, regardless of their training and specific domain expertise. This has resulted in low engagement (and poor return on investment) from past digital campaigns.
The leadership group work through the Digital Capability Model to check this assumption, in particular, they ask:
- How is digital expertise and knowledge fostered and to what extent is it shared across the organisation?
- How are the roles and responsibility for maintaining/understanding/ initiating organisational digital identity and digital communication allocated and communicated within the organisation?
What’s the solution?
Leadership realise that adequate training and resources have not been allocated to build the capability of the current workforce.
Budget is allocated to allow existing health promotion staff to undertake suitable training and other professional development activities.
“Within my organisation this [digital capability-building] would be flipped back to me: ‘You’re the health promotion person and you know technology. You can go and do this’. Because they’re just incredibly time-poor and I am the young person, so I hold all the information”
(Health Promotion Professional, 18-29, DDCSRH)
What’s the problem?
During the 2020 COVID lockdowns, SHO launched an Instagram account in order to share sexual health content and build connections with young people. Over the past three months, Tai (a Health Promotion Officer) has noticed that engagement with SHO’s Instagram account has significantly declined.
Posts that used to gain 200 likes now rarely get more than 50 likes. He thinks that SHO’s Instagram account might be ‘shadow banned’ (ie Instagram has restricted the visibility of content without informing the account owner).
What’s the solution?
Tai researches other health services’ experiences of shadow banning and learns that he has been using words that Instagram flags as ‘pornographic’ or ‘promoting sexual services.’ These include the words sex, pleasure, vagina, and clitoris.
He joins an informal ‘digital community of practice’ group chat to share strategies with his peers. He learns that many sex education and health promotion services are limited by content moderation, and some have developed workarounds.
To circumvent Instagram’s automated content moderation practices, Tai attempts to convey information in a way that is not detectable by an algorithm. Instead of using ‘scientific’ (but restricted) language, he uses ‘vernacular’ communication that is familiar to platform audiences.
This includes euphemistic language and double entendres; deliberate mis-spellings (ie ‘seggs’); animated GIFs (or short looping videos), and memes (viral combinations of text and images that circulate on digital platforms). He also uses trending catchphrases (like ‘demure and mindful’).
Tai finds that engagement increases in the short term, but also flags the issue with SHO leadership as sector-wide concern.
‘I feel like the idea of continuity of care being attached to really comprehensive medical records and data collection, it’s not a fantasy, but I think it’s kind of held up as this sort of goal and ideal within healthcare that that maybe is just not all that common in terms of how people actually access primary care services. So, I think I definitely see a kind of tension between those sorts of strategies like going to different providers and using different services and that data collection is kind of scattered by all of those practices, I think, speaks to much broader problems about healthcare’
(Policy Manager)
Want to know more about digital skills?
🎥 Watch this video to learn more about why we use digital capabilities instead of digital literacies
⁉️ What kinds of tech skills and general platform knowledge do professionals use for SRH provision?
💻 Research and Evidence page for further reading
🔥 What works? Learning from success in digital sexual & reproductive health promotion
