The Children’s Services team at Aberdeenshire County Council has recently been honoured alongside the procurement elite for their use of PMNet’s engagement platform in engaging and involving young people in a whole range of decision making and service delivery.

This year’s GoAward winners included some of the country’s leading procurement innovators

Grahame Steed, managing editor of GO and chair of the judging panel, said “The finalists were behind some ground-breaking initiatives and were keen to benchmark themselves against the best in the country”

Sam McNeil, who led the project for My Voice at Aberdeenshire Council, says of the platform.

"The project has been a positive experience and very much a collective effort. With the support of developers at People Matters Network we have been able to integrate the ideas and designs from service users and practitioners to ensure we have a system that is both flexible and adaptable to meet the evolving requirements of Children’s Services in Aberdeenshire. This has resulted in a positive user experience for gathering the views of children and young people receiving a service"

There are a number of features of the Together engagement platform and overall solution that can be considered innovative and groundbreaking.

Young people co-designed the product to have customisable profile pages, animation and age-appropriate graphics. The use of emoticons is particularly unique.

The questions asked in the My Voice part of the system have also been streamlined to cut out some of the repetition that children and young people had said they found tiresome in previous systems.

Typical of the comments made by social workers includes “the system is really easy to use and allows the child involved independence, and ‘a voice’ to express their views"

The resulting product is considered by users to be both enticing and fun.

Second, the system, as well as retaining individual records (written and provided by the young person themselves) can track and monitor changes occurring in the behaviour and views across all young people, providing early alerts and the evidence needed to measure the effectiveness or otherwise of policy changes.

A further important feature of the system is the flexible and adaptability of what has been produced. Together Aberdeenshire is ideally suitable for use in many future continuous improvement initiatives.

For further information on the Together solution and a tour of the full engagement platform, contact Jonathan at PMNet.

For further information on the Together solution and a tour of the full engagement platform, contact Jonathan on 07432 637322 or email: jonathan.bostock@peoplemattersnetwork.com.

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