Can you introduce yourself and let us know your job title and what your role involves on a day to day basis?
Nice to meet you. I'm Ewan Main, Online Support Manager for the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. My job is basically to oversee all the interactions with carers (that is, people who have to look after someone at home with an illness, disability or addiction) that take place on our websites at www.carers.org (for adults) and http://www.youngcarers.net (for young people aged 18 and under). On both websites carers can get in touch with each other and with our team using our discussion boards and chatrooms, as well as contacting us privately for support by email. The young carers' site is entirely moderated: the chatroom is only open when a member of staff is in there, and discussion board messages need to be pre-approved by us. So, we have a team of four of us who make sure the service is staffed every day of the year – me, my jobshare colleague, and two Online Support Workers.
I do that as a half-time jobshare. The rest of the week I mainly do freelance design and photography work, originally mostly for print but increasingly web and video too. I also work regularly with the local authority Young People's Services here in York, ranging from helping out as a spare youth worker to working with young people to design publicity, helping the service to develop its social networking presence, and working with them on film and photography projects. I'm also a trustee (and currently vice-chair) of York Carers Centre.
So, as you can imagine, BecauseItsGood appeals to me for a number of reasons all at once! But finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that I spend two or three evenings a week as a tour guide for The Ghost Trail of York, dressing as a Victorian undertaker and telling supernatural stories to tourists. But don't worry; I don't believe a word of it, and I wouldn't watch Most Haunted if you paid me to.
Can we have a bit of background about how you got where you are?
I first got into the social/welfare/do-gooding line of things while I was at university 12 years ago. I volunteered for the student-run Samaritans-style listening and information service, and eventually became the coordinator of it. From there I spent four years working in a young people's information, advice and counselling service, a part of the City of York Council. At the same time as that I did various other bits of part-time youth work and was supported to do a part-time M. A. in Community and Youth Work at Durham University.
Eventually my eye was caught by an advert offering the chance to do “Youth Work in Cyberspace” (funny how dated that phrase sounds now, only 6 years later!) and I began working part-time for The Princess Royal Trust for Carers on www.youngcarers.net . At the same time I spent a while as a Student Finance Adviser at Leeds Met university, which I enjoyed but eventually realised that the commute was the single worst aspect of my week, so I moved to mainly working for the Trust. Last year I was promoted to Online Support Manager and took on joint responsibility for supporting adult carers as well as the young'uns.
The design work has been a bit more by chance. Like anyone else who's not terrified of using a computer, I always used to be the one who was called on to do anything computerised when I was working in the young people's advice service. “Ewan, can you sort this out for me? Ewan, why does it say 'It looks like you are writing a letter; do you want help with that?'” and so on. This progressed to my being the one who laid out the annual reports and other documents. Then I stopped working there (they gave me a computer mouse as a leaving present. I'm serious. A normal, wired mouse) but they still carried on hiring me to do design work; it spread from there and I'm now in the surprising position where I design nearly everything that a department of the City of York Council puts out, on a freelance basis, and have several other clients too. I finally started a part-time course in graphic design, but the offers of work have never (yet) really slowed down so sadly I still haven't found the time to finish it.
What’s the single biggest business challenge facing charities and NGOs?
With each year that goes by, the need to demonstrate our effectiveness seems to increase. I don't for a moment think this is a new phenomenon – you can trace it back through Best Value, the Citizen's Charter, Thatcherite internal markets, and on and on – and in principle it's hard not to agree with. But the ways in which our effectiveness is challenged, questioned or potentially bettered keep evolving. If the contract to deliver a support service to carers in a local area is opened out to competitive tender, who's to say a particular charity is inherently the best-placed organisation to deliver it? And what unique offering is an online support service for carers providing, given that people can find all the answers they need at direct.gov.uk or adviceguide.org.uk , and offer each other mutual support via Facebook? We can never take our usefulness for granted; we may do something that's innovative, unique or valuable one year, only to find that the rest of the world has caught up by the next.
What is the hardest part about being a digital champion in a non-profit organisation?
The fact that our organisation's digital presence needs to fulfil a mixture of two functions. On the one hand, our websites (and forays into Twitter etc) are traditional PR tools: corporate outlets describing what a company does, the issues it cares about and its carefully selected key messages. On the other hand, though, our online work is actual interaction with people who need our help and support. I sometimes think of it as being simultaneously a youth/community centre and an advertisement for that centre's corporate parents. Who is our key audience: vulnerable people themselves? Charitable trusts interested in funding work to support those vulnerable people? Journalists Writers People from the Daily Mail interested in writing about those vulnerable people, their immigration status and whether they're in receipt of benefits? And how do you decide whether a user can swear on our discussion boards? Whether a young person can describe their self-harm in detail? Whether a forum member can rail against the same government minister that your colleague's working with?
Last time I counted, our organisation had about 70 employees, and only about 8 of us have anything to do with the online support we provide – so issues like these are inevitably ones that I approach from a different angle from that of most of my colleagues. It's rarely caused major problems, but we're constantly aware that it's a fine balancing act.
How has digital affected the evolution of charity activities?
Hard for me to say, as my first induction into charity work was when I was hired to deliver an internet-based service. I get the impression, though, that charity activities haven't changed that much: on the fundraising side it's still about forming relationships with people who might see the value of our efforts; on the PR side it's still about raising the public's awareness about an issue, about what's being done to address that issue and about what more could be done; and on the delivery side it's still about engaging with individuals, groups and organisations to provide support or effect change. I think all of these are basically human skills and needs. Even though the means of achieving some of them have changed and continue to change, I don't think it's the means and mechanisms that will be remembered.
What is the biggest digital trend that is affecting your organisation?
Social networking, in its various forms and guises, is having a big effect on what we're doing. It's the issue I mentioned before: when we were set up in 2004 the very notion of a place to meet other young carers in a friendly and supportive online atmosphere was pretty unique to our users. Certainly, many of them were using MSN or Habbo Hotel, but it hadn't yet rocketed to representing the majority of their online experiences the way it has now. So, the fact that they can get in touch with each other (and with us) is potentially much less of a draw. Pretty much every decision we make – whether about an aspect of design or a change in our approach to safety – now has an undercurrent of “but if we do this, would they keep coming here rather than going elsewhere?”
Interestingly, though, I don't think that pressure has been entirely negative. For one thing, it's sharpened our ideas and forced us to keep developing; and for another it's pushed us into a niche that we didn't particularly seek: many of our users have said they specifically like our service because we don't allow them to make unsupervised contact with each other, and we don't allow them to swap contact details. We've become something of a safety/privacy haven for them, and that's only happened because the trends have changed around us.
What’s the next big thing in digital? And how will it affect you?
There's an ongoing move away from the notion of websites as “places to go”. Massive use of RSS/atom, along with APIs for everything from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter, mean that people increasingly have a constant and integrated “feed” that can follow them across sites, computers and mobile devices. It’s less and less true that to access a particular set of content, a user needs to look at a specific website using a specific category of device. So, I think we’re at the beginning of what will become a much bigger shift away from the idea of a website or service as a destination in itself. To keep up, organisations like ours will need to think more about providing content (ranging from tweet-style updates to full rich media) that people can subscribe to or follow, receiving it as part of their own feeds, using interfaces we have no control over. The challenge then is to produce stuff that’s of high enough quality to rise up above the noise.
Who should we interview for the Becauseitsgood blog next?
I’d be interested to hear from YouthNet , the people behind the fantastic TheSite.org.
Check out Ewan's profile
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