Behind Our Screens meets Connected by Data

We came to Connected by Data with a clear idea of what problems our community faced. We’d turned up to countless spaces about young people’s experiences online to find we were the only young people in the room, and the narratives being set about our experiences just weren’t in line with the lived reality of growing up online.

We had a theory of change, bring together the experiences of young people growing up online to have a source of insight that decision makers, parents and educators can’t ignore, and build our relationship from there.

We had the ideas. We didn’t quite know how to carry them out. We only had visibility of bigger well established campaigns and we weren’t quite sure how to get there

Connecting by Data

Connected by Data connected us with a cohort of 4 other community campaigns. Connected by Data facilitated a safe environment to test and learn, to not get everything right, to start trying out ideas and see what happened. This was key for a grass roots group like ours. It gave us the confidence to move from ideas to action.

We built out our website, our messaging, our branding, our governance.

Another key role Connected by Data played was in connecting us to more well established campaigners. What we learnt from them was different. They built out our network of connections so much, and a lot of what they gave us was a change in mindset. To take each part of our campaign step by step, to use our theory of change to guide us rather than feeling like we needed to figure out the fine details of how we’d get there in advance.

Connecting with community through data

We now have our website and brand out there. It shows our supporters and community the potential of data to create change. Our key focus now is on empowering young people who have grown up online to engage with our campaign. We have the infrastructure in place to facilitate that, and the connections in place to execute our plans and evaluate and adapt as we go.

We’re so grateful for Connected by Data and Luminate for creating space for grassroots communities like ours to learn and grow. One key learning point from this experience is the need for funders and grantmakers to invest in communities that may not have had access to funding previously, and may not have traditional governance structures. It’s allowed us to grow our campaign around the needs of our community and the people we are trying to influence. And with that growth we’ve been able to experiment and adapt as we go.

A lot of our work at the moment is on reaching a diverse range of young people and sustaining a safe space for them to have ownership of our campaign over time. If anyone can help us with this we’ve love to hear from you https://linktr.ee/behind.our.screens

Connected by Data’s work with Behind Our Screens was part of the Catalysing Community Campaigns project.