Following last month’s blog discussing TKM’s presentation at the Bath Digital Festival (read here), this piece focusses on the “Survival of the Fittest Roundtable”; an evening at the festival for discussion and networking with forward-thinking companies who share a belief that together we can help shape a positive digital future.
The event comprised of six roundtables, each with participants coming from a wide range of backgrounds including software development, marketing, healthcare and local government. Each roundtable had a different theme:
- Ways of Working
- AI and Robotics
- Digital Disruption
- Dynamic process change
- Customer Centricity
- Digital for Good
Anil and Neil were hosting the Digital for Good roundtable. Each table was presented with a small leaflet providing information on homelessness in Bath, and then given thirty minutes to think about how digital could be used to help combat and reduce homelessness. The challenge was complex and thought-provoking, in equal measure, and brought out Anil and Neil’s competitive side, with their roundtable coming up with the winning idea, despite an array of strong ideas being offered up by from each table.
The Winning Idea
The winning idea took a multi-pronged approach. The first of which was to look at where homelessness actually starts; homeless people of the future are the children of today and 75% of homeless people actually have somewhere they could call home. It is critical, therefore, to provide a solution to educating children on mental health and other related problems and provide them with a path to getting the help they need. Embracing how and where children embrace on-line content was critical to success, and engaging more effectively with vloggers, possibly the biggest influence on children’s behaviour and their on-line footprint, was an agreed focal point.
Secondly, to increase awareness of where people can go when on the verge of homelessness was our next priority. The solution was to create a postcode-based app set up by local authorities which would provide information on how to access local support. Online vloggers and other key influencers could help raise awareness of these apps. The aspiration would be to build a database offering local support in in every corner of the country.
Perhaps the main takeaway from the roundtable was that we are often so focussed on using digital to develop businesses, that we forget that digital is an exceptionally powerful mechanism to improve the welfare of society and do good.