I work as a housing counsellor in a third sector organisation that provides housing and financial counselling and other service for young adults between the age of 18 and 29. Currently I’m in a two-year project where we collaborate with two other non-profit organizations and our aim is to create a model for collaborative service where housing counselling and young adults’ coaching is combined. We work together in small teams of one housing counsellor and one coach. The aim of the project is also to create new ways to work with the young adults’ when it comes to their close and meaningful relationships.
Of social media we have mainly used Instagram and Facebook. Instagram is only for a weekly posting and to make ads of our service. The target group is also other professionals who work with young adults. In Facebook we have more specific groups where we target the young adults with our ads. We have also used Jodel to find different channels, where we have followed discussions to find out about current phenomenon among young adults. We would have wanted to arrange a sponsored discussion in Jodel, but it turned out to be too expensive. Fourth social media platform we have used is Discord. We have visited a popular SekasinChat Discord page to answer their young visitors’ questions about loneliness, living alone and how to manage own finance. We have discussed that Discord could be used more, but in a short two-year project it is not efficient to use too much time for developing something new there. That is why we have only entered pages that already exists, in roles of professional visitors.
ChatGPT has also been used in my team. We have used it to help us formulate our new service, to formulate texts in ads and to make pictures. It has been useful, although the pictures have never been used, but they have given us inspiration of what kind of pictures we can search from Canva to our ads. I think that ChatGPT can be used also when it is time to evaluate the results of our project, and to get help to possibly recognize new phenomenon from the results.
Dall-E
Dall-E is an artificial intelligence-based tool for creating pictures. This is a tool that we should have used instead of ChatGPT. It creates more realistic pictures. I’m pretty sure that the images could be used as in our tools that we create for working with young adults. I am not sure if they would work in ads, as many people already avoid posts that have been created with AI. Also, I don’t know how Instagram’s or Facebook’s algorithms supports AI-pictures, so the visibility in social media could be less than with self-photographed pictures. Photographing though takes a lot of effort, especially when none of my team really enjoys it and it is not appropriate to take pictures of our clients.
Doodle
Doodle could be a great channel for scheduling meetings where we meet both clients, their close ones and other professionals who work with them. It doesn’t require any common communication channels between all the participants and one professional, or the client could be the coordinator who send the link to doodle for everyone. That could also increase the client’s involvement in their own life. The risk is, that one or more of the participants don’t know how to use doodle.
I could personally use LinkedIn to connect with other professionals on the field and to make new contacts that could be helpful also later in my career. I don’t think it would have any use directly with clients in the social field.
Miro
We could use Miro when working as a team remotely, when we create new ideas and develop them into action. I can also imagine a remote meeting with a client and use it to make a mind map together, but it seems to be aimed at professionals and teamwork. I tried it a little bit and it may also be a little bit complicated to use if all the participants are not willing to learn to use a new platform.
Monday
This was a totally new platform for me. I signed up and tried it myself but tried all the features as if my team would have been with me. It would be easy to create tasks that can be assigned to other team members. The platform would also work in remote meetings where the tasks could be divided equally, and the team members would have an opportunity to influence what tasks each member wants to have. The platform seemed simple, and I liked that there were a lot of variations for lay outs in different features, so it is really possible to make it look “my own”.
This is a platform that could also be useful with clients in my work. It could be used a coaching platform for housing counselling for young adults, where the coach and the client could make the tasks together and the client can mark the tasks as done. It would of course require that both coach and the client know to not enter any personal data to tasks. Because Monday is also available as a free mobile application, it is more likely that the clients could possibly use it.
In my opinion the key elements of successful use of digital applications are accessibility and safety and especially when it comes to social media, there has to be a easy way to connect with other or to create text, pictures, mind maps or other creations together.
Self evaluation
I am very excited to find the Monday application and I will start to use it in my work and introduce it to my team. As we are developing our housing counselling and coaching into a digital service as well, I think Monday could be good platform to test how it would work. This part of the course was fun and very useful, as I found also other platforms, I want to take a closer look at and try them later. I learned a lot by actually trying the new platforms, which i think was essential to get the proper experiencce to evaluate if the platform is useful or not.