Tag Archives: Elefriends

Engagement, co-design and community moderation on the Elefriends community at Mind

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elefriendsI’ve just finished 9 months working on the mental health peer support community Elefriends. The role was a maternity cover post and focused on community engagement as well as moderation training and support.

So what did I get up to?

Six co-design workshops with community membelefriends co designers

I organised and co-facilitated six co-design workshops with community members and local Minds. All the workshops had an online consultation component.

  • Two workshops to co-create community content and ‘themes’ functionality for Sport England funded project Get Set To Go.
  • co designTwo workshops to co-create community content and functionality for Big Lottery funded peer support project Side by Side
  • Two workshops to co-design a mobile app for the community. The Apple version is in the app store now.

I worked with agencies PAN and Yoomee to create and test content and functionality initially developed in the co-design workshops.

This included three animations to encourage community members to get more active. You can see the first one here.
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Online consultation with Mind’s Elefriends community

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I first came across the Elefriends community after attending their online peer support training.Screen Shot 2013-10-29 at 15.21.24 I was interested in online peer support for adults and wanted to find out more about the impact of providing community members with peer support training. How does this affect their experience? I wrote about this training here.

Online community consultation

I really enjoyed working with both the community and the digital team at Mind so I was really pleased to be asked to do some consultancy work for them. At the time, Elefriends was moving from a Facebook page to a new platform. The team were looking to consult with the community both on and offline. This was to ensure that as many community members as possible got a say in the changes.

I attended the offline consultation days and then based on my discussions with community members I:

– Designed a three day online consultation to gather community members’ views on how the site should be managed
– Used interactive tools to keep the group engaged, and provided support to participants throughout the exercise

Recommendations, moderation guide and evaluation

I summarised the findings, to produce recommendations and draft guide for community managers

I also helped the team design an evaluation survey for their funders, which looked at how community members used the site to better manage their mental health.

At times, the consultation touched on sensitive issues, including the expression of thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Clare’s understanding of mental health, empathy and respectful approach has been a real asset to this project and I look forward to working with her again.

Eve Critchley – Senior Digital Officer at Mind

Social media, mental health and mindfulness

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Exploring the potential damage that social media can cause; promoting unrealistic representations of daily life and encouraging us all to make unhealthy comparisons with our internal experience.

It was only a few years ago that the idea that Facebook and other social networking sites could diminish happiness or affect wellbeing was still a relatively new one. Now there seems to be an article or news story claiming something similar every other week.

Is social networking good for your mental health?

Screen Shot 2013-10-07 at 21.26.55

How big is your discrepancy?

Mind recently published a blog from one of their Elefriends community members – ‘Is social networking good for your mental health’. It inspired an interesting debate on twitter which they collected together on Storify. As expected, there were tweets from people who found social media a lifeline, the only contact with the outside world, a supportive community of people who understood. Fabio Zuchelli writes a great post about the how Twitter can help when you’re depressed.

On the negative side of the debate were others who found trolls and haters bullied or upset them. And finally, most interesting for me, were the people who found social media difficult because of the comparisons it (almost) forces them to make. Continue reading →

The Elephant in the online community – mental health peer support for adults

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Online peer support for mental health at Mind

Yesterday I attended a session run by Mind on online peer support – helping users of the ele‘Elephant (in the room)’ community on Facebook develop their skills in supporting each other. I was interested in attending as I had been chatting to Eve, one of the trainers (and ‘Elephant handlers’) on Twitter. The work they are doing has lots of links to similar work I am doing – and developing – at YouthNet on TheSite.org.

I was also interested from a more personal angle. I was hoping to find out more about the peer support services for mental health which are offered, not just to young people, but to everyone. I’ve certainly found that in writing about my own experiences with mental health, others have come forward to share their experiences and discuss the issues with me. I’m impressed by the strategic objective of Mind to give everyone access to peer support, on or offline, by 2016. The session itself only highlighted the value of peer support, with everyone sharing their stories and offering new perspectives and ideas to each other throughout the training day. It was also interesting that there was a strong sense in the room that, while young people tend to be well served, there is not enough emotional support online for mental health for adults. Continue reading →