Social Media Helpline

Lessons from Piloting a Social Media Helpline

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Major grant from the Digital Trust Foundation

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 28, 2015
Media Contacts: Anne Collier 801.663.6629, anne@netfamilynews.org
Sarah Elliott 650.477.6585, sarah@sqcomms.com

GRANT FROM DIGITAL TRUST FOUNDATION TO LAUNCH
SOCIAL MEDIA HELPLINE FOR CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS

iCanHelpline.org, a joint-project of nonprofits #iCANHELP and Net Family News, is set to launch August 17

SAN JOSE, CA—Net Family News Inc. and #iCANHELP today announced that their California pilot iCanHelpline.org, a toll-free and email helpline for schools, is being awarded a grant of $175,000 by the Digital Trust Foundation. It was one of nine grants “to emerging and established leaders in the field” awarded this month for “research, education and support focused on understanding, preventing and responding to digital abuse,” the Foundation announced. Also this month, iCanHelpline successfully completed its crowd-funding campaign at Indigogo.com.

The helpline will launch August 17, to help school and district personnel with social media-related problems such as cyberbullying, sexting and reputation issues. It will be available from 9 am to 4 pm on school days throughout the 2015-’16 school year.

“Think of it as 411 plus 911 for social media help for the school community,” said Anne Collier, the helpline’s founder and president of Net Family News. “We aim to provide the social media part – expertise, perspective and help with getting content taken down that violates services’ rules – of schools’ response to incidents of anti-social behavior in digital media.”

“This adds on-call intervention to all the prevention education available to schools from the Internet safety field,” said Matt Soeth, co-creator of iCanHelpline and co-founder of #iCANHELP.

Beginning on August 17, the helpline will be available toll-free at (855) 997-0409 or via email at help[at]icanhelpline.org.

About us: Net Family News is a San Jose, Calif.-based national nonprofit organization founded in 1999 to educate the public and advise the Internet industry about research and developments in technology related to youth. #iCANHELP is a Bay Area-based national nonprofit organization that creates and promotes positive, school-based solutions & interventions to online harassment and bullying. To learn more, visit iCanHelpline.org.

To support this free service to schools, click here.

indigogologo

Indiegogo media campaign to help launch helpline pilot

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For Immediate Release May 28, 2015

Media Contacts: Anne Collier 801.663.6629, anne@netfamilynews.org; Sarah Elliott 650.477.6585, sarah@sqcomms.com

#iCANHELP AND NET FAMILY NEWS INC. TEAM UP TO PILOT A SOCIAL MEDIA HELPLINE FOR SCHOOLS DURING 2015-’16 SCHOOL YEAR

iCanHelpline’s California Pilot Debuts Its Crowdsourcing Campaign on Indiegogo.com

SAN JOSE, CA–With 92% of middle and high school students online daily, 24% of them “almost constantly,”* it’s time schools had some help with social media. The helpline pilot will be the first step in the development of a national call center aimed at helping schools resolve problems in social media faced by students, staff and other members of school communities. When a cyberbullying, sexting or reputation-related incident occurs, schools or districts will be able to reach helpline staff by phone, email or through a form in the Helpline Web site, iCanHelpline.org.

“The helpline will be the hub of a whole help ecosystem,” said Matt Soeth, co-founder of #iCANHELP, “with real-time, research-based advice, help in reporting and escalating abuse in social media services, a directory of school policy and investigation resources and a growing, searchable database of school social media case studies.”

“This kind of service is unprecedented in the US,” said Anne Collier, president of Net Family News, and we’re bringing it to schools because school is the one institution that reaches virtually all young people, including those at risk, and because school life is the context of young people’s social experiences, online as well as offline. Getting schools help with that helps students and parents as well.”

Features of the pilot program include:

  • A call center–plus: Schools can call during school hours for real-time help and the Web site – which will include links to sources of specialized help and a directory of resources for prevention, incident response and policymaking – is 24/7/365. To be added as cases come in will be an ever-growing searchable database of anonymized school case studies making the Helpline a source of metrics & trends in school online safety issues.
  • Working with social media: Building on our organizations’ longstanding relationships with numerous social media companies, including Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter and Ask.fm, we’ll help schools navigate sites and apps, report abuse and get content taken down that violates Terms of Service, providing the industry with much-needed local context as a trusted intermediary.
  • Part of a global network: We’ll also work in close cooperation with Internet helplines around the world and, with a growing collective knowledge base, help users resolve problems in global social media.
  • Unique among helplines in approaching students as part of the solution and building on established student leadership education and peer-mentoring practices.
  • Deep Internet safety experience: Builds on more than 15 years in the Internet safety space, working with practitioners and researchers and advising Internet companies.

Funding for the pilot is being raised through Indiegogo.com. “Contributions big or small are huge to the helpline,” said Anne Collier of Net Family News. “This is about growing the digital literacy and citizenship of all members of school communities, and we believe these are such important issues in the public’s consciousness that people will want to contribute.”

The Helpline’s developers – #iCANHELP and Net Family News Inc. – invite you to contribute to a fundraising campaign at Indiegogo.com: http://igg.me/at/icanhelpline. The goal of the campaign is $25,000 to cover “construction costs” for piloting in California next school year – Web site construction, communications tools and staff training.

About us: Net Family News is a San Jose, Calif.-based national nonprofit organization founded in 1999 to educate the public and advise the Internet industry about research and developments in technology related to youth. #iCANHELP is a Bay Area-based national nonprofit organization that creates and promotes positive, school-based solutions & interventions to online harassment and bullying.

Please make a donation to the iCanHelpline campaign at http://igg.me/at/icanhelpline

*Pew Research Center’s 2015 “Teens, Social Media & Technology” study

indigogologo

Youth-serving Internet helplines worldwide

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INSAFE Helplines reportAmericans may be interested to know that there are Internet-related helplines in 31 European countries, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. Europe’s helplines are run by Safer Internet Centres (in 27 of the EU member states, plus Iceland, Norway, Russia and Serbia), which make up the Brussels-based INSAFE network established by the European Commission early in this decade. ICanHelpline.org is modeled after the UK’s Professionals Online Safety Helpline because POSH’s work is, for the most part, designed to serve Britain’s schools and law enforcement.

Last year, European Schoolnet, the Brussels-based network of European ministries of education that coordinates the work of INSAFE, published the first report on Europe’s Internet helplines, “INSAFE Helplines: Operations, effectiveness and emerging issues for internet safety helplines.” The study was done by Europe’s well-known research network EU Kids Online, based at the London School of Economics.

The report found that there are four main kinds of Internet helplines in Europe: general helplines that were established well before Internet use took off and provide help and care on a wide variety of issues including mental healthcare, later adding support for online problems; Internet safety helplines set up within countries’ Safety Internet Centres where staff do “Internet safety awareness-raising” work as well as provide help; Internet safety-only helplines that focus solely on online issues and work with the Centres but are usually operated by separate organizations; and Internet helplines for specific constituencies such as the UK’s POSH and the Netherlands’s helpline focused purely on online child sexual exploitation (the role played in this country by NCMEC, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which which iCanHelpline.org is a registered online service provider for when schools are dealing with sexting cases.

The report’s authors found that, just as here in the United States, cyberbullying remains the most common reason for contacting a helpline (INSAFE publishes helpline data quarterly, the latest report here).