Cyber safety design for Ecclesiastical

Fresh thinking

Cyber safety education for children tends to involve scare-mongering by older age groups and stock information provision.

Our ambition was to engage children and wider stakeholders in constructive and productive new ways and to create something far more empowering for the target 8-12-year-olds.

Collaborative approach

A key principle of our approach was to work directly with the children themselves as well as teachers and parents; to understand context, to empathise, to prioritise issues, to collaboratively devise, test and iterate potential solutions to maximise relevance and take-up.

Innovation work utilised the Design Council double-diamond model (divergent-convergent principles), which included empathy mapping, 'how might we' exercises and collaborative ideas generation. Collaboration activities were undertaken on school sites.

See Pancentric's Innovation Guide.

Programme ideas were story-boarded on the strength of the insights from the sessions. These concepts were played back to stakeholders and insights from this fed into final creative development. 

Bold design outcome

The final 'CyberReady' solution gave kids and teachers a fun & flexible classroom toolkit to address issues as diverse as cyber-bullying and screen-time overload. Instead of second-guessing issues or pre-defining outcomes, the toolkit allowed participants to focus on the cyber areas that most concerned or excited them on the day of the class and to collaboratively workshop possible solutions together. No right or wrong - just a set of tools to help socialise the issues and ways forward.

All 'Cyber Ready' branding and proposition development was created by Pancentric. Shown below are early graphic concepts for the gamification-style identity.

The final engagement pack came complete with interactive exercises, canvases for class exercises, fun cut-outs to help kids creatively explore different cyber scenarios and coping mechanisms. For more details of the kit, visit a dedicated page on Ecclesiastical's website.

“We put customer-centricity at the heart of the design process. The programme outcome was a breath of fresh air and is set to make a real difference to how kids deal with the good, the bad and the ugly of the web. Well done Pancentric for an exceptionally good approach and programme outcome.”

Nicholas Hartley, Head of Business Improvement & Innovation, EIG

Award-winning

The Cyber Ready initiative won a CIR Risk Management Award (Public Safety category), celebrated for helping the 8-12 age group deal with cyberbullying and wider cyber risk.