Since April 2020 charities across the UK have been rushing to migrate their face-to-face services online. They've applied their safeguarding knowledge to a new context with enthusiasm and commitment. But best practice guidance has been dispersed and sometimes hard to find. Until now.
Launched today, DigiSafe is a step-by-step digital safeguarding guide. It's written for charities designing new digital services or taking existing ones online.
“A guide that helps charities continue to deliver safe and effective services while breaking new ground in both content and style.” - Charné Tromp, DigiSafe Lead at CAST.
DigiSafe’s backbone is a risk assessment process. Charities can use this before, during and after taking their services online. It advocates an iterative approach to risk management. This means using your risk register as a dashboard to guide how you design your service.
If you’re moving your services online, DigiSafe will help you:
- learn the principles of digital safeguarding
- think about how to apply them in specific service scenarios e.g. video, online groups etc
If you’ve already taken your services online, DigiSafe will help you track risks and review your progress.
Recognising risk and spotting abuse when delivering online can be different. So DigiSafe explains how to identify both offline and online abuse when delivering this way.
It also takes a design-first approach. It helps charities to build safeguarding and risk assessment into each stage of their digital journey. It works for charities taking services online for the first time who may be working out how to write a digital safeguarding policy. And it works for those who are already risk assessing, designing and delivering services online.
DigiSafe is written in GitBook, an online publishing platform. Easier to navigate than a PDF, it also enables users to feed back on their experience. Because it is easy to update it avoids the pitfalls of PDFs that become out of date.
DigiSafe is a Catalyst resource. This means it was written and designed by a network of organisations working to the Catalyst charter. In this case the people involved were:
"Our grantees have asked for DigiSafe. So we're really pleased to have funded it. We'd encourage all charities to use it to make their online services safe and effective." - Philip Howard, Head of Grants at The Clothworkers’ Foundation.
DigiSafe is ready to use at www.digisafe.thecatalyst.org.uk
