Kids Help Phone broadens efforts to reach kids with successful website

While it’s perhaps no surprise that the Internet has been an effective vehicle for Kids Help Phone to provide free counselling, what is somewhat astonishing is that it’s come at no expense to its phone counselling service. In fact, time spent counselling on the phone increased 4% in 2005, meaning all web activity is essentially a boon to the organization’s mandate of "providing the immediate help and hope that young people need and deserve." The non-profit Kids Help Phone has been counselling young Canadians 24 hours a day on a variety of issues, including sexuality, substance abuse, relationships and suicide, since it launched in 1989. Kidshelpphone.ca went online in 1996, expanding services with the launch of "Ask a Counsellor" online in 2002. "The growth of technology and how kids are using it means we need to keep up with the growth of that demand," Kids Help Phone’s manager of youth and parent marketing, Meghan Reddick, tells Canadian New Media. In 2005, between phones and the website, the organization helped Canadian kids in need more than 1 million times, an all-time high. More than just allowing the crisis intervention service to meet the demand of Internet-savvy youth, the website provides options for those who previously wouldn’t have used the phone. "With web counseling we’re able to reach a whole new group of young people," says Reddick. "We find that the kids who use our web service tend to be younger than those who use our phone. Kids who are sometimes too timid or afraid to talk to a counsellor directly on the phone are turning to us for help online." The main function of Web counselling is to allow kids to anonymously post a question on a message board, which will be answered by a professional counsellor after 72 hours. Additionally, all questions and answers are posted on the website so those who are even too reluctant to seek help online can browse for previous responses to similar issues. This has been an extremely popular option, says Reddick. A recent post from a teenager on kidshelpphone.ca reads: "I wanted to thank you for your kindness. Even though I only wrote in once, I come to this website almost every day. Reading through other peoples’ issues and reading the answers of the moderators helps a lot seeing as teenagers seldom see that their problems are very much alike to others’." It’s a given that teenagers will seek help for many of the same or very similar problems, so the ability to browse frequently asked questions is a huge advantage over the phone. And because Kids Help Phone has to disable its "Ask a Counsellor" function occasionally to allow moderators to answer questions that have piled up in the queue, kids can still get help themselves by reading archived responses, entries in the "Express Yourself" section, or information in the "Get Informed" service. The obvious drawback of using the Web for those who want a specific question answered is timing. On the phone kids are connected directly to a trained counsellor and get to develop a back-and-forth to go over issues and resolutions. " Web counselling, don’t have that opportunity to ask more questions and delve in," says Reddick, "so they have to read between the lines of the child’s response and assess…the core issue." Answers are also reviewed by a supervisor, to ensure the question was truly understood, before being posted, which adds to the three-day turnaround. Reddick continues: "Counsellors have found, however, that kids who post questions online tend to be more open and expressive with their issues. We think that kids just feel more comfortable, maybe a little more anonymous being able to write out their question and to think through and…craft what they are trying to say." Regardless of the medium, the issues tend to be relatively the same. The most common subject is relationships, accounting for 41% of calls and 33% of online questions. But in the case of questions on physical and sexual health, which could be harder for teens to talk about, inquiries of that nature accounted for only 14% of all phone calls compared to 20% of questions on the Web (see chart on page 3). Additional services on the Web also allow the organization to target specific issues. The organization is currently overhauling the "Get Informed" self-help section of its website, starting with a new bullying section including tip sheets, resources and definitions. And as more funding becomes available, the organization wants to keep improving its services. "We’re still doing research on how Canadian kids want to communicate and how Kids Help Phone can best service them," says Reddick. "But we let kids choose how they best want to reach us using any method that’s more comfortable to them." Kids can also take comfort in knowing that the Web service is just as anonymous as the telephone. The website was redesigned in 2004 so the message board can operate without email addresses or threads, ensuring anonymity. Going forward, the Internet increases the opportunities to add new interactive offerings, as long as funding can keep up with technology. Reddick identifies real-time web counseling as one such potential addition. "We want to be able to help Canadian kids and obviously it’s a very popular medium for them," she says. "But it just would require a significant investment in staff, training, technology, and we just don’t have the funding at this time for that kind of investment but definitely something we’re exploring."

Kids Help Phone broadens efforts to reach kids with successful website

Broadcast | March 20, 2006

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