--- title: "Four weeks to go | Socialheads Blog" url: https://socialheads.co.uk/blog/four-weeks-to-go/ --- Product Updates 26 August 2026 Jeremy # Four weeks to go I called it the Safeguarding dashboard, and a conversation with a council showed me the same name can fit one service and not another. Plus push notifications, availability, per-service settings, a few important words, and a grant application for the fostering side. **Building in public. Twelve weeks in, four to go.** I had a genuinely good realisation recently. I was showing a council Socialheads and we got to the safeguarding area. People can flag a worrying message, which is then visible to the right people in the organisation. I had called it the Safeguarding dashboard. Which made complete sense to me. The whole reason the feature exists is safeguarding. But as we started talking, the conversation moved into their existing safeguarding procedures. Where concerns need to be recorded. What systems they already use. What has to happen internally. And that is where it clicked. For some services, that name fits exactly how they will use it. For this council, safeguarding already has a home. Their procedures, their systems, their responsibilities. Socialheads sits alongside all of that, and what it does is let someone flag a worrying message. Same feature. Different services. Different fit. In care, words carry very specific meanings, and every service arrives with its own already established. So in the product, the words stay simple. A flagged message is a flagged message. What happens next belongs to the service. That conversation probably sums up where Socialheads is at right now. ## Making Socialheads fit One of the reasons I spent so long researching Socialheads before properly building it was because care is complicated. There is rarely one person using a system in isolation. You have young people, practitioners, managers, safeguarding leads, commissioners, data protection responsibilities and existing case management systems, all interacting in different ways. That research shaped the foundations of Socialheads from the beginning. What is changing now is the level of detail. Once there is a real product in front of someone, conversations become much more specific. Even something completely normal in a messaging app, like sending a document or image, can suddenly raise practical questions. What guidance does a worker need about what they can share? Does a service want that available immediately? Would they rather start with basic messaging and introduce more functionality once everyone is comfortable? Those questions do not fundamentally change what Socialheads is. They help me understand how it needs to enter a service. The foundations came from a lot of listening. Now I can show people those foundations and start working through the details that only become visible when something is real. ## What we built This was another pretty big sprint. We now have the foundations for push notifications, with Android notifications working end to end in the simulator. Seeing “You have unread messages” appear for the first time was just awesome to see. It is such a simple thing on the surface, but it made the app feel another step closer to being real. We also added availability, including away and out of office states. That came directly from research around the way messaging can blur professional and personal boundaries. Making it easier for a young person to contact someone should not quietly create an expectation that the worker is available all the time. There is more to work through here, particularly around what someone should see when their worker is unavailable and what alternative support should be offered. Different services will have different answers. We have also added more settings so organisations can tailor Socialheads around the way they work and introduce functionality gradually rather than necessarily switching everything on from day one. Part of that is language. One service might use “young person”. Another deliberately uses “child”. Somewhere else it might be “pupil”, “resident” or something completely different. I don’t think Socialheads gets to decide which one is right. So services can now change some of the terminology used for different roles. Exports have improved too. Attachments can now be included alongside the conversations they belong to, helping keep the record together when information needs to move into another system. And there has been plenty of work on the interface and information architecture as the number of people and conversations inside Socialheads grows. ## A few important words I also spent time with Breda looking at the language a young person sees when they want to report a worrying message. We had: - **Safely report** - **Review first** We changed it to: - **Safely report** - **Share your concern with a trusted person** That might look like a really small wording change. But if you have received something worrying, perhaps from someone you are supposed to trust, I think that is a huge distinction. “Review first” tells you very little about what is going to happen. “Share your concern with a trusted person” hopefully gives you a bit more reassurance about what you are actually doing. Is it perfect? Probably not. But I think it is better. And that is exactly the kind of detail that becomes easier to question once the product is actually there in front of you. ## The fostering side It has been a long few weeks. Good ones, but long. One more thing happened in the middle of them: I applied for a grant so I can look into the fostering side of Socialheads. Fostering plays an important part in the world this is being built for. And foster carers often feel unsupported. We would love to research that properly and tackle it. ## Four weeks There are four weeks left in this build now. I never really gave myself a precise definition of what “finished” would mean. It was more a picture in my head of where Socialheads needed to get to before it could unlock the next stage. A product solid enough to show properly. Foundations I am confident enough to build on. Something that allows conversations about real roll outs rather than hypothetical ones. And weirdly, I think I am getting there. There are still plenty of unglamorous things to work through, including getting a separate developer account set up properly, and plenty still needs finishing. But two and a half months ago, a huge amount of this simply did not exist. Now the foundations feel real. That is a pretty big thing to say. I have always wanted Socialheads to work in settings where getting communication right really matters. Where safeguarding, professional boundaries, evidence and accessibility are not nice extras. That makes building it harder. But it is also the point. Four more weeks. ![Socialheads](/assets/img/logo.svg) **About Socialheads:** We're a UK social enterprise creating a purpose-built messaging platform for care, co-designed with practitioners, young people and organisations. [Learn more about our work](/about) ![Jeremy](/assets/img/team/jeremy-pitt.jpg) Written by Jeremy [Socialheads team](/about) [Back to blog](/blog) Share:[](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsocialheads.co.uk%2Fblog%2Ffour-weeks-to-go\&text=Four%20weeks%20to%20go)[](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsocialheads.co.uk%2Fblog%2Ffour-weeks-to-go) ## Stay informed about safer digital communication for care and youth services Get evidence-based insights, research findings, and practical guidance delivered straight to your inbox ## Related articles Product Updates ### [Halfway](/blog/halfway) Group chats, reports with compliance and safeguarding dashboards, message flagging, re-assignment that keep the record. [Read more](/blog/halfway) Product Updates ### [The designs are here](/blog/the-designs-are-here) The part everyone keeps asking to see: the first full look at how Socialheads works, from joining to your first conversation. 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