Socialheads
Messaging built for
youth services
A place for youth workers and young people to stay in touch between sessions, with professional boundaries held and no personal numbers exchanged.
The work
Youth work runs on a relationship a young person chooses to have. Nobody is placed with a youth worker. They turn up, or they do not, and the quality of the relationship is what decides which.
The work happens in sessions, on detached and outreach shifts, in projects that run for a term, and in the gaps between all of those. A lot of it is carried by people working evenings and weekends, often in small charities on tight budgets.
The National Youth Agency's position on digital youth work is a sensible one: treat it as you would face to face. The same safeguarding principles apply, the same boundaries, the same professional judgement. The setting changes; the practice does not.
Why the phone becomes the problem
First among the staff team. Sessional workers and volunteers get coordinated in a WhatsApp group: who is covering tonight, what happened last session, which young person to keep an eye on. It is the operational backbone of a lot of youth services, and it runs entirely on personal phones belonging to people who may only work a few hours a week.
Then with young people. They answer messages. They do not answer letters, rarely answer email, and often will not pick up an unknown number. So youth workers use the thing that works, and that has usually meant a personal WhatsApp account.
Up close it is a worker doing the job with the only tool available, because the alternative was losing contact with a young person who needed some.
What it costs is boundaries. A youth worker's personal number sits in a young person's phone permanently, including after they leave the organisation. Messages arrive at midnight with no way to hold a line. And when a service needs to show how a concern was handled, the evidence is on someone's personal handset, or gone.
What a youth service needs
This is the list we built to.
- Something young people will actually use, because engagement here is entirely voluntary.
- Workers keep their personal number to themselves, during the job and after it.
- Young people know what is confidential and what is not, before they say anything.
- A clear route for a young person to raise a concern, and for a worker to escalate one.
- A record that survives volunteers and sessional staff moving on.
- A price a youth charity can actually clear.
How Socialheads fits
For the staff team it replaces the coordination group: named group conversations for a project, a session team or a volunteer rota, owned by the organisation rather than by whoever set up the WhatsApp group. A service can start here on Core alone, without any young person in the system, which is often the sensible first step for a youth charity.
Workers use their own phones with a professional account, so nobody hands out a personal number and access ends when someone leaves the organisation. That matters more in a sector that runs on sessional workers and volunteers than almost anywhere else.
Young people reach it in a web browser, without needing their own phone or a card to set up an app store account. For open access and detached work, where you cannot assume anything about a young person's device, that is the difference between reachable and not.
Conversations are staff-led and group conversations work for projects and cohorts, so a whole group can be reached without anyone collecting mobile numbers on a sign-up sheet.
Young people are told plainly what is private and what a safeguarding lead may read, which is what the NYA guidance asks for: be a safe space, and be honest about the limits of confidentiality. A young person can always flag a message that worries them, so they have a route to raise something themselves rather than depending on an adult noticing.
Where the line sits
Socialheads is not a youth management system. It does not hold attendance, outcomes frameworks, funder reporting or membership records, and does not replace the tools you use for those.
It does not monitor a young person's device or their other apps. It governs one channel, the one between your workers and the young people they work with.
And it does not make your organisation compliant with your safeguarding standards. You are the data controller and we act as your processor. Your policies and your practice stay yours. We support them and hold the record.
On cost, plainly
Youth services are often the organisations with the least money and the most direct contact with young people, which is an uncomfortable combination when a tool is priced for a local authority.
Safeguarding Plus, the plan that covers young people being in conversations, starts at £7,500 a year. For a small youth charity that will be too much, and we would rather say so than let you find out after three meetings.
There is also a Social Impact Rate from £3,500 a year, which is Safeguarding Plus at a reduced rate for smaller services and charities. The pricing is all published, so you can work out whether this is possible before spending your time on it.
What changes for the young person
They can message a youth worker without that worker's personal number being part of the deal, and without wondering whether they are texting someone on their day off.
They know where they stand. What is private, what is not, and how to raise something if they need to. Young people are generally far more accepting of a rule they were told about than one they discover.
And if the worker they got on with moves on, which in this sector happens often, the thread does not vanish with them.
If keeping contact off personal phones is where your service is stuck, the next step is a conversation about how you work.
Wondering what the lost time adds up to? Try the impact calculator.