Player Profiles: Our app is live!
We are incredibly excited and proud to announce (shout from the rooftops!) that along with the end of the 21/22 academic year we have just concluded the pilot of our pioneering new skills development app Player Profiles!
With feedback like 100% of our young people saying they found it really useful and would continue to use it if we did further developments, we are 100% sure they are just as excited as us! We couldn’t have done it without our partners Sport England and East Head Impact as well as long term friend of the charity Marc Boughton, so a huge thank you from everyone at Dallaglio RugbyWorks for making Player Profiles and this pilot possible!
Where did it all start?
During the pandemic, just like many other organisations, we lost contact overnight with so many of our young people in a time when they needed our support the most because we couldn’t get into some of the schools we worked in. This highlighted the need to for us to transform as an organisation so that we could be the life-long support partner for our young people whenever they need us; including outside of the school gates and even when they were no longer in our programmes. We recognised the opportunity to connect with our young people in a digital way and wanted to develop a platform that had messaging with their coaches and content for them to consume. However, following some user research and focus groups with our young people it became clear that their need and wish was to develop their life skills, learn more about career opportunities and connect with people they trust and the idea for Player Profiles was born!
What is Player Profiles?
Player Profiles is our pioneering, newly developed webapp-based platform which has a game-changing impact on young people by putting personal development in their hands and aims to fill an "aspiration gap" to allow them to assess their current skillset, identify their goals, plan progression against those goals, understand and address their skills gaps, access relevant resources, and to seek the support of all agencies in their lives to work together effectively to radically improve their life chances. It has been designed by working hand in hand with our young people to ensure it meets their needs and looks and feels like their other everyday applications.
We have built a platform that allows focuses on skills development and ownership of progress journeys within the skill areas identified by the World Economic Forum as essential for the 2025 workplace. Underpinned by gamification as an engagement technique, young people can assess their current skillset/ level, address any gaps by identifying and setting goals, plan progression and access support from our delivery team whilst also having the ability to use their own real-world scenarios and examples and not just traditional academic subjects as evidence for achieving their goals.
Player Profiles has been developed to enhance DRW’s face-to-face delivery, not replace it, and further extend learning beyond the school day by providing opportunities to achieve life and workplace skills through the gamification of skill development, challenges and support from peers and mentors. It also aims to keep our young people active outside of our sessions and the school gates by having Physical Skills as one of the skill areas they can progress their own goals in. Lastly, we are developing Player Profiles to be innovative in the data ownership space because young people also own and control their own data and decide whether and how to make it available to support organisations.
“I can better myself and win prizes at the same time, that’s great ”
What did we do in the English pilot?
This pilot was to test the first iteration of our prototype through sustained use and engagement with a group of young people following its co-design with them.
The design questions posed by the pilot study were:
Is using a points-based system with rewards an effective sustained engagement mechanism for these young people and are they the correct drivers?
Are the skills in the prototype, the most useful ones for these young people to support their positive steps into further education, employment and training?
Does the selecting of goals, submitting of evidence without external assessment to progress and choosing whether to share their data give young people true understanding and ownership of their data, their development journey and their self-validation so that the power is given back to them and away from organisations collecting data on them?
Is the design of the app itself young person friendly and what are the features missing that would most benefit young people to increase their chances of being in education, employment and training post 16?
What were the key findings?
Young people in different regions were interested in different elements of the app, for example, those in the West Midlands were very driven by the opportunity to win the prizes where-as those in London were more interested in discussing the goals and skills and additional potential touchpoints with Dallaglio RugbyWorks staff showing the different features that are needed.
The gamification elements like the quiz, to identify which level young people were on within a skill, and the ability to earn kudos points to redeem for prizes were well received, talked about a lot and created fun competition between peers during sessions proving the use of gamification as an effective engagement tool.
There was a wide range of understanding and ability to evidence (in discussion in the focus groups) the six skills in the app thus demonstrating the need for support in skills development within those areas. Some young people could easily explain the definitions and had examples of how they had achieved goals already, but others could not and lacked the confidence to about this especially in front of their peers.
Having the ability to make their own decisions regarding achievements and moving through levels was powerful for some but not understood by all. Whether this was fundamental change from a wider perspective about multiple organisations deciding this for them in most areas of their life was difficult to conclude on such a short timeframe and context.
Accessing the app has many challenges from password complexity, device availability and areas of connectivity and to keep young people engaged simplicity and ease of access is over paramount importance.
“I’ve already got evidence for all of those levels because my communication is really good”. Dan then worked through in his first session a number of goals and levels successfully self-assessing that he had demonstrated lots of elements of the communication skill. ”
What are our next steps?
We are talking the summer break to make some changes to Player Profiles including introducing more skills content as a result of the young person feedback and the learnings from the pilot. From the start of the academic year we will be rolling out the app to more schools across our network, giving more young people the opportunity to co-design it with us, own their own development journey and setting and achieving their own goals. We are incredibly excited what the long-term future holds for Player Profiles too! We want it to grow into a digital support partner from a goals, career, skills and trusted relationship perspective that we can use to connect with our young people forever but also that fellow youth organisations can use to support their beneficiaries too!
If you would like to get in touch and talk about Player Profiles some more please reach out to Vikki Bentley at vikki@dallagliorugbyworks.com