TFGL2021 - S4 - Ep 9 - The Big Quit
Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.
Joining host Bex Rae-Evans we have podcast regular Greg Ashton and Tech For Good Live team member Harriet Pugh.
Transcript
Bex: Hello and welcome to yet another in a seemingly endless stream of tech for good live podcasts. It's a show where a bunch of friends get together and talk about how to use technology to have a positive social impact. On today's show, we'll be talking about how you can't trust anything you see on Instagram, especially if it's somebody telling you that they're going to plant a tree. It's basically the environmental version of if this post gets 100 likes, this boy will get a heart transplant. I should have said 10,000 likes. One hundred likes wouldn't have been very many in charity news of the week. We'll be talking about the extraordinary demand that's going to be placed on the charity services this winter, and we'll be talking about a new digital project to help support people with atypical speech. All that and more coming right up. Joining me today we have Greg Ashton. Greg, Bonfire Night is over. The Christmas adverts are on the TV and Jonny has been playing Christmas jazz all weekend. I’m feeling festive, so do you have a favourite Christmas movie?
Greg: Ooh, I hate that favourite movie question. I'm always like, is one's never enough. Like, I like five, but, um, yeah, I guess maybe Elf. But now I'm thinking about it, I'm like, yeah, I do love that movie. I also like It's A Wonderful Life. Home alone, I can watch, you know, till the cows come home. So yeah, I'll let you know after Christmas, which one I've settled on.
Bex: Thanks, Greg. Harriet, views? Making her first ever appearance on the podcast [claps] Harriet plays a massive role at Tech For Good Live but so far has made the wise decision to avoid the podcast. How are you? What's your favourite Christmas movie? Also, hello.
Harriett: Hi. Christmas movies are hard. Yeah, I don't know if I watched specifically Christmas themed movies very much. But probably Trading Places if that counts. There's like a Christmas scene in it.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah.
Harriett: love that film.
Greg: With Dan Ackroyd dressed like a drunk Santa.
Harriett: Yeah, yeah.
Greg: Good choice. Good choice.
Bex: And me, I’m Bex. I'll be your host today. And I think that all Christmas movies are equally good. No really. I do. I tried to watch one called Krampus and found a weird B movie version of it and I thought it was excellent, but Jonny made me turn it off cause it was really, really bad. But I liked that about it.
Greg: [laughs] Is that from like the eighties? Was it like a video? Yeah.
Bex: Yeah, it was great. But I also like newer ones, like non-classic ones. What's that guy, the one about postmen. The animated one? That was wonderful. And I cried so hard at that. That was good. There's some newer ones that I think are brill but they’re just not classic yet. The Kurt Russell one. Kurt Russell in anything is good.
Greg: [laughs] I didn't like the second one though.
Bex: No, it wasn't as good as the last one, but I still like it. It’s a Christmas movie. I’m up for it all. Anyway, Harriett, welcome to your first ever podcast, how are you feeling about it?
Harriett: Yeah, I’m feeling alright. Yeah. I don’t know what else to say.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: That’s a good start to the podcast Harriett [laughs]
Greg: [laughs]
Harriett: I'm usually in the background behind the scenes, just doing stuff. And, you know, sometimes it feels quite scary going on something and talking about stuff and having to act like you read the news. Cause I don't really read the news. I don't like the news. It makes me feel sad. So I tend to just focus on, you know, projects and doing stuff and what can we change.
Greg: So what have you been changing? What have you been doing behind the scenes?
Harriett: What I've been doing behind the scenes? Well, something I've been working on with a team of people from the Tech for Good Live Slack community is a service called Help A Charity, and we launched it over a year ago now, 18 months ago, at the beginning of COVID. We actually started the planning for this about two years ago with Ten GM who are the charity infrastructure body for greater Manchester. And the idea was that there are lots of people in the tech for good live community that want to help charities and want to do good things with tech and there are lots of charities that need help. So we don't charge a service where charities could ask for help and we would find them volunteers to help them solve the problems that they were facing. And we learned loads doing that. And we've taken some time out to kind of take stock of what we learned about what works, what doesn't work. What kind of support charities need and what kind of support volunteers can provide. And we're just in the process of kind of testing some new bits. We've got a mentoring scheme at the moment and we're looking for charities. So yeah, if any charities want to help us pilot some digital mentoring or tech mentoring, these are people that can just help you make tech simple, help you answer like questions that you've got or help you try and find clarity in what can be quite an overwhelming, scary job. We're looking for charities, so give us a shout if you want help.
Bex: Thank you. That's a good plug. We'll post a link in the writing bit but it's tech for good dot live. You'll find it at forward slash help dash charity.
Greg: [laughs] The writing bit?
Bex: The bit where we write about the stuff that we talked about.
Greg: [laughs] How long have we been doing this? The writing bit [laughs]
Bex: The description, the podcast description, right?
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: Shut up Greg [laughs] Okay. Let's move on to this week's topic. Statt of the week. Four million people posted a picture of their pet to Instagram with the sticker, we'll plant a tree for every pet picture and no trees were planted. Tell us more Greg.
Greg: Yeah. This is the Instagram post that launched the zero trees. You flagged this to me and I've just seen it all over my feed. Like, lots of people posting things and taking the mick out of it. I don't think I saw anyone post with the sticker.
Bex: Didn’t you? I saw so many of them. I think I'm naturally a sceptical person. So every time I saw someone posting it, I'm sure they meant well, so it wasn't a slight on them. But I started saying out loud to whoever would listen, no one's planting any trees, Sandra. There's no trees. I just knew. I just knew.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: I don't know what it was about it, but it was like, there are no trees. I know there are no trees. I don't know what it was. I just knew. And then we found out that there were no trees. So, I mean, at least there were some nice pet pictures. I can't deny that that was enjoyable.
Harriett: It's like one of those things, where people were going to post a picture of their dog or cat anyway and it's like, oh, I'll just do this thing just in case. I dunno. Maybe a tree will materialise.
Greg: Yeah. People should know now. They should know now.
Bex: That everything’s a lie [laughs]
Greg: Yeah, just how to spot these things. I think I saw a sticker thing a few years ago that was kind of backed by the wotsit foundation. Anyway, one of those foundations, The Bill Gates Foundation, and that it was like you share this and for every, if we hit so many shares, we'll donate 2 million to this fund and they did. And I think they went over so they kind of did a higher donation. But you knew that was going to happen cause it was promised by a foundation. Whereas this was just like, who the fuck are these guys like coming out of nowhere and promising to plant trees. And the worst part about this is, so you shared with me a Twitter thread which was from a guy who had been a journalist. I don't know whether he is, he kind of talks about it in the past tense. Patrick Marlboro. And he did like a deep dive into this and one of the things that he flagged was the press don't seem to be looking at this in any kind of detail, weirdly. They’re talking about basically the top-level stuff which is loads of people posted it. So what happened was within 10 minutes, they withdrew the post because apparently they realised they wouldn't be able to plant these trees because they had literally no plans to plant them. And then that's pretty much it. That's all they've done. But then actually what that's done is created more people to share the post.
Bex: And at that point I was like annoyed. And again, some people are really sympathetic towards them. At that point, like, oh, they just didn't realise it would go viral. Bless them. I was like, no, fuck off. Stupid idiots haven't like planned this at all. Like they never had any trees. They just thought it'd be funny. And like, so I was already annoyed at this point and it turns out it's way more nefarious than that even. So yeah. Then you, Greg found the full story.
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. So the full story is pretty grim. It's not some kind of well-meaning organisation from the looks of it that have decided to do this and then got a bit in over their head. Regardless of whether it was. Even if it was a large organisation and they'd done it and then gone, oh shit, we’re actually going to hit that, like, why would you do it in the first place? But basically this thing just didn’t exist until this year. The Plant The Tree Co. was created in 2021 and it looks like their business model is around buying bracelets or necklaces or something. And you buy his bracelet or necklace for $36, which apparently looks like it was bought from Alibaba for like 50 cents. And obviously, the assumption is is you buy that and the rest of the money goes to planting trees. Right? And maybe this was a way of building up publicity so that then they could get more people buying bracelets. There are other organisations that do this and actually have a business model based on people buying cheap shit and selling it on. Many charities do it as well. They have little charity shops where they sell absolute cheap crap shit but people buy it.
Bex: And it’s kind of interesting that selling something to make money, to fund a charity, like has been going on for years. So it's not something new really. And in some ways there was something innovative about it. I mean, it's all really like kind of dark pattern behaviour, but we always talk about how like all of this dark marketing behaviour, like, so essentially there was three, I think three Instagram accounts that were very much cute pictures of animals and that's it. Just to get the likes and get the views to build up that following, which is actually like a clever marketing ploy. It's like a bad one, probably because it's founded on lies, but it's quite clever. And we always talk about how that those clever marketing practises are often used to do bad and not used to do good. Probably for good reasons because it's lies, but I thought that was quite interesting that you were seeing this innovative way of marketing and a savvy use of a platform to build a charity kind of follower base. However….
Greg: [laughs]
Harriett: Yeah, I listened to this podcast the other day called Blind Boys. It’s one that I listen to quite a lot. And he did an episode on captain planet.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: I love Captain Planet.
Harriett: But it goes on this like massive down this big wormhole and like on this big critique of captain planet and he was like, but in the end what they were doing was selling toys.
Greg: Oh yeah.
Harriett: And they thought that by selling toys that they would make kids care about climate change. But what they actually did was make kids just want to collect all the toys and then it actually just reinforces sort of capitalism and doesn't make people think, oh, what can I do to like tackle climate change. Like obviously, it's not buying plastic toys.
Bex: I don't know if this is like an urban legend or not, but one of the episodes of Captain Planet as well, they had a thing at the end. It was like, Hey kids, don't drop litter. And Captain Planet would be like, here's a better way to do it. Put it in the bin. And one of them, apparently, according to this urban legend, this captain planet saying, Hey kids don't drop toxic waste into rivers. It’s like, okay. I was doing that all the time, but I guess I won't if Captain Planet tells me not to. I just love that story, but yeah, Captain Planet sold lots of plastic toys, which probably wasn't a good idea. Reinforced capitalism.
Greg: I mean, that's all cartoons in that time.
Bex: Same with My Little Pony [laughs]
Harriett: [laughs]
Greg: Yeah. Exactly that. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty bad. But yeah, as we've said, it happens within the charity industry and is, you know, it's partly that, you know, lack of altruism. People want something in return so they can buy something and feel like they're helping. But yeah, going back to your point Bex about the clever use of social media. It is terrifying. Like literally what they've done is just farmed content from other accounts.
Bex: It’s what Lad’s Bible has been doing for like forever and everyone's okay with that. I mean, it's a bad way of doing things but it's a clever use of the platform.
Greg: But then they get this much reach and you think charities are working so hard every single day to provide, you know, genuine real content and they can never get this kind of reach. It's so frustrating. And it's all down to a 23 year old student called Zack from Boca Raton as far as our friend Patrick can tell. Based on what he's followed through and discovered it's this student who set up this organisation and seems to have done very well for himself, really, if you're considering if lots of people have gone on to buy those bracelets and necklaces. The other thing that he came up with was an app similar to it was kind of like Airbnb for parking spaces. So you can rent out your parking space, which seems like a very good idea, but apparently also seems like much of a scam. And it's not the first time he's done this. So apparently he did something similar in 2019 where he was selling these bracelets to raise money for the Australian bushfires, black lives matter and also allegedly planting six and a half thousand trees, which was the thing that they were posting on their posts when they were saying we’ll plant 4 million. The only thing that you could find was saying that they'd already planted six and a half thousand trees, and everyone was like, well, what are the details of this and there were none because obviously, it was a lie.
Bex: Cause he’s pocketed the money right? That‘s pretty certain.
Greg: Yeah, I mean, there's no information to say that he's done otherwise. Really. So, yeah, it's insane but the worst part is the reporting on it is that people aren't calling out this scam, which could really damage, you know, some charitable organisations. Look at Eclosure, the search engine who actually do plant trees and they share a lot of really detailed information about how they do it. They don't plant mono-cultures. They work with local planters. They provide jobs to people in those areas, rather than coming in and just planting one type of tree. They’ve planted millions and they're doing a really good job and people will now probably question their work. They'll associate them with, uh, this plant a tree cow. So you could really see other projects that are genuine being damaged by this. Yeah, it's really frustrating.
Bex: Thanks Zack for your contribution to society.
Greg: What a dick.
Harriett: [laughs]
Bex: From one horrible story on to another. Charity news of the week is, unfortunately, going to be tough days ahead for charities. Greg, what’s going on??
Greg: Yeah. So a news report from a study of 350 charities carried out by the law family commissions on civil society in October this year has found that basically it's going to be, they keep referencing this perfect storm. So 210 of those 350 surveyed said they expected demand and rise for their services this winter. You've got, you know, damages already from COVID. So increase in demand anyway. You've got rising costs of everything as inflation goes up. You've got potential further increases across the board, fuel, all those kinds of things. So, yeah, it's looking like a pretty bleak winter, particularly for, you know, the healthcare charities, social care. Those are going to be really, really badly hit. It is kind of, you know, anyone could have, you wouldn't have had to do that survey. You could quite comfortably have predicted this. So yeah, it's, it's going to be a tough one. I guess, you know, what can we do to help out is the question now.
Bex: It's not something that is a surprise, I think, to anybody working in the industry. I think we all knew it was coming. But yeah, it’s shit.
Greg: It's a tough one, isn't it? Because you're going to get you, you get a rise every year now. It's just that perfect storm of all these different factors? And I guess thinking back to COVID lockdown and everybody was kind of supporting. There were a lot more people volunteering and trying to support and help out in their local community. So I wonder if maybe now's the time to kind of get back to that and do those little things to help people out to maybe prevent them needing help from a charity. You know, help your neighbour, help out in the community.
Harriett: The big society.
Bex: I was just gonna say the idea it'd be in a perfect storm. Like it really ends where it like a proper like point of no return. Like it's fucking shit. I was reading this other article, which all of this leads into my rant later, so I won't give too much away, but you know, this big quit has happened as well, because of, again, a perfect storm of things where loads of people are leaving their jobs, because they didn't leave the jobs for two years because of COVID and they wanted to make sure that they were secure. So now, like we're catching up on all of those people who were planning on leaving their jobs and loads people leaving the jobs, but also because people have just like reflected on my life over COVID and some of the people, even for that reason to let this happen where everyone's quitting their jobs. But also there's just this is a perfect storm in the jobs industry as well, where I've just read a really great Twitter thread by Tony Wilson, who's the director of the Institute for employment studies and there's also been record entries to work. So 38% of those who were unemployed have found a job. Like record job moves. So there's like loads going on in that sector. And in lots of cases, the stats look great. There's very little unemployment at the moment in comparison to the past. And all of that sounds good, except that when you dig into the figures, people who are disadvantaged are more disadvantaged than ever before. So those people getting jobs, aren't those people who were struggling to get jobs in the first place. So those with health conditions, parents, any sort of disadvantaged young people are not getting jobs. So I feel like it's double compounded a lot of issues. This whole idea of a perfect storm, a lot of shit is happening right now. And it's all not good and I don’t know what to do.
Harriett: I wonder about the areas as well as geographically. How are those jobs distributed?
Greg: Yeah. Yeah. That's going to play a huge part in it. Although apparently, unemployment was down this month. Yeah.
Bex: Yeah. Generally, really, really low levels of unemployment. There's way more jobs than people at the moment across all sectors, but particularly in the design industry but across all sectors. But it's just that those people who are disadvantaged are the ones that were disadvantaged in the first place.
Greg: And have the lower wages, which haven't grown. I think there was some stat I saw the other day about wage growth, but it's decades behind. Decades behind. So, you know, you're playing catch up. And they don't want it to because that drives inflation and it’s a tough one when there's just not enough money around now.
Bex: And those people are going to need so much more support than ever before. Like they’re not able to get jobs. The charities that were supporting them previously are not doing. Every benefit has been cut, like, yeah, it's a really bad place for everybody and charities have got a lot on their plate.
Greg: One thing though, and they talk about, you know, global inflation is up but we know quite well that, you know, certain industries are largely owned by the same massive multinational corporations. And they're all making a shit ton of money. So if inflation is that bad, why are they able to make all this money? If the cost of materials is so much and they're having to pass that on to the public and their customers, why are they still making, you know, 20, 30, 40% profit? That really boggles my mind. And it's that question of, well, hang on a minute, why are we not doing more to question that when we've got potentially dangerous inflation rises, why are we not looking at these companies and saying, what the fuck are you doing? Cause there's genuine, you know, looking at how hard charities are going to have it and yet they're making 25, 30% profit on top of everything after costs. It just blows my mind.
Harriett: I think people do think that though. Like, 1% of everyone hates Amazon. Obviously, a lot of people still use Amazon but I just think it's one of those things a bit like climate change, it just feels so overwhelming and so big. It's like, where do you start? Like, and people just don't believe that there's anything that anyone's going to be able to do to bring down bloody Jeff Bezos or whoever.
Greg: There is that but there's also, so I was reading an article the other day that said every kind of survey that's done where people are asked about what they'd like to see done about climate change or what they themselves would do, you always find recycling's really high up, cause that's a fairly low, you know, you're throwing stuff away. So if you can throw it away in the right direction, great. Then the next highest popular tended to be things like changes to industry standards and things like that. You know, stuff that big business can do when it comes to stuff that people themselves can do but would impact the way that they live their life, like buying less stuff, those always tend to be right down at the bottom. So whilst people say they want change, it's very much a - I want change but I don't want to change anything about my life. Yeah, that's the bit that gets me. It's like you said Bex, there is, you know, some people that are still doing very well or doing even better than they were pre COVID. The gap for those who aren't, is much greater. And, you know, saying to people you need to do a little less well and to pull these people up, you know, people just won’t agree to that.
Harriett: The thing about this though is it's always difficult when we're talking about like a citizen and like individuals because it's very difficult to feel like what you're doing as one person is going to make a difference. Like this kind of stuff like this, where it's like, you know, we want to buy less stuff, so like we need to just tax Amazon and stop them from being able to sell cheap shit everywhere, all the time. That just can't be done. Like. Yeah. I just think that has to be done by government. Otherwise, I just think we're in that dangerous place of it being individuals faults and then you start blaming people and like, like moral opinions about how other people are living their lives and that's just not helpful. I can, it's just actually moving us further away from where we need to be. Which is like, as a collective, human population, like we have to address this problem and that's gotta be, you know, the powers that be.
Bex: Are the powers that be the government because they’re pants [laughs]
Greg: I don’t think any governments are managing very well at the minute.
Bex: They're all trying their best. Let’s stop talking about governments. Nothing we can do there. Let's move on to a positive story. Tech news of the week. Actually, we’ve been slaggin off Amazon today already but Google have done something positive. Greg, please tell us what it is.
Greg: Yeah. You know, stop clocks right twice a day and it seems that Google have done something right. On the surface at least. So there's this project from Google called Project Relate, which helps people with atypical speech, which could be caused by a neurological condition and it helps them communicate with others. So it's an app created by Google Speech and Research Team that uses machine learning to understand an individual's unique speech patterns and lets them interact with people and technology around them. So very simply, you know, if you've got somebody who has a neurological condition that causes them to slow their words or have other difficulties speaking, then the speech recognition in Relate will learn and understand what they're trying to say and they can use that as almost like a translation tool. So they've got the listen feature, which transcribes speech in real time. So you can copy and paste into other apps. The repeat feature, which does what I just said. So it synthesises a voice and kind of repeats what the person said. And there's an assistant function that integrates with Google Assistant. So you can use smart home features, requests directions and plays music. Yeah, genuinely a nice thing from Google. It sounds really, really good. And there's a video that they've shared, which just looks fantastic.
Bex: If it looks as good as it says. I think just a lot of general transcription stuff would maybe work [laughs].
Greg: I was thinking that.
Bex: I wonder if that learning function where it learns the speech patterns is much more sophisticated than your typical translation tool. I'm hoping it is. I'm guessing it is. But I wonder if it takes a lot of like, training, cause I guess that's what we don't really do with transcription tools, which we complain about a lot in this podcast because we haven't found one that's able to transcribe our podcast in any sort of way that's comprehensible. But I guess we don't really train it for very long. We try on a couple of podcasts and then sack it off cause it hasn't worked. I guess this might require a certain level of training.
Greg: Yeah. So this started in 2018 and they run a project prior to this called Project Uphonia to collect samples of citizens with atypical speech. I think they collected more than a million samples from people with a diverse range of neurological disorders. Currently it's not able to kind of, it does have that hurdle of people needing to personalise it through giving a lot of samples. So it's not out in the public, but you can apply to sign up. I think it's available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. If you're 18 or older and have Android eight or later, and it's g dot co slash project relate. And what happens is you download the app and then you have to, it's basically also like 90 minutes recording, about 500 phrases. So a good amount of time. It is a long amount of time recording those phrases. But if it can have this impact then I think that's, anybody's going to be happy to spend that amount of time using it. And like you say, you know, it could mean huge improvements to voice recognition generally, which could have a huge impact for all sorts of disabilities.
Bex: Yeah. Good stuff.
Greg: [laughs] And for us as well, being able to transcribe things. And Scottish people, of course. Cause there's always that thing about Scottish people struggling to use voice activation. The classic sketch of the two guys in a lift, trying to ask for floor 11. I won't do the accent.
Bex: I really was hoping that you are going to do the accent [laughs]
Greg: No. I’m going to avoid that train wreck.
Harriett: Yeah, I would really love to know why they chose to do this. Just cause I don't believe that Google would choose to do good things.
Greg: But they're so big. This is the thing. It's not like you've got this big corporation called Evil Corp who literally they're like, right guys, let's have a look at all of these projects. If they're not doing some kind of evil, even knowingly or unknowingly, then we're not going to approve it. You know, there's so many different arms of it and they do a lot of research as well. So yeah, this is probably just one of those things where it could have gone horribly wrong but the people that have worked on it, have done really good work.
Harriett: Yeah.
Bex: I feel like it does kind of like link to their products though. It's not completely random. They have Google Hangouts, which does have an integrated speech-to-text feature, which is really great. So this is almost our typical design for the user who has the most needs and it will be better for everybody, sort of thing. Design, accessibility and inclusivity and everybody will benefit from that usually. I feel like this is really deep learning into speech and speech to text and all the stuff around that. So that will help support, hopefully, benefits to more general users as well if that technology could be improved. Maybe.
Greg: Yeah, I wish more tech companies would think like that. Like you said Bex, think about who's the person with the greatest need rather than saying what's the group with the easiest needs and the biggest numbers. Let's meet all those. Let's focus on the group with the greatest need because if we can meet their needs, we can probably meet everybody else's and this is a great example of where if you improve voice recognition to the point where someone with a new neurological disorder, it can be understood, then everybody's going to benefit from that. It’s better way of doing these things.
Harriett: And there's a lot of people that would use your products.
Greg: Exactly. Yeah.
Bex: And also, I don't know what they would do with it, but there is a lot of data sample collection in this project.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: Let’s park that and see what happens. Maybe nothing.
Harriett: That was what was immediately in my mind. As a cynical person, I'm like, oh, right. Okay.
Bex: [laughs]
Harriett: You’re making Google smarter.
Bex: Yup. Yup. On to rant of the week. This is my one this week. I have not had one in a while. But it's not really a rant or a nice. It’s posing a challenge to the industry. So as I was talking about earlier and we talked about it quite a bit I think there's the big quit happening, which is allowing for salary rises and people to negotiate better deals for them. But within the design industry in particular, over the last few years, salaries have skyrocketed. We are in demand. More techy roles and developers have always been highly paid and that's rocketed even further over the last few years as well, which is all great for the individual designer. And I think it's mainly been led by, you know, the big quit has helped skyrocket these kinds of salaries, but also, you know, with the pandemic, a lot of people have been needing technology services more than ever. So a lot of people have been recruited into the tech space, you know, think about Zoom and how big they are now. And so I think, you know, they're able to pay these bigger salaries because they’re selling a lot more products or whatever. So there's that side of things, which is it's the industry, it's the industry reacting to needs and paying designers nicely, which is all great. But my challenge and people who work in the tech for good industry is that as we've heard charities don't have any extra money. So where design salaries are skyrocketing, charity money and budget has gone down and any budget for doing social good has disappeared and it's getting tighter and tighter. So as an agency working in the charity space, we can't really touch higher day rates and actually ethically, we should probably look to lower them but we have to pay higher design salaries to stay relevant in the industry to attract the best talent. I think it's a real challenge. I don't know what the answer is to it yet. I'm experimenting with little teams that can do cheaper work but carving out that space, but ultimately we work across the board on social challenges. We're not a big investment company that can go and get a big evil client and charge them shitloads and then we use that to make cheaper work for charities. That's not the business model. It's not how we want to work. We don't want to work with those big, awful corporates. So yeah, stuck in this weird challenge. I think a lot of similar agencies are in the same space.
Greg: Yeah. And I feel like some of it is, you know, inflated. There's a lot of talk about how many tech companies are overvalued and as a result, you know, I think there are roles within tech companies that are overvalued and certainly, in some sectors, I think wages inflated through various effects and, and routes. I don't want to go into too much detail on that but there's certain areas where I look at how much various design jobs are being paid and I just think how? Like, how are you paying that much?
Bex: Yeah, that's a really good point. I guess I never really got my finger on yet. Whether this is short-term inflation or whether it's going to stick. It's definitely not going to continue at the rate growing at the rate it is. That's impossible. It can't do that. But whether the salary is going to stick or it's going to burst at some point and everyone's gonna go, we're done with our designers now. Sack everybody. There's too many designers and not enough jobs. And everyone needs to take a paycut. Don't know if that's going to happen.
Harriett: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people kind of jumped to the idea that like, oh, well, people on high salaries might then work best days and then use some of their spare time to like, do social grid stuff. My company’s looking at volunteer days for people working in tech, like, can they go out and do something good. But a real issue that we've been grappling with Help A Charity and also just in the tech for good live community, is that those people don't have the kind of experience of the charity sector or the understanding of social issues. So you just end up with like, tech bro led projects where like you've got kind of people that don't understand how social problems like come about, trying to design solutions that just completely don't work. And so it's really tough. It's like you do need to have priority of wages across the board really, so that you don't just end up with the charity sector reliant on the occasional bit of help from someone that doesn't really understand them. Yeah. I just think it's so important to recognize the, like in the charity sector, we talk a lot about lived experience and it's kind of a similar sort of idea to that. Having worked in the charity sector for a long time and worked on the frontline, like doing charity work gives you like an experience, set of experience or like knowledge and experiences, expertise that's like so valuable. But it's just not valued.
Bex: No. And it's a really good point about the pro bono stuff. There is space for it. There absolutely is. I'm not saying people should never volunteer. We run a volunteering project. We clearly believe in it. But as you say, it's not that depth of need sometimes that the charity industry needs. And I'm a big advocate of trying to get skills permanently into the sector. How do we get design skills and a lot of bigger charities ever been able to do that over the last few years and have employed in-house, which has been brilliant to see but yeah, I think generally there's a pay cut there and the more disparate those wages become the harder it's going to be for charities to get that in-house experience and afford agencies. It's all going to become out of reach.
Harriett: And then the question is how do you bring those people together to work together? And not just like for one day? But to have longer-term sustainable relationships. Whether that's mentors, trustees, designers that support a charity over a long period of time. But then of course, at what point are you then just competing with like agencies that are doing that properly? Yes, it's a really hard, hard nut to crack.
Greg: I do wonder with the big resignation, like you were saying Bex, a lot of people kind of looking at the work that they were doing and reassessing their lives. You often see people go into the third sector or kind of social enterprises because they’ve worked in more commercial areas and the money has kind of lost its shine and they want to do something that has a bit more value, so they're happy to take a pay cut.
Bex: And, you know, recruiting for mission is always really important because you get people who care about the same sort of stuff. Right? And that leads into this idea of I'm doing it because I care and not because of the money. But I also worry about the flip side of that. Like, there's like an exploitative nature of, well, we work for charities, so we can't pay you much.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: And that's it. And it feels a bit explosive to do that as well, even though it is the reality of the situation.
Greg: It comes back to that priorities question, you know, what are the societies, governments, large communities. What are their priorities and where did they put their money? You look at football clubs who have got millions, millions, millions of pounds and then, you know, charities who just struggle to make ends meet. That’s where people's priorities are essentially, and that's where the money goes. So it's a tough one. What I hope is, you know, we see more, you know, particularly with climate change and things like being a good organisation become more of a priority. There's a lot more innovation in the UK and social enterprises, social good organisations seem to be more popular now. So I'm hoping that, you know, obviously it doesn't help the charity sector but I'm hoping that through their work, they improve things in general and maybe take some of the load off charities. And they're more likely to work with charities as well in collaborative roles. So then maybe they can bring the expertise but also be making money on the side that helps to balance the cost of designers.
Bex: Oooh, I mean procurement is a whole other conversation. I was talking to an organisation the day that understood the benefits of working with the charity sector. And I think they were talking about digital inclusion and obviously the charity sector is doing a lot of work there. So they understood the benefits of procuring charity sector partners for that but we're also nervous about it because they tended to be less professional and value for money was a little bit difficult with the charity sector because of the inefficiencies within the charity. Which I can see and I could get. But it's chicken and egg, isn't it? Like those charities would be better if you gave him some money, but to give them some money, you have to trust that they're going to get a bit better. And I'm talking about like really tiny organisations. And of course they're not super efficient because they've never had any funding and they've not had budgets to set up a CRM or like anything else, because they've had no money. So it's like a proper cart before horse. But we've moved into like procurement chat now so I'll back off from that.
Harriett: Sorry but I think charities are so efficient.
Bex: Yes, they have to be right [laughs]
Harriett: You know, some of the stuff that people on the ground can achieve and in a community. I worked in the charity sector before for a long time before moving into a design agency, but in the charity sector, I remember doing a piece of user research. I think we interviewed 80 people about this digital product that we were making in a month.
Bex: I was going to say, you did it super quick, right?
Harriett: Just the research was in a month, but we spoke to so many people and we just worked really, really hard but also we were so close to the people, it was really easy to talk to them because you just know a load of people that use your services. So you can just get access to them really quickly. Then you go and work for a design agency and if you speak to five, that's good.
Bex: Oh my God. Five user interviews a day is like, amazing. Yes. A lot of researchers I spoke to recently, like two a day, I do two interviews a day. That's max. Like what?
Harriett: But I mean five in total for a product.
Bex: Yeah.
Harriett: And that's like really normal. And you think, whoa, I mean, our discovery research was about 80 people. And then it was constant testing all the way through. I just think, yeah, charities, they might not have the system, but if they had the tech that could be even better.
Bex: Exactly.
Harriett: But they are the most efficient organisations.
Greg: Look at the likes of Parkinsons. Like, the work that they're doing, the way that they work, the teams that they've got set up, you know, they're not the only ones. There are other ones across the board, both big and small as well. We've just got absolutely brilliant teams and they're doing stuff, like you say, it's rapid. It's really inventive. It's really interesting. I just think, yeah. I think a lot of people who think that they're having a great old time working for some big tech company, they're fooling themselves. It's just going to be, you know, mired in giant organisational goo, that you always get. And actually, if they went to one of these charities, they'd be doing some way more interesting work.
Bex: Yeah. This is such a nice conversation. Thank you both. I'm going to have to cut it off because of the time but I really enjoyed that. Thanks [laughs] That felt not genuine. It was genuine.
Greg: [laughs]
Bex: And finally, I'll let you do this, Greg, because it's weird.
Greg: [laughs] Yeah. So a Chinese farm is using facial recognition tech to stop goats getting incestuous.
Harriett: What?!
Greg: I didn't read the article. I made a point of not reading the article cause I didn't want to ruin it with facts. I just wanted to enjoy that headline of facial recognition tech.
Bex: I’m reading the article and it’s exactly what you think is. I mean, this is a line here that says, they’re developing facial recognition technology for goats to stop them having sex with their relatives. Quite straightforward.
Greg: [laughs] I’m just picturing this like a big room with all these screens and it's like, you know, like Minority report where it's just like checking everyone's face and then an alarm goes off and the guy runs down with a spray bottle and sprays them to stop them rutting.
Bex: [laughs] Cool. Thanks for that Greg.
Greg: That's probably the best use of facial recognition that that is currently out there.
Harriett: I wonder thinking of rolling out across other animal populations.
Greg: [laughs]
Harriet: Why stop at goats?
Greg: [laughs] Very true. Very true.
Bex: That is, unfortunately, all we have time for, but Harriett how did that go? Was it all right?
Harriett: Yeah. Great. Loved it.
Bex: Awesome. Where can people find you on the internet is the main question we ask here.
Harriett: Yes. And it's a good one. I'm on Slack. I'm on the tech for good live slack, which sometimes take people a while to get into. But where can people find me? We'll put a link for the Help The Charity stuff I talked about, we'll put a link in the notes for this podcast. Otherwise, it's just LinkedIn, but I don't really use it. I'm on it but I don't use it.
Greg: Who does?
Harriett: Yeah. I'm like a WhatsApp girl. I don’t really hang out anywhere else.
Bex: Well, will you be back on the podcast? As an official part of the Tech For Good Live team, you are also invited to become a podcast regular. I mean, you don't have to answer now, but the offers there.
Harriett: Yeah.
Bex: Yeah? That's it now. This is a binding contract [laughs] Listeners, what do you think. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch on Twitter at tech for good live or email. Hello at tech for good dot live. We'd love it if you gave us a nice iTunes review and told your mates about this podcast. Thanks to Podcast.co for hosting our podcast. Don't forget we run this as volunteers. And we like to get our podcast episodes transcribed and this does cost money because no one wants to do it cause it's a really boring task. Yeah. It's not something that people want to do as a freebie, so we have to pay for it. And if you want to help us pay for it, please consider chipping in a price of a cup of coffee at tech for good dot live forward slash donate. That's it, we're done. Goodbye.
Greg: Bye.