FLiP

What is it?

FLiP from commonground and White October is an online platform that lets young people who are not in employment or training build a personal profile based on feedback from their peers. This helps them communicate their strengths more effectively and connect with relevant opportunities.

The platform is aimed young people aged 16 to 19 who have few or no qualifications and are struggling to find employment or training. Young people use FLiP to rate their abilities across a number of key areas such as reliability, organisation and decision making skills. Using social media channels such as Facebook and email they can also invite family, friends and mentors to rate them as well.

FLiP anonymously aggregates the results of this crowd-sourced assessment and a builds a private dashboard where young people can compare results and highlight their strengths. Young people can then publish and download their online public profile to accompany their CV or application form and prepare for potential interviews.

How the idea developed

The idea for FLiP came out of the Jailbrake weekend that NESTA ran with the Social Innovation Camp in 2010 where it was apparent to the team that young people could talk about their friends' strengths with much more clarity and confidence than talking about their own. Using the concept model that was built at the event, commonground adopted a design-led approach and worked directly with young people to co-design a prototype that helped them figure out what they are good at. Alongside this they worked with recruiters and training providers to understand what information they found valuable.

Prototyping highlighted that users were confused by FLiP because it did multiple things - it provided a crowd-sourced strength assessment, it connected people to job and training opportunities and it helped people boost their CV. As a result it was unclear why they should use the tool. In response to this feedback commonground decided to separate out the offers which led to them developing two versions of FLiP:

• Flip Yourself - www.flipyourself.co.uk - uses the online strengths assessment to match young people with suitable job or training opportunities.
• Flip Profiles - www.flipprofiles.co.uk - uses the online strengths assessment to help young people communicate their strengths and improve their CV.

Through Nesta's Reboot Britain programme commonground received £39,000 to develop a working prototype of FLiP.  

Latest news (as at 20 August 2012) 

After two years of concept development and prototyping, FLiP have recently been awarded funding from Nominet Trust that will allow them to set up the new enterprise and start to scale to a regional and then national level. They have also recently entered a partnership with the Prince's Trust XL Programme who have agreed to let the team roll out FLiP through their youth clubs, and UK Youth who have agreed to signpost their member organisations to the platform. 

Want to know more?

Bruno Taylor, commonground Founder - bruno@gotocommonground.com