Digital Education

Digital Makers: The Campaign Trail

Tom Kenyon - 01.10.2012

October is a busy month here at Nesta Towers. The summer's officially over, the Olympic flame has moved on and Plan I has been published. Which means we're all now racing to Get Things Done. Number one on my list has been moving on our plans to build a public facing campaign driving demand for the Digital Makers movement.

In early September I put out an invitation to tender for agencies to help us build a campaign brand and a website to drive demand and participation in digital making activities from young people. It's a fun and important brief, but I was overwhelmed by the response we had.

The end of last week was by turns exciting and exhausting working through nearly 20 applications from agencies big and small. The exciting part was reading the genuine passion from very different organisations who wanted to be part of this message.  I know, I know, there's money and a contract at stake - and the people writing the briefs sell things for a living. I know all that. But still, I used to write a fair few of these things myself - on your fourth page of public-spending-mandated questions, it's hard to keep up the energy unless you really have something to say.

So I'd like to say thank you to everyone who applied. If, as I suspect many of you do, you care about moving young people from being just consumers to being creators of digital technologies then keep in touch. There are things you can do to spread the word, and there will be opportunities in the future to work with Nesta, Nominet Trust and our other partner organisations.

Finally, I'd like to say thank you to Numiko, the agency we've appointed. Their energy and enthusiasm shone through.  David, who made the pitch is already part of this world, busy teaching his son to programme, make and tinker with technology. Numiko also had a unique take on identifying with a young audience focused on helping them to make one more step on the digital making road, no matter where they join it.

Our next challenge is to make the creative process of designing this campaign as open as possible, while still moving quickly. We're meeting this Wednesday to kick off the project, and right from the start we want to open up the conversation to a broader audience whether that's through wikis, basecamp, conference calls or etherpads. Ideas on a postcard please (or Tom.kenyon@nesta.org.uk / @mrtkenyon whichever's quicker).