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Jim Fruchterman

July 16, 2024

Tech for child helplines

Child Helpline International Meeting

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The future of tech for

child helplines is: humans!

Replacing human counselors is not likely or desirable. How can we use technology to increase human efficiency and amplify impact?

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AI is not where to begin your data journey.

Walk before running

Start by building up datasets and experience with data. Then, identify bottlenecks, and then do the math.

AI is not easy to apply to the programmatic work of helplines. Maybe it is helpful for administrative tasks like improving grant proposals, or fund raising research. But applying AI to the core work of helplines is something you do after you do the prerequisites. First, you need to be collecting data about helpline operations and using that data. Maybe you use it for planning your staffing levels, or doing quality control and training with your counselors. Maybe you use data for advocacy, advocacy for policy change or for more funding. Once you have data, and are skilled with using your data, opportunities to use AI will become more apparent (and realistic!). You will also need someone who is technical to accompany you on your data journey. A very few helplines do this work themselves in-house, but it’s much more typical to find a tech partner. Of course, our team at Tech Matters hopes to be one of the tech partners you consider. You also have to do the math: it has to make sense financially. It usually isn’t great to spend $300,000 on an AI project which will save you $30,000 of labor time a year. One of the best ways to find AI applications is to look for human drudgery, and help automate that.

Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@micheile?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">micheile henderson</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/green-plant-in-clear-glass-vase-ZVprbBmT8QA?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a>

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Protect & Secure�Your Data

Helplines often have incredible data, which can be used for AI training in the future – especially for national languages.

A Better Deal for Data:

Tech Matters is working with CHI/helplines to set best practices.

As nonprofits and government agencies, we have a responsibility to protect the children we serve. We all have child safeguarding policies: you also need to think about how to safeguard the data of children to avoid data-related harms.

Child helplines tend to have a lot of data about children, which can be very useful for data and AI. For example, current AI solutions are not trained on the data of children, and not on the data of 90+% of humans generally. It might be that your helpline is one of the larger sources of information about your national languages other than that in the hands of the big tech companies (which are less likely to share it for the benefit of nonprofits and your country). The Tech Matters team and I are working with CHI and member helplines on something we call the Better Deal for Data, a set of ethical and practical principles about how to use data responsibly and for the benefit of those we serve.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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Exciting opportunities ahead

Hearing the Voice of a Child

Saving human counselors time:

Handling routine tasks
Routing and triage
Speeding data collection
Supporting and training

Tech is going to be doing so much for helplines in the coming years.

Hearing the Voice of the Child (CHI data exploration)
Saving human counselors time

Handling routine tasks (information provision)
Routing and triage
Speeding data collection
Supporting and training

And many other tasks where the benefits outweigh the costs!

We, and other tech partners to helplines, expect to be working on all of these and other opportunities to improve helpline services. Part of our role as CHI’s tech partner is support the goals of CHI and all of its members, by developing open source solutions to improve their work. Free open source which might inform something you choose to pursue, whether or not you are working directly with Tech Matters or not. So, let’s talk more about the CHI/TM partnership.

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Power of the �network

Innovations and learnings.

We believe that many of the exciting innovations for child helplines are being pioneered by the helplines themselves. The rest of this session will talk about some of these innovations. But, few helplines are in the position to provide software to their peers. That’s why organizations like Tech Matters and ReflexAI exist: to spread these innovations more widely, and make them useful to a wider array of helplines. And we find CHI member helplines very generous when it comes to helping their peers and spread innovations more widely.

You will also learn what doesn’t work from your peers in the network. Whether it’s the failure of Tessa for NEDA, or do’es and don’t when it comes to chatbots, your peers are an indispensable part of the effort to use tech effectively.

As CHI’s open source partner, we’d love to support your helpline. But, more importantly, we are unusual in that we care about all helplines, and we share all of our work openly.

We’ve added the channels where child are, beyond voice
We’ve made it easier to submit the annual survey reports to CHI
We expect to support the more ambitious plans ahead, including AI

We want to build AI models which can work for all members, not just those in North America. For example, we are working with a North American CHI member as well as with members in Jamaica, Zambia and Zimbabwe on topic recognition. We’ll be sharing what we learn with the network.

Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@vishal9950?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Vishal Vasnani</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/gray-metal-ceiling-QMhF0-q8oKg?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a>

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Thank You!