OPEN

Commissioned by digital agency Soup, we were asked to help youth charity Open to get a handle on young people's (13-18 year olds) digital preferences and, crucially, how Open can use online and on-mobile comms to compliment their town centre youth venue offering.

Using focus groups, desk research and an online panel, we explored the issue from a macro level - highlighting examples of relevant digital innovation from around the world, outlining youth attitudes to various features and services, assessing online offerings from other charities. And we got into specifics - testing concepts, looking at how Open's website can segue with favoured social media like Bebo, evaluating the popularity of online booking mechanisms, QR codes, location based services and web-based mentoring. Our work will play a role in Soup's digital strategy and website build for Open in 2009.

"We asked Crowd DNA to help us and our client Open to understand the  best approach to communicating with young people. They produced a great body of evidence from various research methods about content, technology and language that relates directly to our audience. Crowd then followed this up with some direct research about how to apply this understanding to our proposed online community. The results helped us take the guess work out of engaging with young people to great effect. Brilliant work." Steven Bennett-Day, creative director at Soup