George Tillo
Organization: The Mix
Website: https://www.themix.org.uk/
Twitter: themixUK
Facebook: The Mix UK
Instagram: themixuk
The Mix was formed from the merger of two charities: YouthNet and Get Connected in 2016. It provides free, confidential multi-channel support through phone, text, web, social and counselling. It connects young people to experts and their peers to talk about everything from homelessness to finding a job, from money to mental health, from break-ups to drugs. We reach 3 million under 25s every year through the technology of their choice. Whatever issue a young person is facing, The Mix is always there for them, providing help, information and support – 24/7 throughout the year.
We aim to grow the number of young people engaging with our service from 3 million to 4 million by 2021 while keeping our cost per intervention to under £1 (currently 66p per young person we support). We are a digital service that excels at early intervention, information delivery, youth engagement and signposting (connecting young people to further sources of support). We base our growth plans in our work to better understand and engage our users along through data led marketing and content strategies, and the use of young volunteers in service delivery (currently 70% of our volunteers are under the age of 30). We further increase our impact by creating strong ongoing support journeys and building bridges between virtual and face-to-face services.
We are funded by trusts and foundations, corporate sponsorship, events fundraising and individual giving. Our 3-year plan will continue to grow income from these traditional sources, and open new areas of funding through the sale of consultancy and white label services. As an organisation, we believe we are well placed to continue to drive down the cost of our core service delivery through the use of digital technologies and the growth of our volunteer led workforce.
The Mix is a charity registered with the UK Charity Commission. We are governed by a Board of Trustees who delegate operational oversight to the CEO and directors of the charity.
The Mix are a small yet digitally ambitious charity. Each year more than 3 million people access our services. We want to enhance our delivery and help those young people get access to bespoke information, support and data as quickly as possible with our limited human resource.
Our challenge to you is to help us create an innovative solution that allows us to disseminate new content to our service users, or for them to immediately find what they are looking for through a service other than simply textual search. We envisage that this could happen through increased use of ‘bot’ based technology – whether that be chat-bots or smart-device bots that people can leverage to digest information from our services. Using key-words in their questions they should be presented with useful information or next steps in how to get help.
We have provided access to our test environment APIs so that you can leverage existing sample data for development.
Relevant Links: https://www.themix.org.uk/
API details: The Mix Code for Good Background Info Doc
This application can be delivered in the form you think appropriate: be that a web application, or smart device intent utilising modern web frameworks or SaaS providers.
To help you create an innovative application; Amazon Web Services, Google’s various cloud APIs, IBM Watson, Azure, or other providers can be leveraged. You should investigate the various chat-bot and smart-device offerings available and what meaningful learning they can provide based on previous intent – for example Workplace by Facebook, Facebook Messenger bots and Apple Business Chat could all provide valuable research as well as Amazon Alexa or Google voice APIs where you can leverage test environments.
git clone https://github.com/London18/team-19
cd team-19
npm install
node ./bin/www