Mobile phone’s just the job for Brixton’s Employment Cafe

The drive towards electronic government to meet 2005 targets has, so far, focused overwhelmingly on online service delivery. Councils have spent millions ensuring their websites are accessible and usable, while further money has been spent putting PCs in schools and libraries, so that, in theory at least, we all have access to the web.

Yet having access to the web doesn’t mean we will use it. Digital divide research has shown there will always be people who don’t have, or more importantly, don’t want to use the Internet. These are the people who are hardest to reach, so how do we target them?

Ros Griffiths, founder of Brixton’s Employment Café, thinks she has a possible answer. “What if we changed the medium? What if services were accessible via a technology that is carried around for 16 hours a day, by 90% of the UK population?” That technology is the mobile phone and the Employment Café’s simple service means that once a client has registered their details, they will receive personalised job alerts via their handset.

The decision to target mobile phones was initially customer-driven, says Ros. “We were finding that when people gave their contact details they provided a mobile number rather than a landline. Now for us to call a mobile is not cost effective, but it is to send out text alerts.”

The idea attracted the attention of the local council, Lambeth, which despite being the largest single employer in the borough, was finding it hard to connect with the local community. Lambeth has since commissioned Employment Café to customised their website to incorporate a text messaging infrastructure that will enable them to send job information in real-time direct to the local job seeker.

“It fits in with Lambeth’s objectives and responsibilities, particularly as it high unemployment. Our service lets the council contact 280,000 (Lambeth’s population) potential employees.”

Apart from helping the council interact more effectively with the local community, it also helps target young people, a group notoriously difficult to reach. “You cannot use traditional methods to attract 16-24 year olds,” Ros explains. “They vote for Pop Idol, not the government!”

It also changes the very nature of ‘looking’ for a job. “Instead of people looking for work, work looks for them,” explains Ros. “It’s like speed dating, but instead of matching people with people, we’re matching people with jobs.”

The service is the first of its kind, and the Employment Café has attracted visitors from as far away as Holland, and the US, as well as politicians and companies in the UK. Ros is understandably proud to be a pioneer, as she says: “The Employment café is leading with mobile technology in the public sector, tackling key issues that have been talked about for 10 years.“

“Our solution tackles both social and digital exclusion. Soon we won’t be talking about e-Government we’ll be talking about m-Government,” she concludes. “Remember where you heard it first!”

For further information, contact:

Yaa Kufuor

Project Manager

info@employment-café.co.uk

Tel: 020 7733 8878

Web address: www.employment-café.co.uk

Employment Café will be showcasing their text messaging service in the Digital Inclusion workshop at the London e-Gov Conference on 6 July.

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