There has been growing media coverage of Payment by Results schemes since the New Year, both here and abroad (particularly the USA, Canada and Australia). I’ve updated the free to download PbR resource pack three times this week already. There has been a proliferation of schemes with many scheduled to start delivery in 2012.

The PbR approach brings fundamental changes to the way Government Departments commission and pay for public services. This has led to speculation and discussion of a wide range of issues on this Blog and elsewhere, particularly around payment mechanisms and potential private-statutory-voluntary sector partnerships.

However, blogging has one main drawback – most visitors are much more interested in reading posts than commenting on them with the majority of debates taking place offline.

This blog is pretty typical. It’s had over 5,000 different visitors since its launch in September 2011 and more than 30,000 page views, but only 70 people have posted comments.

Therefore, as a way of broadening the debate about Payment by Results, I have decided to do a series of short (5 minute) video interviews with key figures involved in PbR and host them on the blog.

I’m hoping to interview representatives of Government Departments, commissioners and providers (both private and charitable) and key “others” such as Social Finance, who have developed Social Impact Bonds as a way of funding PbR initiatives.

For once, I won’t be having any editorial input, just giving the interviewees the opportunity to present their views on key PbR topics.

I’m very keen to get the questions right, so would love your views on what they should be.

In order to keep the videos watchable, I am going to aim to stick to the five minute limit. This means that after an initial 30 second introduction for interviewees to say who they are and describe their involvement in PbR, there is probably an absolute maximum of five questions.

Here’s my initial list:

1. Do you think PbR has improved service delivery for clients/offenders/service users – and why?
2. Do you think the outcome measures for the PbR schemes you are involved in are the right ones?
3. What have been the main advantages of PbR for your organisation?
4. What have been the main disadvantages of PbR for your organisation?
5. Do you think PbR will be a common way of commissioning (procuring?) public services in three years’ time – and why?

I’m very keen to get readers views. Please tell me what you think I should be asking.

You can comment below or get in touch via Twitter @russwebt. Please send in your ideas for who you’d like to see interviewed too.

“Offenders with drink problems face US-style tagging“

“London’s Drunk Criminals Wear Tags That Track Sobriety“

“Sobriety bracelets’ to fight crime in London“

Just a selection of some of the newspaper headlines this weekend, typically accompanied by pictures of Lindsay Lohan, reporting the latest populist schemes to tackle alcohol-related crime – tagging offenders with “sobriety bracelets”.

The bracelets monitor blood alcohol levels electronically and transmit results to a base station every 30 minutes. If offenders wearing the bracelet drink alcohol, they are liable for arrest.

The stories themselves are confusing because they mix up details for two different schemes: one in London, one in Scotland; one aimed at repeat low level offenders and one at those convicted of more serious alcohol-related crime.

Even a careful reading of Boris Johnson’s official press release fails to clarify the details of the London pilot. I have a number of concerns about the scheme:

Is it realistic to enforce instant abstinence on dependent drinkers?

Drug rehabilitation requirements allow for offenders to reduce their addiction over time, individuals are not instantly breached if they test positive.

What is the legal rationale for punishing people for drinking alcohol?

It is not illegal to drink, should we be criminalising alcohol use?

How can punishment by itself be effective?

There are no details (and certainly no funding stream) to provide alcohol treatment to help offenders stop using alcohol.

However, without clearer details, I will have to wait to explore these issues in a future post. At the moment, the lack of proper information encourages me to see the plans as more to do with the Mayor’s re-election campaign than as an effective response to alcohol-related crime. The initiative reminds me of Bori’s first ever mayoral announcement – the ban on consuming alcohol on the tube.

The press release does, however, make it clear that the scheme requires the passing of national legislation and that amendments were being made in the House of Lords last week to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill for this purpose.

One aspect of the plans which received no press coverage was the fact that offenders will be forced to pay for the testing process themselves. Again, details are lacking, but it is interested to speculate on the payment method:

Will offenders rent the sobriety bracelet on a monthly basis?

Do they only have to pay for tests that confirm they have been drinking?

Will the benefit system pay for the bracelet for the large number of alcohol-dependent offenders who are unemployed?

Or, is the scheme only open to those in work?

Can they buy the bracelet outright at the end of their order?

I definitely think there is potential for a payment by results approach…

Facebook has become a key tool in police investigations.

Police routinely access suspects’ Facebook pages to look at recent activities and establish connections between offenders or offender and victim.

Facebook helps police make arrests.

Tracking on Facebook can often help police anticipate a wanted person’s whereabouts and expedite arrest.

Facebook is the reason for collapse of a growing number of prosecutions.

However, the use of Facebook by victims and witnesses has resulted in many identity parades being declared inadmissible in court.

Facebook is a mixed blessing for law enforcement

All new technologies prompt a renewal of the battle between law enforcement agencies and the criminals they seek to detect, arrest and prosecute. The advent of social media has resulted in a period of rapid adaptation in both detection and avoidance techniques.

So powerful has Facebook become as an investigation tool (leaving aside the all too common cases where offenders openly brag about their crimes on Fb posts) that many civilians routinely employ it. Human Resource departments have been quick learners – there are probably now thousands of people in the UK who have lost their jobs when they rang in sick but were well enough to post on Facebook about the fantastic night out they had.

There was an interesting story last week about a Lancashire man who succeeded in identifying the two soldiers who assaulted him by trawling through Facebook accounts of mutual friends. His online “detective” work resulted in arrest and prosecution.

However, although Facebook has greatly enhanced the police’s capacity for effective investigation and arrest, it has proved to be an obstruction in a number of cases where proving identity is key.

The Police Federation National Detective Forum revealed that a number of trials have collapsed after victims and witnesses conducted their own online investigations, browsing Facebook and Twitter to learn more details about the accused.

This is particularly prevalent when a witness or victim has looked up the accused on Facebook prior to an identity parade or trial. In these situations, they are identifying the defendant from their Facebook photo rather than from the time of the offence.

There was a well reported incident at Bristol Crown Court last summer when the judge invited the jury to return a not guilty verdict in a burglary trial. In this case the victim’s neighbour suspected her own grandson of committing the offence and told the victim. Unfortunately the victim herself looked up the grandson on Facebook prior to identifying him from a video identity parade leading to the judge ruling that there was a strong danger of mistaken identity.

My legal Twitter friends @TooManyBlueys,  @LifeinCustody, @nedbar1  and @btemplaw tell me that this is increasingly common with defence counsel routinely asking:

“Have you looked at the defendant’s Facebook page?” in order to get evidence dismissed.

It will be interesting to see what strategies police and prosecutors adapt to preserve the integrity of the identity parade.

The interesting thing about PbR schemes is that they are supposed to be all about finding creative solutions to entrenched social problems which actually work.

But when you look at most of the articles and opinion pieces, you find they are much more preoccupied with how to measure the results accurately and prevent provider organisations from gaming the system.

That’s why the First Commandment of Payment by Results schemes is “thou shall not pay twice”. PbR schemes are carefully designed not to pay for outcomes that would have happened anyway.

Sometimes this preoccupation goes too far and the concern about measuring outcomes accurately interferes with the operation of the project itself.

To my mind the Kent Drug Recovery PbR pilot is a case in point.

The pilot has been thoughtfully designed so that only one quarter of the provider’s income is paid from successful results in the first year (2012/3) with this proportion increasing by stages to a point in 2015/16 when 60% of the contract is on a payment by results basis. The outcome definitions prioritise recovery from drug dependence with a smaller payment for reduction of offending.

Great care has been taken to try to reflect the range and extent of substance misuse problems which new service users will present. Clearly a person with a long term heroin, crack and alcohol dependency exacerbated by mental health problems will require much longer and more intensive treatment than someone concerned about their level of cannabis use.

For this reason, Kent Drug and Alcohol Action Team has designed a five tariff band with accompanying values:

However, in its desire to prevent gaming, Kent DAAT has decided that it cannot trust its service provider to do the initial assessment and allocate new service users to one of these bands – presumably fearing that the temptation to classify someone that needs a brief intervention on the “critical case”" tariff would be too overwhelming.

Therefore the initial assessment of need and tariff is done by a separate agency which is independent of the substance misuse treatment system.

And this is where the payment metrics have been allowed to distort the effective operation of the scheme. My experience, and that of many other drug researchers, is that the number one complaint of drug users trying to access the treatment system is that they are repeatedly offered assessments instead of being provided with treatment.

This fact was formally acknowledged by the National Treatment Agency back in 2002 when it introduced its “Models of Care” guidance aimed at developing treatment systems whose priority was to match service users to the most appropriate service for them as swiftly as possible.

For many service users, it requires a significant effort of will and courage to admit you need help and make an initial appointment at a treatment service. After disclosing what for many is a painful, sometimes shameful and embarrassing, life story to a total stranger, most do not want to hear that they need to repeat the process to a totally new worker the following week.

We know from our day-to-day lives that our first impressions of an organisation are critical. Indeed most drug treatment agencies provide their staff with sophisticated training on how best to engage service users and build and develop motivation from a first contact.

Designing the front door to a treatment system as a porch is surely a mistake which will reduce take-up of services.

This mistake is not the only one. There is a consensus in the drug treatment field, shared by commissioners, providers and service users, that assessment is not a one-off activity but a continuous process undertaken by worker and service user in collaboration which develops and fine tunes each individual care plan.

What happens when a service user who has been classified as having moderate needs discloses after 6 sessions that they have much more serious problems – can the worker act, or must s/he wait for a re-classification assessment?

It seems to me that the commissioners and designers of PbR schemes need their own version of the Hippocratic Oath which all doctors take:

“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.”

The Second Commandment of PbR is: First, do no harm.

The recent publicity campaigns promoting the new 101 Police telephone number have all been at pains to emphasise that the number should not be used in an emergency.

But 999 (911 in the USA, 000 in Australia) is not the only way to contact Police in an emergency. Indeed, the US Government has started to put in a place a system which allows members of the public to text or send multi-media messages to call for help.

Recently, I have come across a number of stories of people using Facebook to contact the police in an emergency.

Some of these stories are bizarre, as Facebook police stories often are.

For instance, a 29-year-old woman in Minnesota posted to Facebook in January this year that she was being threatened with a gun. Her Facebook friends picked up on this and called the police. When they got to the address, they found a man with a shot gun who had been threatening the Facebook poster. He was duly arrested – and so was she. It turned out that he was threatening her because she had stolen some of the drugs in his house. Since she was wanted on a warrant and was a suspect for two drug-related crimes, the Facebook poster ended up in custody too.

So focused are many young people on their Facebook status, that they forget about other means of communication. Take the case of two young girls (age 10 and 12) who were trapped in a storm drain in Adelaide, Australia back in 2009. Instead of simply dialling “000″, they used their mobile phones to update their status on Facebook to report their predicament. Fortunately, one of their Facebook friends called emergency services. You can read the full story here.

However, in some domestic violence situations Facebook has been the only way for people in danger to contact the police.

Just before Christmas in Wyoming, a man seriously assaulted his partner and would not let her leave the house, taking her mobile phone away. Several hours later, he fell asleep and she took her laptop to the bathroom and updated her Facebook status:

“So not a joke…Please before he wakes up please help me he took all the phones and my purse and won’t let me out the door he beat…me help.”

One of her Facebook friends contacted the police and the perpetrator was duly arrested. Further details here.

Facebook came to the rescue again in an even more serious case two weeks later in Sandy, Utah. A man who had previously been imprisoned for assaulting his partner returned to her home on release and imprisoned her and her son for a period of five days while submitting her to continual assaults.

Again, he had destroyed her mobile phone and prevented her from leaving the house. After five days she was able, eventually, to hide in a closet and update her Facebook status. In this case, the Facebook friends who picked up her posts only knew her in the virtual world and it took them some time to work out her address. Fortunately they succeeded and the police were able to make an arrest before the situation became fatal.

The video below gives the whole story:

Is it time to allow the public to contact emergency services by social networks? Most police services emphasise on their Facebook pages that social media should not be used to report crimes or emergency situations, for the obvious reason that social media pages are not monitored in real time.

However, the virtual culture is so integrated into many, particularly young people’s, way of communicating with the world that last year the US Federal Communications Commission announced that it was developing plans to allow members of the public to contact the 911 number by text and multimedia messages. This initiative will require significant upgrading of equipment and systems and is not expected to be available for another 5-10 years.

One of the big advantages of this approach is that it will enable first responders to see photos and videos of an accident en route to the scene and to be prepared for the situation that faces them.

Will we see similar developments in the UK?

The last time I blogged about the police use of social media, I was amazed that so many police officers were active users of Twitter – there were 556 back on 19 September 2011.

I was so surprised at what was a new phenomenon to me that I coined a new phrase – #Twoppers – for Coppers who tweet.

Just four months on and the speed with which police forces across Britain have adopted social media has continued to accelerate. The #iPlod generation, as I now think of them, (thanks @TheCustodySgt) currently numbers 779.

@NickKeane, the digital engagement adviser at the National Policing Improvement Agency, is the man who keeps score. So comprehensively have police services embraced Twitter that Nick  maintains eight different lists; in addition to UKCOPs who Tweet, there are City Centre Cops, Helicops, Corporate Force Twitter Accounts, not forgetting spoof accounts (of whom @SirIanBlair is my favourite).

But Tweeting is now just one example of how police use social media.

@SuptMarkPayne posted on his blog last week about the growing consensus that the police need to integrate social media into traditional policing in three key areas:

• Engagement
• Intelligence and
• Investigation

Certainly engagement with the public is the primary aim of most iPlods. I posted previously about how those police areas who had built up extensive Twitter followings were able to use the micro-blogging channel to ensure that accurate information was relayed to the public during the riots. Safer Neighbourhood Teams in a number of areas are also using online web-based surveys to consult with local communities.

The use of social media for intelligence and investigation purposes has really taken off over the last few months, stimulated by the posting of CCTV footage online in the wake of the riots.

Police chiefs have quickly understood the power of social media – and the fact that it is relatively inexpensive. West Midlands Police, where Superintendent Payne works, has an online directory which details the hundreds of official police Twitter accounts, dozens of Facebook pages, plus their Youtube and Flickr channels.

This online presence has immediate public appeal – why watch “Police, Camera, Action” when you can see your local police in action down the streets you know. Most of the hundreds of videos depict police successes, or give information about major inquiries or crime prevention campaigns.; essentially more engagement work. Flickr is being used in a similar fashion, West Midlands are currently posting a new photo every day to depict different facets of local police work.

The local Facebook pages also provide information about local issues interspersed with appeals for intelligence on local crimes.

Sussex Police have a similar approach, even trying to attract people to their Google+ account, although like most of us they are waiting for the platform to take off in the UK. Like West Midlands they have used social media as a way of engaging with local communities and communicating the breadth of work that the police undertake.

The force launched its Sussex Police People transparency initiative at the end of October 2011, a year long campaign to open up the workings of the police to local people via live video, webchats, Twitter and Blogs. I am particularly impressed by the Blogs which follow the working lives of 12 police staff with very different roles. Where I think Sussex Police have got it right is that almost all the bloggers are front-line staff, not senior officers, including a PCSO, Scenes of Crime Officer and someone working at the Contact Centre.

The investigative uses of social media understandably receive less publicity, but accessing suspects’ Facebook pages to uncover connections and get a picture of recent movements is now standard practice.

Of course digital innovation provides challenges too. I call in evidence @Dietjustice‘s blog post on an officer’s confrontation with a keen legal student with a headcam. iPlods, and indeed many more of us who are not serving officers, may like to replace the phrase “keen legal student” with other, more Anglo-Saxon terms afterviewing the video – don’t miss it unless you are an officer with high blood pressure.

Many of us think of the Police as an organisation which is inherently bureaucratic and conservative, with both a small and large C – although Theresa May has done her best to balance up party political support across the ranks. But the speed with which it has embraced social media – and put it to effective use – has been impressive.

Three years ago Superintendent Payne found there was nowhere within the entire West Midlands Police Force where he could access the Youtube footage he needed to watch to further his investigation into a serious assault, now the force has a dedicated channel of its own hosting hundreds of videos.

New technology has been embraced by the police and the criminals it seeks to detect. At the current point of time, I have to say that the iPlods are making faster progress.

]]> http://www.russellwebster.com/talking-about-the-iplod-generation/feed/ 1 http://www.russellwebster.com/its-payback-time/ http://www.russellwebster.com/its-payback-time/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:20:36 +0000 Russell Webster http://www.russellwebster.com/?p=1805

Read the full post here]]>

For most organisations, websites are their shop window – the face they show to the world. Most of us now, when we need to find out about any sort of business or company – private, public or voluntary – head straight to Google and search for their website – often in the expectation that it will show up in the search bar before we have finished typing.

I have at least a couple of conversations a week when I am urging Probation Trusts to overhaul their websites, update their content and make it more interactive and online-friendly; the critical first step before integrating social media so that website visitors can disseminate Trusts’ work for them. Sometimes, I get an uninterested response:

“What’s the point – we’ve analysed our hits and most of them are people looking for a job or wanting to make a complaint?”

If we set aside the argument that if there was decent content and probation trusts publicised their work more, they would get a lot more traffic, we are still faced with a fundamental problem.

In real life, as well as online, one of the key reasons that people don’t know what the probation service does is that they can’t approach it for a service.

Any member of the public can call or visit the police, Youth Offending Service, housing department, environmental health etc. and request help.

If you ring your local probation service and ask for help with your son, brother, friend or whoever because they are getting into trouble, you’ll be politely told there’s nothing they can do. You can’t ask for probation – you’re put on it.

The fact that people can’t get a service is one of the key reasons that the work of probation is so  little known.

And that’s why Community Payback is so vital to probation’s public image. First, you can actually nominate work that you would like offenders on Community Payback to do – provided that it advantages the community in some way. Secondly, you can see offenders at work in a public place under the supervision of the probation service and, if the project is local to you, witness what a real difference can be made. There is an ongoing debate about whether Community Payback (which used to be known as Community Service before being called Community Punishment for a period) is primarily about punishment, the public shaming of criminals or restorative justice.

Nevertheless, there is certainly a strong consensus amongst probation trusts that the more worthwhile CP schemes require some level of skill and commitment and result in real community improvements, rather than merely litter-picking. The best schemes, such as the Plus Programme run by Leicestershire Probation involve gaining qualifications in employable skills such as gardening.

The Prison Reform Trust published a paper in the wake of the August riots which found that public support for CP had increased from 54% in 2006 to 76% in 2011.

It is therefore no surprise that Probation Trusts publicise the Community Payback projects undertaken by their offenders in a number of ways.

Some use Twitter to point up the scale of the work:

Others highlight the contribution that Community Payback makes to the local charitable sector:

A number of trusts, such as Merseyside, put Community Payback stories prominently on their websites with before and after pictures

Some Trusts – such as York & North Yorkshire and Lancashire – went a step forward and made a video to explain what CP is all about:

As my contribution, I have curated an online magazine featuring some of the best examples of how Probation Trusts publicise their Community Payback work – the public face 0f the probation service. They include articles, interviews with beneficiaries, videos and a whole lot more as you can see below:

So, we know that there is a good range of online-friendly information about Community Payback on Probation Trust websites – the challenge is to make sure that content has an audience. Perhaps the first target group is local community and voluntary sector projects who would like to avail themselves of unpaid work to help their organisations, and, therefore, the wide community.

Most local areas have Councils of Voluntary Services or equivalent umbrella groups who typically send out monthly or quarterly electronic newsletters. It is a simple job for trusts to get details of how to nominate a community payback in these.

But, as well as a phone number, make sure there is a link to the CP section of your website and an invitation to follow your Trust on Twitter.

As all of Oxford Street knows, getting your shop window right can attract a lot of business.

Probation Trusts can attract a much bigger audience by presenting the impact of their Community Payback work on their homepage.

It’s indicative of the high level of interest in payment by results that last night’s seminar at the Academy for Justice Commissioning attracted a full house who stayed till the end  despite a light breaking through the Ministry of Justice conference suite ceiling where it remained, dangling over the MC’s head, for the duration of the event.

The presentation focused on the design, financing and operation of the ONE Service, the PbR scheme which seeks to reintegrate short term prisoners released from HMP Peterborough into the community without reoffending. The speakers were:

• Toby Eccles founder of @SocFinUk, who arranged the Social Impact Bond which finances the scheme.
• Rob Owen, Chief Executive of @StGilesTrust, who run the ONE service.
• Roger Hill and Liz Diamond from @Sodexo_UK who operate the prison.

Despite most of the audience being very well versed in Social Impact Bonds and the service model operated by the ONE Project, the seminar still succeeded in being interesting.

There was of course the inevitable debate on whether reoffending outcomes should be measured on a binary – has someone re-offended? – or frequency – has someone re-offended less than predicted? – basis that has been covered at length in this Blog.

More interesting were Roger Hill’s thoughts on the challenge for prisons of being paid on re-offending rates when their primary focus has always been to produce good prisoners rather than good citizens. I know from my experience advising the Home Office on the development of prison-based drug treatment Counselling, Assessment , Referral, Advice and Throughcare (CARAT) teams in the late 1990s what a cultural challenge it was for prisons to think about life outside the prison gate, let alone spend resources there.

The PbR scheme at HMP Doncaster  where the private contractor, Serco, in partnership with @TurningPointUK and @Catch22Charity run another resettlement scheme has advantages over the Peterborough scheme because the prison needs to reduce re-offending rates by 5% to keep its contract (and can gain bonus payments if it reduces them more substantially).

The contract for Sodexo at HMP Peterborough is not based on PbR but is monitored via a set of targets all focused on the internal operation of the prison. Indeed the contractual requirements on data protection actually make it very difficult for St Giles staff who cannot transport case files in and out of the prison.

If PbR resettlement schemes become the norm, with all prisons’ performance measured by their success in bringing re-offending rates down, there would be tremendous benefits in directing their entire focus on the rehabilitation rather than the warehousing of prisoners.

Another topic of interest was just how pivotal a role the peer advisers play in the Peterborough scheme. Peer advisers are prisoners trained by St Giles Trust to NVQ Level 3 to support and encourage short term prisoners on the ONE scheme. It is this peer approach  which is largely responsible for over 90% of eligible prisoners signing up for the ONE Scheme despite the average stay inside of only seven weeks.

The final point of interest was the consensus in the room about the challenges of working with short term prisoners. On the one hand, there was agreement that this group, with a history of repeat offending and multiple problems, were a very challenging group to worth with – not least because of their worsening accommodation and employment prospects in the current economic environment. However, most of the audience also felt that organisations working with them had the great advantage of not being restricted by the bureaucratic compliance arrangements that went with working with longer term prisoners who were subject to statutory supervision.

It did make me think that the probation and police services have a great case to argue that their Integrated Offender Management schemes – which typically include short term prisoners – should be funded on a PbR basis. At present, IOM schemes have to function in the absence of any dedicated funding stream.

I am writing this post to celebrate the launch of the new @UTurntraining smartphone app which is dedicated to preventing deaths caused by opiate overdoses. The app was launched on 16 January 2012 and is available for download from the Android marketplace for the sum of £1.99. The iPhone version is already under development.

Back in October, I wrote a post speculating on whether a smartphone app could be developed to tackle drug overdoses. My idea was based on the fact that people who overdose on heroin or other opiates often have drug using friends with them who are too scared to call 999 for fear of police involvement. I wondered whether an app could be developed which used a smartphone’s GPS capacity to dial emergency services and direct paramedics to the location of the overdosed person.

Within a couple of days, the harm reduction community had got in touch to let me know that UTurn Training had not only had a better version of the same idea but had invested a great deal of time, effort and money on developing just such an app. They tell the full story on their own website but were kind enough to keep me up-to-date on the process and send me a beta version of the app.

The app itself has three key sections:

1. A guide to recognising and preventing opiate overdoses
2. An emergency section which talks users through the process of what to do in the case of an overdose
3. A resource section for more information and support

Many people who download the app will be family members or friends of dependent heroin users who are fearful of finding their loved one overdosed. Section one does a great job in informing people about the main issues so that they know what causes opiate overdoses and what to do in the event:

The emergency guide itself was painstakingly developed with the help of many harm reduction professionals (particularly @PatoHare1) and input from dozens of drug users. It uses simple step by step diagrams with voice guidance to talk people through getting help, administering naloxone if available and giving CPR. One of the challenges was to get the right voice that everyone could hear clearly, and which was reading out instructions at the right speed – not so fast that they couldn’t be followed, not so slow as to be distracting to someone in a state of fear and anxiety as they tried to save a life. The app developer @okodigital was critical in getting this process right.

Throughout the whole development process, U-Turn Training kept consulting with opiate users and experts in the field. Their reviews have been encouraging with many pharmacies and drug treatment agencies saying that they thought the app would be an effective training tool for staff and drug users on how to manage overdoses.

The app is considered to have such potential that it has been entered for the Megas, the Guardian Digital Innovation Awards 2012 in the “Best Use of Technology for Social Change” category.

Even though I became aware of the development process late in the day, I do know how much work was required to ensure that the app was fit for purpose and functioned in critical overdose situations. Of course, all that hard work (and money) will be wasted if the app isn’t downloaded in its thousands and used as an awareness raising and training tool to help prevent opiate overdose fatalities and promote the use of naloxone.

So please, download the app and spread the word.

Linford Christie was a great sprinter, winning Commonwealth and European gold medals on a regular basis. However, it wasn’t until late in his career that he stepped up to the very top level and became world and Olympic Champion. When he won the 100m Gold at the Barcelona Olympics he was 32 years old – four years older than all previous winners.

According to athletics folklore, one of the main reasons for this was that he dramatically improved his starting technique after his training partner Colin Jackson (also World and Olympic champion at 110m hurdles) told him to start on the B of Bang! Christie was able to shave  a tenth of a second off his start, enough to convert Silver and Bronze medals into the coveted Gold.

To use social media successfully, you have to be equally quick off the mark. Events get frenzied coverage online – think of the racist woman on a tram incident – but they soon fade away.

Last week, the screening of the BBC drama series Public Enemies  – which focused on the relationship between a probation officer (Anna Friel) and a released murderer (Daniel Mays) presented an opportunity for probation trusts to publicise the work that they do and correct common misconceptions of probation officers as soft on crime and criminals.

Public Enemies didn’t show the probation service in the best light. To create an exciting drama, they had the probation officer acting in a very unprofessional way, eventually embarking on a love affair with the offender she was supervising. I blogged about the series and created an online magazine, “Probation in Action” containing articles, interviews and videos about the way the probation service really works. You can see a slideshow of the magazine in the sidebar to the right of this post.

The chart below shows the number of different visitors who viewed the online magazine every day for the last week. You can see how quickly interest peaks and fades away as people move on to the next new topic.

It is therefore important for PR departments to be quick off the mark and have their content ready as a number of trusts including Staffordshire and West Midlands and London were. The great thing about riding the crest of the social media wave is that you can quickly attract a new audience (Twitter followers, Facebook friends, Blog subscribers etc) at least in the short term, and you can retain and grow this audience by continuing to publish new and interesting content.

However, the added value of online content is that it continues to remains visible and accessible in a way that traditional media items (TV and Radio interviews, local press articles) do not.

Those probation trusts who created material for the airing of Public Enemies, be it background information about the supervision of released prisoners and risk management or case studies of probation officers at work (such as this one developed by @gmptprobationPR), will be able to redirect their online audience to the same material when it becomes relevant again – on the publication of MoJ statistics or a national or local news story.

Again, this is easy to illustrate from my own blog. The piece I wrote about Public Enemies last week was the fourth in a series on probation and social media over a period of three and a half months. Although the original post was only viewed 398 times in its first week online, it has now been viewed over 1300 times, as you can see below:

The increase in views in December came about in response to my blogging three more times about probation issues and the mini-peak last week was in response to the screening of Public Enemies.

The other reason that Linford Christie stepped up a level later in his career was that running – and winning – became his sole focus; he dedicated his whole life to training and preparing for major championships. In the same way, organisations who commit to social media and develop a good range of interesting online content in their key areas of operation can expect to profit fully when the occasion arises.

Sometimes organisations are wary of getting involved in high profile online media storms, but they needn’t be. Probation trusts could have responded to the racist woman on the tram YouTube video with a short comment and a link to an article or feature about the work the service does with hate crime and racially motivated offenders – but only if they had a carefully constructed piece already on their website.

The results when you prepare well and get off the mark fast can be spectacular: