Young people struggle to navigate public services organized by sector. DigiUng is a collaborative government initiative coordinating youth-related public information and services in one joint digital ecosystem across sectors of society. The whole ecosystem is available from one place: ung.no, offering information and digital services tailored to the age and needs of its 60 000 daily users.
DigiUng has been a transformative initiative, opening a new realm of possibilities for the public sector.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
The Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs and the Directorate of Health have worked together over many years to better understand and meet the needs of young people struggling to navigate public services organized by sector. DigiUng is a collaborative government initiative aiming at coordinating all youth-related public information and services in one joint digital ecosystem across sectors of society. The whole ecosystem is available from one place: www.ung.no, offering information and digital services tailored to the age and needs of its 60 000 daily users.
DigiUng can already show concrete results with new, more efficient, and more holistic digital services as well as improved user experience since the initiative received partial funding in 2021. Through ung.no are young people aged 13 to 20 years old able to access informative content in the form of text, videos and illustrations, ask questions to a nationwide interdisciplinary panel of experts, find the closest youth health services, choose between certified apps and other digital self-help tools, chat with a wide-ranging group of volunteer organizations, book appointments with healthcare providers and carry-out virtual consultations.
The groundwork that has been put in over many years eventually led to great political impact and a government commitment in 2023 to use ung.no as the state's primary cross-sectoral channel for digital information, dialogue and digital services for children and young people across sectors of society. 18 government organizations are now officially a part of DigiUng, in addition to dozens of collaborators from civil society, municipalities, private sector and academia.
The ecosystem is constantly being enriched with new services, functionalities, and programming interfaces. DigiUng coordinates an innovation portfolio gathering new initiatives that could benefit the ecosystem in the months and years to come.
This pioneering journey of change in the public sector has in many ways been long and demanding, but also incredibly educational and exciting to be a part of. Along the way, participating organizations have had to work differently, think differently and, not least, think together – always with young people's interests at heart.
Innovative thinking around user involvement, portfolio and project management, cross-sector collaboration and technical solutions have been invaluable in bringing about this journey of change and creating a better public sector for young people.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
There are few comparable initiatives in Norway, both in terms of scale, reach, cross-sector government commitment and user-involvement. The joint digital ecosystem that DigiUng has build (and keeps on expanding) has opened a whole new realm of possibilities when it comes to collaboration, digitalization, integration, and development in public service. Part of the yearly budget is set aside to the innovation portfolio and DigiUng projects use innovative methods such as design thinking.
What is the current status of your innovation?
DigiUng has an administrative structure that oversees daily operations as well as an innovation hub that coordinates a portfolio of new initiatives. The composition of the portfolio changes over time as projects end and new ones start. At any given time one may find DigiUng initiatives working on any and all the different steps listed above.
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
DigiUng has become one of the government's high profile cross-sector initiatives in 2023. The collaboration involves over 70 different organisations from central and municipal government, civil society, private sector and academia. Young people are also an integral part of DigiUng and participate actively in all our design processes.
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
DigiUng uses extensive user insight among young people aged 13 to 20, both at the start and during development. We have established a national youth panel which we work closely with to ensure we meet their actual needs.
Ung.no is visited every single day by 60 000 young people (which translate to about 12% of the total youth population in Norway). Indicators show close to 90% user satisfaction.
Organizations participating in DigiUng benefit from being able to reach out to a wider user-base.
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
Key results so far:
Established a cross-sector digital ecosystem consisting of public enterprises and non-profit organisations.
Established technical and organizational infrastructure that puts young people's needs at the centre.
Established a framework for cross-sector collaboration that promotes future improvements and innovations.
Ung.no, as the central component of the ecosystem, has 60,000 visits every day and answers yearly over 110,000 individual enquiries from youths. 88% of users say they are satisfied with the service. In addition, our estimates indicate that 110,000 youths will visit the service overview and that 30,000 of these will visit a service.
Challenges and Failures
DigiUng has had a long journey, starting in 2014 (although the webpage ung.no itself has existed for 20 years). Cross-sector government cooperation is challenging to achieve and there have been many setbacks along the way pertaining to lack of funding, structural disagreements, lack of political support, immature technology, restricting regulations, failed prototypes, … But DigiUng has learned from both failures and positive experiences and gradually worked to solve all the aforementioned issues. We are also prepared to meet more challenges along the way but know that strong user-focus, skilled teams and good cooperation across branches of government can solve most issues.
Conditions for Success
Many factors have played a key role in getting DigiUng to where it is today:
• Flexible but long lasting funding
• Government commitment
• Active user-involvement and feed-back
• Open communication and great cooperation across the organisations involved
• Good leadership, skilled teams of creative and motivated people
• A joint vision and goals
• Adaptable technology, solid infrastructure for administration and management parallel with flexible arenas for Innovation
Replication
The replication of DigiUng for other groups of the Norwegian population is regularly discussed. It is currently being considered adapted to kids under 13 years old. Many of our data, services and work methods are used by og inspire other organizations working towards other groups or in other contexts. We also believe that DigiUng has potential to inspire other countries wishing to better meet the needs of their younger population.
Lessons Learned
DigiUng is always learning and sharing, it is a necessary part of our development. We can and wish to share takeaways around all and any of the topics listed under 6.2 and 6.3.
Project Pitch
Status:
- Implementation - making the innovation happen
Innovation provided by:
Media:
Date Published:
28 June 2024