Zoe Amar  0:04  
We are delighted that this episode of Starts at the Top is sponsored by Arvato CRM Solutions. Arvato CRM Solutions designs and delivers award winning customer service, business process outsourcing, and digital and Intelligent Automation solutions with some of the world's most respected brands, as well as innovative charity and public sector clients. They partner with clients to help them define their customer experience and transformation strategies by implementing the right technology, people and processes to improve their customer journey while driving new efficiencies and helping them prepare for the future. To find out more about how Arvato CRM Solutions could help an organisation like yours, and to receive a free no obligation chat, visit arvato.co.uk forward slash Wales air ambulance.

Donna White  1:14  
It's about what they want to share with us and not what we've got to say. And I think that's the sweet spot where we can find a little bit more relatability and build up a lot more trust with young people.

Paul Thomas  1:26  
Welcome to a brand new episode of Starts at the Top our podcast about digital leadership and change. I'm Paul Thomas. And I'm Paul Thomas, because Zoe has sadly been consumed by hay fever today, so it's just me in a very short introduction before introducing our guest. We're very excited today to share our conversation with Donna White, senior head of digital and youth marketing at the Prince's Trust. We spoke to Donna in May and learned a lot from her about how to tackle marketing communications to young people in a constantly shifting environment. The short answer is that there are no short answers. Talking of princess we're recording on the day that Spotify has ended its podcast deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, a joint statement from Harry and Megan's company and Spotify said they had mutually agreed to part ways. The contract was estimated to be worth $25 million, 18 million pounds in late 2020. So where others see problems. I see opportunity and we just like to put it out there, Daniel Eck if you're listening, we're here and available. And Megan, Harry, you're welcome to come on Starts at the Top too if you'd like a platform to discuss your challenges with leadership and navigating digital streaming services we are open to all. So now for our conversation with Donna white, from the Prince's Trust.

Zoe Amar  2:48  
We are very excited to welcome Donna white to the podcast today. She is senior head of digital and youth marketing at the Prince's Trust. Donna works for the Prince's Trust, a youth charity that helps 11 to 30 year olds to develop the skills and confidence they need to get into work, education or training. It uses digital content to drive awareness consideration and signups among young people who empower them to find a job or start a business working with partners such as Tango, Disney, Tik Tok and many more to extend the charities reach and relevance. Prior to this, she worked in PR and communications for public sector and food, drink and hospitality agencies outside of work. Donna is a charity comms mentor, equality, diversity and inclusion trainer, counselling college student and likes to visit exhibitions to see the best parts of London. Donna Welcome to Starts at the Top.

Donna White  3:51  
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Zoe Amar  3:54  
Very excited to have you here. And just rereading your bio, I mean goodness me, such amazing talents and a range of experiences and I know we're going to explore all of those as part of the interview. Let's begin with what you've got going on currently. So it's been a really busy, very exciting month at the Prince's Trust, hasn't it, especially around the coronation. Can you tell us a bit more about what's been going on for you and the team?

Donna White  4:17  
Yeah, it's been a fantastic month. So with the coronation, we were really fortunate to have some of our trust supported young people and celebrity ambassadors and stakeholders invited to the ceremony. And as a result of that we generated a lot of PR and media interviews in the week in the run up to that event, which was fantastic. So even just hearing the commentary during the ceremony, there was lots of kind of shoutouts for different Prince's Trust ambassadors. And that's been a great kind of branding springboard. In the week of the coronation, the Prince's Trust, helped to generate 42 million impressions online. And our website visits increased by 202% in that week, compared to the year before, so we are really primed to be talking to our audiences at the moment as we capitalise on this halo effect. And just a couple of weeks after that coronation we had our flagship Prince's Trust award ceremony in central London, where we honour our young people's achievements, and we had great star quality on our red carpet with Amal and George Clooney, Stanley Tucci, Rylan, Sam Ryder, and just so many ambassadors who were able to share their experiences through their own social media channels, so the owns and earns, kind of pulling power. This month has been fantastic and great for team morale as well within the Prince's Trust. 

Zoe Amar  5:48  
And that's fantastic. Congratulations. I mean, you had me at Stanley Tucci, and also an extraordinary amount of website impressions. That's just brilliant. I mean, that sounds like you're living the digital marketing dream, to be honest.

Donna White  6:00  
Yeah, it's, it's really great to have some of those highs. But we are aware that it's not as easy as just kind of getting celebrities onto a red carpet sometimes. And we're doing some work around our brands doing a little bit of a review. Because what we keep coming back to at the Prince's Trust is that there are two very distinct audiences that are not alike. You know, we're all about reaching 11 to 30 year olds to get them into work, education and training. So that's what my team focuses on. But then you've got this wealth of supporters, and that could be colleagues, volunteers, government and corporate partners, etc. And the language that you have to use to appeal to those groups is so distinct. What I've heard is that young people don't like the term young people. In fact, when they come to us at that kind of average age of 16 to 25, they're not considering themselves as young anymore. So we really have to pay attention to our marketing collateral. And they definitely don't like the terms vulnerable or disadvantaged, which we completely get, and we kind of ring fence that for our fundraising comms. But we recognise that it does play an important part in helping to demonstrate the impact. So it can be really difficult to get that balance right.

Zoe Amar  7:24  
Absolutely, I can see the dilemma that I didn't realise you had such a broad audience. I mean, that must be a real challenge in terms of reach, in terms of segmentation, and also say relevance as well, as you say,

Donna White  7:37  
Yeah, relevance is a big thing for us. And as part of our strategy, it's all about extending our reach and improving our relevance, because as much as we are really well known, we're not necessarily known for the right things. We have such a complex offer, which is great, we do so
 much to support young people, but that message can get lost sometimes. And some recent data that we've established is that just one in five young people are aware of the Prince's Trust even when prompted. So that's why working with the partners that you mentioned earlier, the likes of New Look, Disney, Marvel Tango, or Cadbury is so important to try to get that instant access to Gen Z, give us a few kudos points so that we can start to have that conversation and build up some brand loyalty, brand familiarity in a place where they're already going to be hanging out.

Paul Thomas  8:34  
You have to help us because as parents of young people, knowing how to describe them to other people is probably half the battle.

Donna White  8:43  
Yeah, there's, there's just no quick answer. And I think that's why I'm having the conversation with young people. So not being defensive as a marketing team, but just saying, you know, have you got any ideas? How can you help us? What's the short term? What's the longer term, and we know that we might not find any resolutions too quickly. But I think some really great feedback that we had from young people was that, you know, rather than just keep using the term or being too repetitive, draw upon the age ranges, you know, that's all encompassing, you're either 16 to 30, or you're not. So young people are very then clear, if we're talking to them. And it helps us to get around any queries around eligibility too.

Zoe Amar  9:30  
It's really competitive, isn't it to build a relationship with that audience? Am I right? In thinking that?

Donna White  9:38  
Yeah, because it's always changing. And I just think being adaptable being agile. Not being too precious over your youth marketing acquisition plans, is really key. We do a lot of lead generation at the Prince's Trust so for each of our courses, we would run a digital campaign to try and build a As much interest as possible. And we're very aware that, you know, there's a cost to reach these young people, and we try to keep within our cost framework. But in a digital world that we're currently live in, people expect results or feedback instantaneously. But we hand those leads from marketing over to service delivery. And that's not always within our control as to how quickly these leads can be followed up. So we're trying to work much more collaboratively with our operations team in order to create a process where young people can be responded to in relatively real time, so that if we do need to retarget them, we're not going to be making that more expensive, because they've had a poor user experience. So we're entering a world of real sophisticated marketing in terms of the Prince's Trust, because it's not just about what our team can deliver, it's how we can deliver it effectively with other departments.

Paul Thomas  11:01  
It has to be quick, doesn't it? Because the truth is really hard to spot trends with that audience as well. Because something that sort of really, up and coming that they might be paying attention to disappears, just like that. I mean, we've had a conversation on this podcast about the drink prime, for example, which you know, I was talking to my 14 year old the other day, and he was saying, well, actually, now it's in every shop, nobody's looking for it anymore. It's not really a thing. Yes, I'll drink if it's in front of me. I'm not gonna go searching for it. And it's interesting. You mentioned tango, because I've noticed a real sort of step up in terms of their advertising. Again, always going back to the the advertising I remember Zoe, you know, the in your face, sort of you've been Tangoed type approach is on its way back. But those trends come and go. So how can organisations stay on top of those trends, particularly amongst that youth audience?

Donna White  11:53  
It's really difficult to do that. So I won't say that there's a great formula that we've gotten, we get it right every time. But I think it's about being aware of all the trends, but then really drilling down into the ones that feel authentic and aligned to your brand style. We know we're a 45, 46 year old charitie so we don't need to be acting young all the time. But we do need to know young people and I think there's a difference. And I think we would break down the trends work out what feels right. And what feels worth putting a lot of effort into. Sometimes you can create great content in just kind of a few minutes. You're not overthinking it. You're not over complicating it, and you're just getting it out the door to test the water. And I think that's where we're getting a little bit more comfortable as a youth marketing team, for a long time, we kind of held ourselves to these standards where we would have these fantastic polished videos with very clear high production call to actions. And yeah, we throw in an ambassador or two, for just good appeal, because that's what the Prince's Trust has access to. But now it's about just coming down to worth a little bit, talking to a young person capturing a story in their words, it's about what they want to share with us and not what we've got to say. And I think that's the sweet spot where we can find a little bit more relatability and build up a lot more trust with young people. So it might only be, you know, one in five, one in 10 trends that we can actually push forward with a little bit, but we'll be across them all, and making a real rational justification as to which ones we progress.

Zoe Amar  13:40  
They're a very discerning audience as well. Aren't they? Quite rightly, sorry young people, anyone who's listening, probably sounds very patronising. For my kids, they are incredibly fussy about which brands they interact with, who they will trust, who they will start to follow on, I think you're absolutely right about things moving really quickly in that digital marketing space for young people. So speaking of that, and speaking of some of the things you talked about, at the start of the interview, all these amazing influences coming to your awards event. That took me back to that first conversation we had a few months ago, when you talked about this really fascinating, very creative approach to how you are marketing yourself during cost of living crisis. So can you break that down for our listeners? Because it's I think it's a really interesting case study of how you can be creative in tough times.

Donna White  14:34  
Yeah, of course. So the Prince's Trust exists to support young people into work, education or training. And during the cost of living crisis, we know that the most disadvantaged are being hit the hardest. So this is our time to really step up and communicate that our offer is free, and will lead to skills and confidence in order to help them create better features, which is fantastic. But how do you do that in a marketing sphere? Well, budgets are also tight for us at the moment, too. So it's all about working smarter, not harder. And we have decided to prioritise our budgets around the conversion point of the marketing funnel, where we feel that we can have a little bit more quality control over the costs that we use, and that we can gather data which will help us to make better planning decisions. So what we mean by that is running these lead generation campaigns across Facebook and Instagram for each of our programmes, whilst gathering information on which programmes are most cost effective in what area of the country by programme theme, or by cost type, or by audience interests. And that is being fed back to our programmes development, service delivery teams to help us plan the next programme mix for the quarter ahead. It means that we can start to look at, is digital marketing the right solution for this particular course or programme? Or should we be looking for offline outreach measures instead, through perhaps b2b marketing, so making sure that we've got the right resources, posters, brochures available for job centres, or parents or guardians. And that's been really exciting for us, because we're just building up a bank of knowledge. And we're starting to put marketing at the table of a really important discussion, where we're not just being told what to do, but we are informing how we do it. We do recognise that actually focusing everything on the conversion point of the funnel isn't ideal. It's an option that we are currently working towards, because we do need to meet those Programme targets. But it is a little bit like inviting young people to shop with us, but we're only showing them one or two products at a time. Or it's actually they should just know that this store has everything that they're looking for. So in order to kind of supplement that that's where the corporate partnerships come in. That's where the influencer work comes in. And we're looking to get gifting kind initiatives with as many groups as possible, to help us to continue to extend that reach and relevance so that we are covering both sides of the coin.

Zoe Amar  17:26  
Such a thoughtful creative approach, you've talked about how the kind of role of marketing internally is starting to shift a bit. So do you think those conceptions that other teams colleagues might have if marketing is beginning to evolve?

Donna White  17:44  
Yes, it is. I know for the last six or 12 months, there's been a real focus on education. So making sure that we are educating senior stakeholders to really understand what we're doing. And there's a few things that I've been really keen on the team getting more involved in. And that's just taking as many opportunities as possible, to shout about how we work, who we're working with, and the results that we're getting. And having that transparency, making sure that people are really aware that marketing is involved in as many projects as possible, helps you kind of break down any barriers that people may have, they start to ask questions, and they start to understand how and why this is quite effective. And it's even more important, because when you have that trust with a senior stakeholder, even if things aren't going to plan, you can still get ahead of the game by saying, this isn't quite working the way that we expected, we do have a contingency, and this is how we're going to adapt. So we are going to stay ahead of it. And it's not about then waiting till the end of the year and saying, Sorry, we couldn't quite reach the targets that we set out for, we've been dealing with the problems as they arise and approaching them together. I think one thing which I want to see more of over the next sort of few months is just a real clear understanding that marketing can only be as successful as the brand, like if one hits a bit of a ceiling, then it does make the other group a little bit difficult to succeed. And that's why I'm a real big champion for really understanding people's perceptions of us so that we can look to mitigate that, so that we can continue to grow those opportunities. 

Paul Thomas  19:32  
But what has been the perception because I work with a number of organisations where marketing is this sort of growing up and becoming a proper strategic partner within the organisation, but it's taken time. And the perception is always when you go in the first it's very service led that oh, yeah, those are the guys that will put the polish on top of some things. So here's my work, so far marketing tidy up, and they'll flush it out. It's a very mad men type of view of marketing and PR, isn't it those people up in those offices, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their whiskey, you know, that sort of thing? Is that the perception? Or has that been the perception internally for a while.

Donna White  19:40  
because when you have that trust with a senior stakeholder, even if things aren't going to plan, you can still get ahead of the game by saying, this isn't quite working the way that we expected, we do have a contingency, and this is how we're going to adapt. So we are going to stay ahead of it. And it's not about then waiting till the end of the year and saying, Sorry, we couldn't quite reach the targets that we set out for, we've been dealing with the problems as they arise and approaching them together. I think one thing which I want to see more of over the next sort of few months is just a real clear understanding that marketing can only be as successful as the brand, like if one hits a bit of a ceiling, then it does make the other group a little bit difficult to succeed. And that's why I'm a real big champion for really understanding people's perceptions of us so that we can look to mitigate that, so that we can continue to grow those opportunities. Paul Thomas 16:45 But what has been the perception because I work with a number of organisations where marketing is this sort of growing up and becoming a proper strategic partner within the organisation, but it's taken time. And the perception is always when you go in the first it's very service led that oh, yeah, those are the guys that will put the polish on top of some things. So here's my work, so far marketing tidy up, and they'll flush it out. It's a very mad men type of view of marketing and PR, isn't it those people up in those offices, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their whiskey, you know, that sort of thing? Is that the perception? Or has that been the perception internally for a while, Donna White 17:28 I think in the past, there was a perception that marketing is very likely to say, No, we are going to be shutting ideas down. Because we are a little bit laser focused on the tasks that we've got ahead. And yeah, that probably was a little bit of a perception of, we make things pretty, we might kind of fluff them up. Those things have been changing. And I think that's because we're part of so many more conversations at the moment. Back when I started within the marketing team, we were running campaigns across the calendar, because it felt like a really nice thing to do. Now, our campaigns calendar is fully aligned and integrated into the business need. And I think that's been the difference. We're doing fundraising campaigns, because we need to reach this type of target with this type of audience. And there's a real kind of cross over there. We're running programmes campaigns, because we want to scale the number of young people we support over the next five years. So we need to be able to grow and flex to that vision. And having those types of conversations with different team members means that it isn't about going after award winning campaigns, although that is a really nice kind of accomplishment to have, it's about making those decisions, which will have a real great impact on the work. And it might mean that the marketing is seen above the line. Or it might mean that it's a little bit more below the line a little bit more behind the scenes in order to get things done.

Paul Thomas  21:51  
You're also the team that seeing those direct results, aren't you because you're having that conversation directly with both your supporters and your beneficiaries. Those people that interact with the trust do so through those those channels. So I think it's become since the social media, boom, if you like I think it's become much more important that that line between marketing and strategy is fully fully defined, because you're the ones with your finger on the pulse, you're the ones that are able to turn around and say, Actually, this isn't quite the right direction or it doesn't feel quite right, because that's not what we're hearing from the people that we're talking to. So is there been a shift more towards that sort of strategic way of thinking from leadership and have you had to fight hard to to get seen in that way? 

Donna White  22:39  
Um, I think we are always fighting to be seen in the light that we know that our work does adds to be seen. And there's always going to be change over at a senior level at times. So there are new people to bring on the journey with you. And depending on the landscape that you're operating in, you might have to have a different type of conversation. So with every charity, I'm sure is kind of having tough conversations about finances. And that means that us taking that strategic approach, not just talking about the kind of opportunities to see we want for our marketing campaigns, but the conversion, the impact that we want to generate is so much more important. And that's really pushing the marketing team into a space where it necessarily hasn't been comfortable in before. I think you're right, I think being connected to the front line, we are really fortunate to hear people's feedback. And it's always great when our audience gives us feedback, unprompted through social media. And we do take those things on board. So for example, we're always having to remind people that we are a charity that relies on generous giving, despite our associations that people might perceive us to be. So it's taking every opportunity to remind people of who we are, what we do, and why we are one of the best youth charities, because we have been around for such a long time. And taking that spirit as well from kind of the 70s when we were set up, and making sure that that is still front of mind and relevant today. 

Zoe Amar  24:24  
When we last spoke we talked about how you were co creating content with young people and especially how you were deploying Tik Tok. But I know that that is a real challenge for a lot of the charities out there who might be listening to this. Can you tell us a bit more about how you're doing that?

Donna White  24:41  
Yeah, definitely. So last year, the organisation set up a youth voice and influence strategy. Because we really recognised if we want to practice what we preach, we do need to invite young people to feedback on all areas of the business. So now we have a groups of young people who could sit on interview panels to make sure that the right roles are being recruited for. And from a marketing perspective, we run listening exercises and content workshops so that we can understand what young people think about and how we can improve our outputs. So what we've heard from young people through those forums is that they will help us to reprioritize the benefits through our programmes. Whereas we might be pushing on one day, you know, free lunch free travel example. They're saying, actually, I really want to know more about the one to one mentoring. That's what's important to me right now. So that is something that we can then dial up in our campaigns. And they're also really proud of the regional representation. They don't want to see London centric campaigns, they want to see and hear different accents, different landmarks in the content that we produce. So they're always a pleasure to be around. And when it comes to the content days, we would work with young ambassadors. So they are young people who have been through our programmes. They're media trained, and they are great advocates in sharing their stories at events or through digital content. But we recognise that we can't always be asking them to create more, tell your story in this format. And in that format, we needed to give something back to them. So we've started to create a blueprint whereby we invite influencers or media specialists to come and give them some training, which will help them improve their social media outputs for their business or for their personal brand. And it gives them a real value exchange. Now, when it comes to partnerships, like TikTok where I would really like to see us going, is using TikTok's expertise to push our product offerings further into the future. So for enterprise, we help young people explore if self employment is right for them. And we've long been able to help young people set up online businesses, particularly ecommerce through marketplaces, such as not on the high street. But digital marketing is changing the landscape ever so much further. You can now be buying and selling through TikTok. And by getting them on board, we can really help people to feel comfortable with using that as an output for their business. And again in the future, early days, but what I could see us doing is perhaps having a kind of TikTok to umbrella couple of cohorts of digital entrepreneurs. So as they go through their training, we could equip them with the tools was that they need to capture their story of setting up their business from start to finish. And then that could be used as inspirational campaign insights in order to inspire the next generation. 

Zoe Amar  27:59  
That's a great process. It feels very equitable with young people what you've described there. And so anything that you are learning from young people at the moment and how they're using digital that has surprised you or really stood out for you. 

Donna White  28:15  
Um, I think what surprised me recently is just how much time young people are spending on TikTok. I know that you can read different reports and perhaps get different stats. But the last thing that I saw was that an average of 12 hours per week for kind of 16 to 25 year olds on TikTok compared to about four hours per week for Instagram. Now, this is a challenge because when TikTok can be in the news for you know, some right reasons, but also some really kind of challenging reasons, that puts pressure on us to really question, Are we making the right decisions, if young people's data is being affected? Is this the right association to be having. But from a youth marketing perspective, take the ethics to kind of one side, it is a platform that they're on, and they're always going to find a way to be on there. And it's a little bit like the Better the devil, you know, because it's not just like we could redeploy our marketing spend to Instagram, yes, it would have some benefits, young people are on there, but then on there for just a third of the amount of time. So that window to capture young people's interest is significantly reduced. And I think that's the type of recommendations that we need to be putting forward when we're being questioned. Because it's not a case of, let's not do it, let's look at the impact this could have, it's not impossible, but we're definitely not making it easier. And if we are committed to supporting young people, then we do need to possibly take a few risks and be where they are. Because if it's not on Instagram, it's going to be on the next platform, which we don't even know what it's called yet. And that's probably going to have so many more kind of question marks around it. 

Paul Thomas  30:03  
I was gonna say it's always riding that wave, isn't it, that you, you have to have big corporate organisations who sort of dance around the idea of using things like TikTok, but when you're directly talking to an audience that is using it day to day and I think it's much more than 12 hours a week, by the way, indication of what's going on in this house. But it's it's one of those, one of those platforms that you just can't ignore. And the trick is balancing your use of the platform with the resources and the education you give to young people about how their data is being used. Because when we sit down with our 14 year old and have those conversations about, you realise what you are giving up here, by doing this or posting this, then they are in a position to make those decisions for themselves. And by the way, there's there's there's another thing within that which I think is for the parents, of young children to also understand this so that these platforms don't get demonised in the way that often they do. Because of the right. They're reading the press, they're seeing the US challenge the availability of tick tock within their country within their borders. You're looking at the sort of the Chinese links and the sort of the scare mongering and all that sort of stuff where young people are looking beyond that and looking at the decisions they're making just more generally about sharing information. So perhaps it's the parents as well. So is there stuff that you're doing around education, around data use and data privacy and those sorts of things for young people and older people? 

Donna White  31:45  
I guess there's two parts to that question, I suppose. One is kind of an internal mode where we do have an ethics committee. So it's not just marketing, making these decisions in a silo and putting the organisation at risk through our external communications. We do have representation from across the organisation, including trustees who will take our pros and cons for and against and help to kind of determine next steps, which I think puts us in a really good position in terms of educating young people on data. We are starting to do more, but I think we'll see that accelerate. So what I mean by that is, we have our privacy notice and we have a young person version of that which is much more condensed and uses far simpler language so that it doesn't feel like we're trying to trick young people into how we use that information. We're very transparent, and always give young people the opportunity to opt out. And that's even during any time during a campaign which they might associated with. I remember a few years ago, we were working on a campaign and that was going to have some really great out of home advertising, which was connected with a corporate partner, and a young person just didn't feel comfortable, there was going to be a lot of digital, there was going to be a lot of PR and press. Like I say, they were going to be on billboards, and the photoshoots had been done. And they didn't want to proceed. And that was absolutely fine. And I think that's where everyone in our organisation is so understanding because we're asking young people to be vulnerable time and time again, keep sharing their story, even if their story was from a good few years ago at times. So that was a case where we were able to remove them, extract them from that campaign, without kind of too much delay. We made a few work arounds. And that was a really positive outcome. But yes, I think going forward, as we extend our kind of digital architecture and digital transformation at the trust, we will need to do more in order to be in order to be that responsible adult, I suppose I always think of the Prince's Trust. It's like the big brother or sister, it's, you know, not telling you what to do, but it is looking out for you and giving you some friendly advice and guidance. And I think that is the stance that we will be looking to take more of across data protection. 

Zoe Amar  34:26  
Such a personal decision as well, isn't it how much you engage with digital. So it's really interesting seeing my kids develop. So my youngest is 10. And my eldest is 12. And my 10 year old, she's not allowed to have any social media accounts, and obviously isn't always my 12 year old either. But my 10 year old is quite kind of relaxed about things, she has had a lot of education in school. And also I talk to her about it as well. But I can see that as soon as she's 13, she's going to be on TikTok. She's already making like little videos with her friends and just saving them on the iPad, I think she's going to be out there doing stuff, we're gonna have to keep a close eye on her. My son is just not interested in having any kind of presence on social media at all, even though he's at the age where he could do that in a year's time. And whenever I take a photo, he always says to me, Mommy, where are you going to put that? And he's been doing that from a really young age. And he's I don't put my photo on Instagram, don't do it, he gets crossed about it. So that's quite interesting how there's no one size fits all for young people, I guess adults as well, actually, that everyone has different levels of comfort with how much they engage with these platforms. 

Donna White  35:40  
Yeah, definitely. And I think that it's just about really hearing people and kind of understanding it from their lens as well. Like I say, we work with so many different types of people at so many different events. But yeah, being really transparent about what data you're collecting, or what type of images you're taking, and how it's going to be used. So between our marketing and comms team, even if we do have publicity consent for a particular story, or quote, you know, we'll always kind of reach out out of courtesy, because we don't want any young person to be blindsided by the fact that they might pop up on a on a Google alert type of thing.

Zoe Amar  36:20  
It's really interesting, such an important bit of education to give young people. And then one thing I'd love to ask you about before we wrap up is when we last spoke, we talked about automation. And obviously, that's something we know that a lot of our listeners are interested in working on. And I know that's involved as part of your Pathfinder campaign. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Donna White  36:44  
Yes. So Pathfinder is our digital transformation project, which is looking to redesign the young person's pre programme experience. So it's everything until they kind of have that first point of contact, which includes marketing, but also has another number of touch points with different teams. And for us, this is about not only improving the organisational culture, but changing the way that we work with appreciate data, and also bringing more teams together in a way that they've possibly not worked side by side before. We've been working with some external consultants and research agencies to help us progress. And through the discovery phases, we've been able to develop some archetypes and we've progressed with some roadmaps, and now we're at the stage where we're just currently starting to co design some of these processes with young people to really understand how we should be moving forward so that we can have some clear recommendations to agree on for the long term. And I think what stood out for me is that yes, it's about digital automation and about making things quicker and easier and much more intuitive for young people. But it's also about embedding young people's needs at the heart of this process. It's about what matters to them, and not what we have to offer. And that's about reframing impact, from start to finish. When we joined to kind of youth marketing and set it up, yes, it was about reaching young people. And then it became about putting them onto a programme and making sure that social media was part of that trail. But now, in the future, where we want to get to it could be that a young person comes to our website, and they download a CV template, or they download a budgeting spreadsheet. And maybe they download it, and then leave the website. And we don't hear from them for six months, because that's all they needed at that time to fulfil their potential. And those are the types of pieces that I think should be really coming to the forefront of our reporting so that we can start to see, yeah, the difference that we're making in a much broader perspective than what we are now.

Zoe Amar  39:11  
That's, again, such a thoughtful way to tackle this huge challenge, isn't it? So please do keep us posted about how all of this develops, we'd love to hear how you get on. Donna, thank you so much. There's been so inspiring and also so practical. You'll have given our listeners lots of really, really brilliant advice there about how they can take some challenges, which I'm sure they're dealing with as well, and work out their way forward. So thank you so much for sharing your story today. We really appreciate it.

Donna White  39:42  
Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Paul Thomas  39:45  
Thank you very much. Thank you so much to Donna for coming on to the podcast and being such a wonderful guest. She and the team at the Prince's Trust really do some great work and it was an absolute pleasure to speak with her. We hope you enjoyed it too. And we'll put some links to some of the work that they're doing in the show notes. Next up is an episode we recorded just this week with Soma Sara, founder of the Everyone's Invited movement. Everyone's Invited as an essential and enlightening force to push us forward to a more equal world. And it's this is a vital conversation, but it's hugely inspiring leader. I really can't recommend it enough. In the meantime, you can find us on Twitter at Starts at the Top one and you can also email us at starts at the top@gmail.com and if you listen to us on Apple podcasts or anywhere you can rate and review please do, all your reviews help us to reach more listeners. And we'll speak to you again in a couple of weeks. Thank you and goodbye and get well soon Zoe!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai