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How might we design healthy, inclusive digital spaces that enable individuals and communities to thrive?


Fostering Digital Wellness through Education & Empowerment

by Amy Blankson

CEO
Digital Wellness Institute
Submission Date
October 31, 2022


CO-CONTRIBUTORS

Tyler Rice, Digital WellBeing Nina Hersher


OVERVIEW

SUMMARY

  • Problem: current wellness programs do not address the impact of screen time on mental health
  • We solve for this by: creating tools, teaching educators, empowering organizations with a roadmap for change, and inspiring others with best practices and ideas
  • Traction to date: we have certified 350 educators in 32 countries, licensed our e-learning content to McGill University, piloted our Certified Workplace program at JPMorgan and Cisco, and will be launching our Insights Dashboard at ATB in Canada in December
  • Our goal: to educate 150M individuals in digital wellness skills over the next 5 years
  • The IDEO challenge will help us: make our content more scalable, our community more networked, and offerings more visible for those who need them

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OVERVIEW

The Digital Wellness Institute helps individuals and communities find their sweet spot for thriving in the digital era through education and empowerment.  We leverage a global network of certified digital wellness educators to teach a core set of skills: What is digital wellness? How do you measure it? And how can you improve it to create a more positive digital culture? 

The Problem & the Market Gap: We can’t improve what we don’t understand.

While measures of improving physical or mental health are well understood, the concept of digital wellness is still new.  And yet, the challenges of finding balance in the digital era are so common that everyone from 2 to 102 can feel the effects: Since 2019, there's been an average of a 5-hour increase in device usage, causing a range of secondary effects from lack of connectedness, poor sleep habits, irritability, back pain, and myopia. That being said, current measures of assessing wellness are often generalized and rarely include the impact of technology on health and wellness. Without actually measuring and quantifying digital wellness, it's impossible to track change and make improvements. 

Our Genesis: Sparking a Movement for Positive Change

As awareness about the impacts of technology overuse grow in the public consciousness, there continue to be more calls for tools and help.  Fortunately, this topic has been our core passion for more than four years. In 2018, we began convening organizations and thought leaders in the world to form a trade collective for digital wellness–while many of these organizations target youth education, others focus on workplace culture, retail offerings, app or game development, and individual coaching. We asked this community what the top needs in the field were and they told us loud and clear that they needed a common definition of digital wellness along with standardized benchmarks and metrics to professionalize and move the field forward.  So in 2020, we created the Digital Wellness Institute to do just that.

OUR SOLUTION:

We foster digital thriving by:

 1. CREATING TOOLS to Bolster Self-Awareness & Regulation

The Digital Wellness Institute adopts a healthy-tech approach program (rather than an anti-tech approach). We believe that our relationship to tech can be optimized when we give more intention to our attention; rather than swinging between tech overuse and tech abstinence, humans thrive when they can find that sweet spot where tech helps them to thrive. But where is that elusive spot for digital flourishing? To help individuals gain insight into their own behaviors, we partnered with a global team of academics and experts to not only define digital wellness, but to also create a scientifically-validated scale (published Sept. 2022) to answer the question: am I thriving online and where might I need to self-bolster and regulate? The Digital Flourishing® Survey not only gives a baseline score for digital wellness, but also uses AI to suggest just-in-time resources needed to bolster their digital wellness (which might include online courses, in-person trainings, access to a coach, recommended PDFs, or connections to support professionals). We also created a suite of on-demand video courses ranging from 15 minutes to one-hour that can be licensed in bulk and offered through an external learning management system. With the help of McGill University in Canada, we were able to translate our Digital Wellness 101 course into French this fall, and we have had numerous requests for other languages as well. Every course includes quizzes along with pre and post surveys to measure course efficacy and solicit ongoing feedback (for instance, students report that their knowledge of digital wellness increases from 38 to 96% after the course and their ability to manage distraction increases from 18% to 86%; other stats available upon request)

  2. TEACHING EDUCATORS through Certification & Collaboration

In 2020, the Digital Wellness Institute partnered with 16 leading experts in digital wellness to create a ten-week, thirty-hour certification program for educators. We have now certified more than 350 educators in 32 countries, each of whom are localizing content through grassroots efforts to create change. For instance, one Canadian leader has now hosted 80 workshops for more than 800 individuals in his organization; one Nigerian leader hosted an in-person training for 50 local partners; one Japanese leader created a Digital Wellbeing Lab at the University of Tokyo, and one Spanish leader created a course for burned out journalists and registered 1000 individuals last month alone.  By providing our educators with high-quality, research-based materials, we enable them distribute up-to-date resources effectively without constant reinvention of the wheel. We also give them credibility, a network, a support system, and opportunities for collaboration and revenue generations, which we believe are essential aspects of creating a sustainable, regenerative economy for digital wellness. Listen to a 1-minute testimonial of how one graduate is putting her knowledge into practice at her workplace.

Through these relationships, we are also able tap into the latest research, information and tools being created around the world.  For instance, six of our Educators have published books since going through our program and several of the alumni have formed special interest groups around research and public policy to stay current.  As we learn about these resources, we are constantly updating our Certification program content and bringing in new voices through monthly education events or "fireside chats" with experts in the field. We also actively practice and try to role model digital citizenship by inviting experts to speak to our community on data ethics, anti-racism, youth empowerment and more (here's a sample event)

3. EMPOWERING ORGANIZATIONS with a roadmap for change.

In our research, we learned that 83% of employees are looking to their employers for help navigating the challenges of the digital era; workplaces and schools understand this but don't know how to create systemic change in a world that requires constant connectivity.  At the Digital Wellness Institute, we have a unique window into some of the most forward-thinking companies in the world.  Using these best practices, we created a proprietary scorecard (modeled after the B-corp movement) that combines objective measures with employee sentiment data to benchmark progress toward creating a positive digital culture.  We then created a recognition system for top-scoring organizations to be recognized as Digitally Well Workplace or Schools. We have now piloted this program with senior leaders at Cisco and JP Morgan and will be starting a new pilot at ATB in Canada in December.

  4. INSPIRING OTHERS by sharing best practices and ideas

The fourth and final initiative of the Digital Wellness Institute is to bring public awareness to the importance of digital wellness, which we do through a campaign called Digital Wellness Day. To date, Digital Wellness Day has reached a total of 21 million individuals over the past three years through a combination of in-person and virtual events. In 2021 alone, our network of educators hosted 77 public-facing events, enabling us to increase awareness of the effects of technology on physical and mental health for 7.7M individuals (you can see some of the recorded events here).


PURPOSE

Our IDEO Proposal: Leveraging Language & Knowledge Networks for Change

Our goal is to bring digital wellness education to 150 million people by 2030. We believe that the best way to create spaces for digital thriving in the world is through empowering local communities to raise awareness and offer solutions for change.

We are proud to be the global leader in digital wellness education, offering meaningful solutions in an accessible format for schools, workplaces, and individuals. That being said, we have six bottlenecks that the IDEO challenge could help us move through:

1. CHAMPIONS: We need to recruit more digital wellness champions in the world, either through targeted outreach, word of mouth sharing, or advertising.

Our next cohort of the Certificate Program for Digital Wellness Educators will start on January 9th.  To increase diversity and equitable access to this program, we recently introduced an application process where applicants can share what country/industry they are coming from and whether they need access to a partial scholarship.  This week alone we received applications from: a Nigerian online safety educator who wants to educate children about healthy internet practices, a first year medical student in India who wants to introduce digital wellness into clinical practice, a burned out journalist from Portugal who wants to help other journalists find balance, an elementary teacher in Canada who wants to teach digital wellness to her staff, a mass media specialist from the US who wants to help youth decode images found on social media, and a digital literacy coach in Singapore who wants to help low-income clients in her community.  We are honored to be able to attract and educate so many incredible changemakers and are committed to honoring a pay-what-you-can model to advance our mission. However, we would also love to identify corporate sponsors who can help us underwrite some of these costs for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

2. COMMUNITY SUPPORT: We need to nurture our growing community of certified educators with a dedicated Community Liaison who can coordinate, support, and engage our alumni.

We recently embarked on a customer discovery process with our program alumni through a survey, ten in-depth interviews, and a community zoom call to learn more about the evolving needs of our community.  Through this process, we learned that the top three needs were a)  a public-facing directory of digital wellness educators (which we will be launching in mid-December), b) on-going education opportunities to stay current on issues (which is why are kicking off a monthly education series with  Dr. Gloria Mark on Dec. 2nd), and c) revenue-generating opportunities (which we now offer through an affiliate program for course sales). 

3.  PILOTS: We need more dissemination partners willing to pilot digital wellness education to their communities (e.g. schools, universities, workplaces, and nonprofits).

In December, we will be kicking off a workplace education pilot at ATB for 120 staff members.  We are also in conversation with Athabasca University, Ohio State University, Virginia Tech, and Silicon Valley Bank.  Each of these pilots is an opportunity to learn, iterate, and educate, and we would love introductions to expand these pilots. 

4. PLATFORM: We need access to a content delivery platform that offers language packs (ideally D2L that comes with support for 150 languages).

We have worked hard to ensure that our courses meet the 2.0 accessibility standards, but our current learning management system only offers one primary language, which limits our outreach.  Our system also lacks the ability to transfer our courses to other learning management systems while maintaining insight into utilization data, which is crucial for demonstrating impact and fueling continuous improvement. 

5. MENTORSHIP: We need mentorship/coaching for using design thinking to develop a global train-the-trainer network that offers quality controls but also localization of content. We are specifically inspired by the work of the Sesame Workshop for bringing a regional focus to important issues while also maintaining brand consistency/messaging. 

We have had interest from alumni in Japan, Colombia and Canada who would like to open a local branch of the Digital Wellness Institute, offering in-person courses with localized content.  However, we are struggling to determine how much localization to allow and how to maintain brand integrity/quality across multiple markets.  For instance, our alumni in Japan shared that work and spirituality (ie wellness) are often kept separate as a result of political trauma after World War II; however with the rise of suicide and lonely deaths in Japan, these topics are being reconsidered.  We want to be sensitive in the way we approach these topics, but still maintain a consistency of terms and definitions that is transmutable globally. We want to continue to develop resources that are unique to the culture and interests of the learners (for instance, healthy gaming is a particularly salient topic in Japan).

6. GAMIFICATION: We need coaching for how to introduce gamification elements to our current programs. We are firm believers that play and fun create better stickiness, retention of information, and engagement with content, and would like help building these elements into our roadmap

We have worked hard to build fun interactive elements into our courses that reinforce key messages (see demo of one interaction here).  However, as we transition our system in the future, we want to build in more elements that leverage fun and play.  We would specifically love the mentorship of FairPlay, Riot Games, and LEGO to think through how to build these elements.  

With the support of the IDEO challenge partners, we are confident that we can create a global movement for digital thriving--but we need your help to get there.

QUESTIONS

Lewisville, Texas

United States of America

Educate and empower 150 million individuals globally about the importance of digital wellness.

As conveners of more than 300 digital wellness organizations in the world, we have heard that the number one challenge these leaders face to creating scalable change is the lack of a common definition, metrics, and strategies for advancing the field.  In response, we created the world’s first certification program for leaders, a ten-week deep dive into terminology, frameworks, research, and actionable solutions.  We have now graduated 350 Certified Educators in 32 countries and hosted three annual Digital Wellness Day events, reaching a combined audience of 21M individuals.  We also created a series of online trainings, including a one-hour Digital Wellness 101 program paired with a scientifically validated assessment, to help individuals and organizations to understand what digital wellness is, why it’s important, how to self-assess, and what skills are needed to flourish in the digital era.  We are ready to bring this training to the world and we need your help.

Global online platform for digital wellness education, with opportunities for localized licensing at schools and organizations through external learning management systems. Additional in-person training opportunities would be available through our network of Certified Educators.

We are proud to have certified educators in 32 countries around the world, including numerous emerging markets like Nigeria, Tunisia, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, India, and more.

To leverage scalable change, we are targeting three types of stakeholders:

  • Secondary school and post-secondary school students struggling to create boundaries in a world where school, work, social, and entertainment are all blended online

  • Teachers and faculty at secondary and post-secondary schools (who are often overlooked in training) trying to manage digital demands from students, parents and their own personal lives 

  • Employees (many of whom are also parents) looking to balance their “always-on” digital culture

If awarded prize money, we would like to invest:

20k in professionalizing our existing delivery platform to utilize a enterprise-ready learning management system like D2L which could help us a) license and distribute content globally while still having visibility into utilization data, and b) tap into language packs to make our courses natively accessible in more countries (currently we only offer English and French, but have immediate interest in Spanish and Japanese)

20k in hiring a part-time Community Liaison to support, inspire and engage our global community of educators

10k to spreading the word about our certification program, course availability, and general strategies for digital well-being

  • Access to tailored mentorship and expertise in structuring global training/licensing

  • Access to systems thinking curricula, tools, and experts to help us better leverage the expertise of our 350 trained educators in a way that maintains quality control

  • Access to prospective angel investors and implementing partners

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  October 31, 2022

  1605 VIEWS

  2 LIKES

  7 Followers

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Challenge Journey

Proposal Submission
Completed
2. Review
Completed
Proposal Refinement
Completed
4. Final Review
Completed
Top Proposals
Dec 6, 2022
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Comments
9
Laurent Rains

The Digital Wellness Institute team has its finger on the pulse of what is needed to find balance in today's digital world. We can no longer have a binary of on and off, but needed recognition of the place of the digital in our lives and the tools to manage this new environment. 

Krister Kroll

I can see how this proposal can lead to happier lives and more productive citizens/ employees. "Be well by doing good."

Amy Blankson

Thanks Krister! We believe that creating scalable impact is so worth the challenge.  I appreciate your support!

Shannon Gavrilchuk

Incredible company and team! The future for improving mental health and wellness online!

Organizational Perspective
Bobo Blankson

As an adolescent medicine specialist, I see the challenges of digital un-wellness in my clinic all the time.  Kids have no idea what balance looks like and they need to know that they have the power to make better choices.  I also really love the perspective that technology is not all or nothing.  Many parents are scared that social media will create negative harms, so they cut their children off from all devices.  In today's day and age, technology is a way of life and we need to educate both parents and teens about strategies for self-regulation. I love that this proposal is so direct and straight-forward, but also research-based and actionable.

Rebecca Kirstein Resch

This is such an awesome proposal. Digital Wellness information and resources are SO important but even more so, implementing this knowledge and the interventions at scale is a major missing piece of the puzzle. We see so many opportunities to scale this and combine it with tools like inqli to support greater social learning leading to the behaviour change that is so critical. Really looking forward to seeing this amazing work scale! 

Amy Blankson

Thanks Rebecca! I love your proposal for Inqli too and see lots of interesting potential for collaboration around access to knowledge networks and resources.  The number one comment I hear from individuals is "I had no idea something like this existed!" We have to fix this, especially for rural, remote, and emerging communities.