World AIDS Day and Reconstructed Living Lab

Today the world is celebrating World AIDS Day and at RLabs we are doing our part to ensure a difference in the lives of people impacted by HIV and AIDS. Some of the projects the RLabs team had involvement with includes:


- Mobile Counselling with Cell Life and National AIDS Helpline

- Mobile HIV/AIDS Information Portal with more than 30,000 subscribers

- Mobile HIV/AIDS CellBook partnership with Metropolitan Foundation providing users access to a full text with advice and information via the mobile phone.


These are just some of the activities RLabs are busy with to reconstruct communities across South Africa.

Art of a Mobile Counsellor

In collaboration with the Department of Social Development and Impact Direct Ministries, the RLabs team hosted the world's first Mobile Counselling Course to a group of particpants from various Non profit and Community based organisations. The focus of the training was to empower these organisations to make use of mobile phones as part of their counselling services. The training was managed by our mobile counselling specialists who covered a wide range of topics over the three days ranging from the "Art of Mobile Counselling" to "Confessions of a Mobile Counsellor".



The new mobile counsellors were also introduced to the system that will be used for the mobile counselling activities. The excitement by the participants and orgsanisations involved was a clear indication that using mobile counselling as part their support services to clients could add value to their service delivery. This is especially the case for organisations working with youth who use mobile phones daily for engagement with friends and family. The training was only the beginning of the journey and the next few weeks we have to roll it out to schools that could benefit of Drug Mobile Counselling Services.

National AIDS Helpline: Pilot training

After a long day of travelling in Johannesburg it is so exciting to be part of the rollout of the world's first HIV/AIDS Mobile Instant Messaging counselling service by the National AIDS Helpline. This week it will be further training with the counsellors and training with the supervisors of National AIDS Helpline who will be managing the services locally. This initiative has been made possible by Cell-Life and their partners who are sponsoring this service.

To add the HIV/AIDS mobile counselling service do the following:

- Add redchatzone@gmail.com on your mobile chat service and accept the contact.
- This service is currently available Monday to Thursday 4 - 6pm.

Youth Marketing for Non profits

With the increased number of organisations especially non-profits looking at how they can engage with young people the video below, by Graham Brown of Mobile Youth, gives an insightful overview of what these organisations can do to reach their youth target market. The Reconstructed Project also featured in this video as we continue spreading the message of hope amongst our young people in South Africa.

The Art of Mobile Counselling - Part 3

Continuing our journey on exploring "The Art of Mobile Counselling" today we will look at what is known as Text language or "Textese". This is a language and culture that is increasingly used by mobile chat users. As a mobile counsellor being familiar with how the language evolved is important and to understand how the chat language words are formed. Below is a general guideline to what could be expected from most chat users:

Words are replaced with single letters:
be --> b
see --> c
are --> r
you --> u
why --> y
okay --> k

Words can be replaced with single digits:
one, won --> 1
to, too --> 2
tree --> 3
for --> 4
ate --> 8

A single letter or digit can replace a syllable therefore shortening some words e.g: ate can be replaced with 8, therefore great can be text as gr8, wait becomes w8, later becomes l8r or l8a. To can be replaced with 2 therefore we can have tomorrow that could be text as 2mro.

Combinations of the above can shorten a single or multiple words for example your and You're become ur or yr and u're. Next week we will continue with "The Art of Mobile Counselling".

Mobile Counselling services via The Grid

Today we've extended our mobile counselling service to the 800,000+ users on "The Grid" mobile social network platform (Thanks Nic Haralambous for stats update). This means that users on The Grid will be able to access our Drug Advice Support, Debt Counselling and HIV/AIDS counselling services. Users on the Grid have to import contacts and could add one of the following communities:

- AIM
- MSN
- Yahoo
- GTalk
- Icq

Once selected then users would be able to communicate with any of our advice support services. To import any of the above communities on the Grid the following steps should be taken:

1) Go to Online Friends
2) Select menu
3) On the menu select "My Friends"
4) Import Contacts
5) Select Menu -> Add Community
6) Select Community (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, Icq), Enter User name and Password
7) Select Import now

The user can add our Drug Advice Support(DAS), HIV Redchatzone and Debt Breaker contacts in any of the above communities to access our FREE services via The Grid.

National AIDS Helpline Mobile Chat service growing

The collaboration with Cell-Life and National AIDS Helpline (managed by Lifeline) ,using our Advice Support Network (ASN) software, offering mobile counselling in the area of HIV/AIDS is clearly showing signs of growth during the "Pre-pilot". Thursday the counsellors had conversations with 16 people and supported 635 messages during their 2 hour session. We are looking forward to see how this project grow as the Lifeline counsellors become more comfortable using the mobile phone medium as a means to support those in need of HIV/AIDS support.

BBC Interview - Drug Advice Support

Tuesday afternoon (25 August 2009) we had the privilege to share our experiences on how we using mobile phones to support people impacted by the problem of drugs. I had an interview on the BBC World Service and you can listen to it online. The interview about Drug Advice Support (DAS) starts at 42:32 (See image for guidance) on the BBC iPlayer.

Drug Advice Support - Interview with Advisors

The Art of Mobile Counselling - Part 2

Realising that counselling using Mobile Chat is not the same as helpline or face to face counselling due to a number of factors. Some of the key characteristics and skills for mobile counsellors are:

- Firstly all the counselling skills that applies to helplines and face-to-face is also true for mobile counsellors
- Fast Communication Skills, the mobile chat generation is a "Now" generation who requires immediate response. Fast chat skills would therefore be good to ensure the most of the medium.
- Multiple conversations with various people in need would require being able to multitask
- Understand the mobile language and culture (E.g. know the basics such as not typing in Capital Letters, make use of the basic chat characters just to give that feel of belonging etc.)
- Read between the characters, important to make sense of the expressions through the mobile phone medium.
- Brief and to the point, remember less is best. The small mobile phone screen of most users mean that they do not need long paragraphs but short and to the point messages.
- Creativity, the mobile counsellor should be creative to get the message across in as few characters as possible
- Passion, as with all other form of counselling passion for the area and medium is important.
- Minimal Chat Response (MCR), this is one of the important skills that's required making use of characters during the conversation such as "k", "o" etc. This is important to ensure continuous conversation and getting the user to discuss their situation.

Next week we'll share more on the Art of Mobile Counselling and your comments are welcome as we grow the characteristics and skills of a Mobile Counsellor.

The Art of Mobile Counselling - Part 1

After an exciting week of training with National AIDS Help Line in South Africa who supports thousands every month with the issue of HIV/AIDS we managed to get 6 of their counsellors all geared up for Chat Counselling using mobile phones. Although all of the participants were qualified counsellors we had to teach the difference in counselling approach via mobile phones. We will be sharing some of our thoughts over the next few weeks of what the necessary skills are to make the best of the mobile medium. Our experience with the Drug Advice Support (DAS) counselling service has taught us that Mobile phones as a medium the following is a few suggestions to consider:

- Mobile chat environment has its own culture and language

- Less is best, the counsellor have to use as little text to get the maximum message

- “Hi” is a conversation, for many just a simple "hi" is a conversation that makes them feel connected in some way.

- Communicate in characters not words. Many of the mobile chat users communicate using characters to make the most of the small screen and limited number of characters per screen

We are looking forward seeing the progress of the National AIDS Helpline as they make use of our technology to support thousands accross South Africa.