SWIPE: Strong Social Work Inspiring Practices Digitization

Inventory and share digital social work tools

This project maps inspiring digital practices for social work at large. The knowledge of digital tools and their inspiring added value for social work make further implementation possible.

Due to the corona pandemic, digitization was forced to receive a boost. Many social professionals started looking for alternatives to reach their target group. This project analyzes the lessons learned from that period and extends them to broader social work. We make an inventory of inspiring practices. What exactly makes these practices inspiring for social workers and for the people they work with?

Digitization is the answer to social work challenges

Social work faces major challenges. The social work conference in 2018 listed 8 challenges and linked them to five lines of force. Together these form the core of the 2020-2024 Strong Social Work action plan. Digitization in social work is one of the listed challenges.

With this project we want to inspire the social work field to further implement digitization in their operations. Digitization and online help are not an end in themselves, but a tool to tackle the challenges facing social work.

Appstore with digital tools for social work

In 2021, Artevelde University College, together with various academic and professional partners, developed an app store for well-being and health. The app store bundles a hundred screened apps and tools that can be used in aid, care and service processes.

SWIPE expands this app store further to social work by selecting and screening relevant digital tools for social work and then making them available to the professional field via a high-quality platform for the professional field.

The research goes through the following steps:

1. For a first overview of inspiring practices, we draw on literature, existing research and publications.
2. In a second phase, we organize focus groups with umbrella organisations, civil society organizations and academic partners. Herein lies the challenge of involving social work at large and thus collecting inspiring practices from different perspectives.
3. The result is a mapping of different digital practices in Flanders.

What makes digital practices inspiring?

Which parameters make digital social work work? What inspires social workers and their target groups to use these digital tools in a sustainable way?

In a selection of case studies, we analyze the practices:

• Through storytelling from a client and organizational perspective, we highlight the inspiring aspect.
• Discourse analysis then helps us to detect relevant parameters.

Results: inspiration for practice

Which digital practices really get the social worker excited about? What works in practice? And what exactly makes this practice so inspiring for care providers and clients?

View some results and actions below and help spread them further.

• appstore for wellbeing and health with inspiring social work practices;
• workshop at the congress strong social work in which digital practices that realise 'proximity' were presented and where attention was paid to how existing digital barriers can be removed;
• testimonials from social workers and clients about digital practices and what inspires them, filmed by social work bachelor students;
• blender innovation tables with which we continue to encourage umbrella organizations to put digitization and implementation on their agenda;
• extra module in the existing offer 'lifelong learning about online help' in which a collection of inspiring practices and the storytelling material take shape