Exploring Whisper - How to Use it in Your Community
Knowing how to keep your community safe if they don’t feel comfortable reporting a problem can make addressing safeguarding concerns challenging. For many young people and adults, opening up about their concerns can be difficult to do in person, and can often result in individuals feeling isolated and unable to ask for help.
By utilising Whisper in your community, you can create an anonymous reporting route that supports your wider safeguarding strategy, to ensure that everyone feels comfortable to raise their concerns and get the support they need.
Our guidance explores how current Whisper subscribers can utilise the tool and how it can benefit those thinking about utilising the tool within their school or organisation.
Why should my organisation use Whisper?
Supporting Safeguarding Practices
Whisper can serve as an important first step in your organisation’s safeguarding protocols, providing a comfortable environment for community members to share their concerns anonymously, which allows staff to proactively address issues before they escalate. Whether the issue relates to bullying, troubles at home, or other well-being concerns, Whisper offers a way for these problems to be raised in a manner that feels safe and accessible. This approach helps ensure that all additional safeguarding measures can be implemented effectively.
Tracking Trends and Patterns in Your Community
By providing an anonymous reporting tool, Whisper allows your school or organisation to take an overarching view of how safeguarding issues are impacting your community. It helps to identify key trends or patterns of behaviour that may otherwise go unnoticed. With this insight, teachers, safeguarding leads, and other professionals can intervene early and provide targeted support where needed, helping to prioritise the well-being of everyone in the community.
What are the benefits of using Whisper?
Quick and Accessible Solutions
Whisper offers two ways for your community to submit reports: via your web form or by sending an SMS message to a dedicated number, allowing any user to reach out anonymously in a way that suits them. With user-friendly features and robust security, Whisper offers users and safeguarding leads fast reporting and response times, providing email alerts as soon as a web form or SMS report is submitted.
Alongside this, an anonymous chat function allows users to directly and anonymously communicate with the safeguarding lead and professionals they need to, to provide more information or solutions to assist with their concerns.
User-Friendly and Flexible
One of Whisper's significant advantages is its ease of use. With SMS functions and online chat options, Whisper is simple for parents, students, and community members to access without worrying about complex technology they haven’t used, or long-winded paperwork. The tool is designed to be flexible, allowing professionals to manage and view reports, while also offering the ability to customise the tool to fit the specific needs of their organisation
Additionally, SWGfL’s offering of Whisper means that your organisation will have access to a wealth of additional support, including guidance from a dedicated customer service team. This helps ensure that you can make the most of the tool and wider online safety support to effectively improve your safeguarding strategies.
Through a subscription of Whisper, you will also have quick and easy access of the Whipser knowledgebase helping you to find guidance from our experts, whenever you need it!
Introducing Whisper to Your Community
To make sure Whisper becomes a key part of your community’s safeguarding practices, it’s important to introduce it in a way that’s clear, visible, and easy to understand. Promoting Whisper effectively can help to spread a consistent message about its importance and how simple it is to use, encouraging honesty, trust, and safety within your community. Here are some effective ways to introduce Whisper to your community:
Posters throughout your community to raise continued awareness
Messaging for your organisations website to inform parents and students
Email templates to notify staff, parents, and stakeholders
To help support your promotions of Whisper throughout your community, you can access a range of customisable templates from the SWGfL website to help guide your communications with parents, young people and staff in your community.
Access Whisper Promotional Resources
Find Out More About Whisper
By integrating Whisper into your community, you create a safe, secure environment where young people, parents, and staff feel empowered to share their concerns and well-being issues with confidence. Anonymous reporting tools like Whisper offer numerous advantages that help to enhance your safeguarding efforts.
Whisper is here for Primary, Secondary, MAT, and youth settings, to ensure a wide approach to anonymous reporting. If you are yet to subscribe to Whisper, learn more about how it can benefit your community below.