The original question
“Do you have any tips on turning an idea about helping others to help themselves into a service?”
Summary of the video
Make people help others first, such as through volunteer opportunities
Create services that allow individuals to contribute to the community
Play with ego by designing a service that makes people feel good and allows them to showcase their achievements
Video transcript
Video transcript
This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.
Do you have any tips on turning an idea about helping others to help themselves into a service? So the question from Kevin is how can we make a service out of people trying to improve themselves? At least that's how I understand the question. To answer that, I have a few pointers that might help.
The first one is, make people help others first. And this is based on one very simple example, which is loneliness. And that's services that I have experience with. There is a lot of services that help people to get less lonely during Christmases, Christmas time, and, big holidays so that people don't feel alone and don't feel abandoned.
Usually it's like a big dinner party, a big community dinner party. But to get the lonely people in these events, It's quite hard, but some services have found a little trick. And the little trick is, they say, oh, you could either come as a guest or you could come as a volunteer. And that's really smart, because people who have a problem usually don't like others to know they have a problem.
I don't want everyone to know that I'm lonely, so they can join as a volunteer and then they are not flagged as I'm being, I'm a lonely guy and I'm coming to this event as a lonely guy. Oh, I'm coming like as someone who helps. And that's very smart because it does a few things. The first one again, it removes the kind of fear from people of being flagged as having a problem.
And the other thing, which is pretty lovely, is that People then have to act as someone who knows, the lonely guy has to act as someone who is not lonely because he is now the volunteer who has to go and speak to people. And so now he is empowered to go and speak to people, which means that by doing it, by teaching the way of doing it, he is learning it himself.
So that's maybe one thing to help transform, to create a service of people helping themselves. Maybe try their other route, which is... Let's people help others in the community. Another part is play with ego. We are ego people, which means we like ourselves a little bit. That means how can you make the service in a way that people see?
That it makes them look good. They can share it with friends. They can show, Oh, I did this thing and I'm getting better, or I'm helping people, it's good to have that. So maybe try to think about how can we use the ego part as a motivator in the service.
A community question
This question was asked by a community member for the second Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.
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