2021 Allens Neota Logic UTS Tech Challenge: meet the winners

Importance of Fundraising

Fundraising is a critical source of income for not-for-profits or NFP’s. With more than 50,000 NFP’s registered in Australia, it is essential for these organisations to ensure that the fundraising process is manageable and easy to understand. In the 2015/16 financial year alone, an estimated 14.9 million Australian adults gave 12.5 billion dollars to charities and NFP organisations. But, what precious time and resources are being taken away from NFP organisations when they attempt to navigate through the matrix of legislation that exists for fundraisers from state to state within Australia?

 

Problem

 

Well, that is exactly what Nikki and Josan, from the Community Fundraising team at Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) came to us about. Aspect is Australia’s largest autism-spectrum service provider, with one of the biggest autism-specific school programs in the world. Aspect provides people on the autism spectrum with the opportunity to realise their unique learned potential, as well as providing support to their families, carers, friends and colleagues. All of this support is done in part with the assistance of fundraisers through the Community Fundraising Team. It is therefore integral for Aspect to ensure that their fundraisers are aware of all the legal requirements in their state or territory, and that the process to undertake a fundraiser is simple and streamlined. However, Nikki and Josan were finding that they were being inundated with questions and queries about how to host a fundraiser. Aspect is a nation-wide organisation, and therefore understanding how to comply with all the legislative requirements of each state is difficult and time consuming, especially for non-lawyers. Not only that, but the current manual administrative process of both applying for and approving fundraisers is complicated and laborious. 

 

Initially, we wanted to focus on the gambling and gaming rules across Australia, but given the timeframe of this app, it wasn’t possible. Instead, we focused on one type of fundraising activity - raffles, which was identified by Aspect as the most useful to tackle. Now, we will demonstrate our solution to this problem, where we’ll meet David, a potential fundraiser. 

 

App Creation + Testing ( Amelia)

David is a teacher who lives in Brisbane, whose son, Michael was recently diagnosed with autism. David did some research into organising a raffle, however was overwhelmed by the process. He came to the Aspect website and was referred to the raffle fundraiser assistant.

[welcome page] ( Amelia)

David is presented with our welcome page, in discussion with our client we wanted to ensure inclusive practice was throughout our app. This can be first seen with the inclusion of a translation tool that can translate our content into one of 98 languages.

[Disclaimer page] (Amelia)

David is made aware of the fact that our app does not offer legal advice on our disclaimer page. Given the context of Aspect’s privacy policy which is presented in a text box, to minimise information overload as well as an easy to read version of this policy. And thus begins the first part of the app’s function. 

[raffle yes/no question] (Amelia)

This is the beginning of the assessment of David’s eligibility to host a raffle. He is asked whether he understands what a raffle is, what state he will hold his raffle in as well as questions relating specifically to the laws that govern raffles within Queensland. David would answer 3-6 questions prior to being informed of his eligibility to host a raffle based on his answers to these simple questions. 

[as we flick through the questions] (Amelia)

We chose to use a broad testing group of individuals of all ages to help us refine our questions as well as understand how accessible the raffle information would be to a variety of people. This led to our team rephrasing sentences as well as using an Aspect specific tone in the information sheets we created. 

[conclusion page]

Now that David has progressed through the first part of the app and has come to the end of the eligibility phase. He is informed that he can host a raffle with a permit, and is given a link to the permit application for Queensland as well as an information sheet which is also provided in an easy to read format which highlights his obligations to host said raffle. These documents were created by the Moral Code team. These documents were created in accordance with W3C standards to ensure the accessibility of our app. 

 [Authorisation application]

At this point, David is forwarded to the document automation section where he will submit his proposal to host a raffle to Aspect. On this proposal form he will need to provide specific details about his fundraiser. This process was initially tedious however after much discussion and feedback from our testers we about to rephrase our questions and add in text boxes which explains specific content and aided our user. 

[waiver page]

After a few pages of information, the user is taken to aspect’s waiver which also includes a hyperlink to their fundraising guidelines.  This element was included to provide the client with an engaged and informed fundraiser who was aware of their duties to Aspect and the law.

[final conclusion page show the proposal form]

Finally, David has come to the end of the fundraiser assistant where he has been given feedback on his eligibility to host a raffle, as well as created a proposal application. This highlights the efficiency and informative full service our application provides.

[show ATF and email aspect receives]

It does not only provide this to the user, but it provides it to the client as upon the completion of David’s journey through the app, aspect’s community fundraising team will receive his application in real time, his includes proposal form as well as a draft authority to fundraise form that was completed with the details he provided in the app. By drafting and automating this authority to fundraise we are helping Aspect minimise their workload and eliminate a step in a bureaucratic process. 

Handover

After months of intensive work, we are happy to announce that our app has been finalised and is ready for upload. It will be embedded in the Aspect website using a separate URL. We have also completed the maintenance instructions, which includes advice on what to do if and when fundraising legislation changes in the future to ensure that the app stays relevant and up-to-date. 

 

Impact

In terms of impact, this app has significant time-saving capabilities. It will allow Aspect to refocus their energy away from complex legalese and bureaucratic technicalities, towards impactful work within the community. Why should they have to waste valuable time on these difficult administrative tasks when the Raffle Fundraising Assistant can do the work for them? In the testing stage, many people were surprised that an app like this had not already been created, highlighting, in particular, the ease and efficiency of the process. Last year Aspect received $7.6M from community fundraisers alone. By removing the legal technicalities from the fundraising process, our app will allow this donation pool to grow, thereby providing Aspect with the freedom to continue doing the amazing work that they do. 

 

Scaleability (Dana)

Ultimately, our app was built to inspire. Due to our extensive research and automisation processes, we have already formulated the solutions to tedious processes, providing a strong base for further expansion, without the challenges. We believe that there is real potential to expand and scale it to other organisations as they grapple with the same kinds of problems that Aspect was experiencing. This is particularly the case since many charities operate on a national basis and must deal with laws across multiple jurisdictions. But this is just the beginning. At the moment it only captures the law as it applies to raffle fundraising, but can be adapted to cater for all fundraising activities, such as fun runs, private event proceeds and even more novel circumstances, like selling pokemon cards on eBay! 

 

Through our tireless work, we are proud to be providing the not-for-profit sector with an innovative solution that will help channel more donations towards these vital community organisations. 

 

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  A warm welcome to everyone. As we begin tonight, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of our land, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. Some of you are on lands with different traditional owners and I also acknowledge those owners.

 

Thank you very much to everyone for being with us for tonight's Allens Neota Logic UTS Law Tech Challenge grand final. Members of our audience this evening include our challengers ‑ the students ‑ and their Allens mentors, family and friends, our judges, supporters of the Brennan Justice Program, UTS staff and esteemed guests from Allens, Neota Logic, Women's Justice Network, Respect.Now.Always, ISS Australia and Aspect.

 

In these difficult times, it is important for us to remember that inspiring work is still being done all around us. The Allens Neota Logic UTS Law Tech Challenge is both a mouthful and a program that enables students to use the Neota Logic platform to build apps for social justice partners to help them to perform their important work. This year our students have worked hard to support social justice with brilliant clients from Aspect, ISS Australia, Respect.Now.Always, and Women's Justice Network.

 

The Law Tech Challenge was first held in 2017 and has always been unique for the close involvement of lawyers from Allens in the projects using the Neota Logic platform. 2021 has been yet another year of fantastic involvement between our UTS teams, Neota Logic and Allens.

 

The Law Tech Challenge is also special because of its integration into the UTS Brennan social justice program and you'll see tonight that this year the students have taken their work for social justice to a new level with amazing social media campaigns that raised awareness about their projects and the important work of our clients. I hope that some of you are already aware of that because you've seen their work on social media.

 

Tonight you can be a part of that by voting for the best social media campaign. You can also get involved by tweeting and posting throughout tonight's grand final using the hashtags #lawtechchallenge and #utslaw that you'll see on the screen. You can also access live captioning for this event following instructions in the chat box.

 

This evening the teams will present their apps to three esteemed judges:  Lisa Kozaris, the Chief Innovation & Legal Solutions Officer from Allens; Beth Patterson, the Director of ESPconnect; and Professor Lesley Hitchens, the Dean of our Faculty of Law at UTS. I now invite Professor Hitchens to present her opening remarks.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Thank you, Genevieve. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to present, but I hope for all your sakes I'll be brief. It is such a great pleasure to welcome you all here tonight wherever you're located and to be able to run the challenge this year despite the difficult circumstances that almost across Australia we find ourselves in at the moment, and in a way that added something even more special to the students and the role that they are performing and the projects that they've undertaken during this as part of the challenge this year.

 

I just want to also acknowledge both Allens Legal and Neota Logic for their continued willingness to partner with us on this and especially at this time when every organisation is facing COVID challenges and that has been just so special to be able to continue this relationship and to have the challenge run this year.

 

If I could just take a moment to say when I think about the challenge, it epitomises everything that we are trying to do at UTS Law through the legal education and the research that we undertake here in the faculty. First of all, it is of course above all about social justice and that is something that's absolutely core to this law faculty and the Brennan program itself is just a wonderful example of students really being part of that endeavour through their student activities.

 

But it does more than that. If we think about the legal education that we want our students to undertake here, if we think about the skills that they graduate with, this challenge, as I say, epitomises so much of that.

 

A key theme at UTS Law is law and technology and we want technology to be used responsibly. We want it to be used for good.  So this challenge, with the support of Neota Logic and the mentors of Allens, really gives students an opportunity to understand and to engage with technology, but also to do it for a purpose that is for the public good to support these NGOs.

 

What else does the challenge do for us?  It develops the skills for students of collaboration and team work, something that increasingly is so important for law graduates, and as well and, most crucially of all, I believe, it reminds the students to remember that at the heart of all legal work is the client and so students through this process had to learn to listen to the clients, had to work with them, had to really understand what their particular context was and their concerns and then build something through that listening and through that iterative process.

 

And above all, what they've delivered is something authentic, authentic because it's not just going to go on a shelf, it's not just a fun thing that they've played with for a few months, but it is designed to be implemented for the NGOs, and I just want to say to the NGOs I had the chance to meet most of you early on at the start of the challenge when we could meet face to face, but particularly I hope that this has been a good journey for you and I hope that through this endeavour, this challenge and the work of our students it is something that will be really lasting for you as well and help you in your important work.

 

So for anyone who hasn't experienced a challenge before, a grand final, I can tell you that it's exciting and I hope that brief welcome gives you a sense of why we see it as so crucial for our students and just such a wonderful experience.

 

So please enjoy the evening ‑ well, I was going to say I look forward to talking to you afterwards, but of course I won't be, but thank you.

 

I'm sorry, I will now introduce Liza Greenwood, who is Head of Innovation Services at Allens, and Julian Uebergang, who is the Managing Director of APAC, Neota Logic and they will just speak in turn as well.

 

LIZA GREENWOOD:  Thanks, Lesley. I don't think I can improve on that or add to it.

 

So I'll be brief. It's great to see so many people here. It's really exciting and we're really excited to be here as well.

 

I just wanted to reflect really briefly on why the Law Tech Challenge is really important for Allens. So we really believe that having a sound understanding of emerging technology that's really becoming a vital competency for lawyers of the future, but perhaps more so is learning to work with clients and work with them collaboratively to develop solutions that solve real problems, solve real problems and solve things that matter. So we think that's critical for the future of the legal profession.

 

So not surprisingly, our mentors at Allens ‑ I know that they've been really thrilled to work with future lawyers of the next generation of the legal profession and they've been loving the combination of law and technology and really that part about benefiting our community partners, which I guess just makes it all mean something at the end of the day.  They've shared some surprising learnings around collaboration and how you need to communicate, clear lines of communication, and even some learnings around demystifying legal techs and apps and their capability, so that's been exciting. We can't wait to see the apps, of course, and learn more about how they're solving real problems that really matter.

 

All I was going to say was thank you so much to the cast ‑ I won't say thousands, but the cast of many who put this together. There's been many, many people involved in lots of hours of work and it all culminates in tonight.  So good luck to the teams. Thank you to the mentors, thank you to Genevieve and everyone who's had a hand in putting the program together and I will pass straight over to Julian. Thanks, Julian.

 

JULIAN UEBERGANG:  Thank you very much and unfortunately, I'm not with you in person tonight to see the tremendous energy that is normally in the room when I've attended these grand finals in the past. 

 

So my name is Julian Uebergang.  I'm the Managing Director for Neota Logic in the APAC region. Neota Logic is the market leading platform of expertise, documents and processes.

 

I just wanted to say a few words about this program. We are very proud to be involved with two iconic institutions, UTS and Allens. We've been involved with this program for a number of years and we're always blown away with the enthusiasm, the quality of the apps that are produced, the organisations that we work with in terms of the end client. So thank you very much for continuing this program and working with us. We really are delighted to be involved and I'm delighted to be here tonight.

 

To the students, I just wanted to say well done. Tremendous resilience to get to this point, particularly in these challenging times. It's always difficult to work in groups and collaborate virtually, but you've done really well and I'm really looking forward to seeing the work product and looking forward to seeing a winner tonight, but I'm sure we'll see some great applications.

 

There's a few people that I just wanted to thank ‑ in particular Genevieve and Crystal for organising this event, coordinating things up until this point and putting together tonight's challenge with the grand final. I think it's been a tremendous effort, particularly in the circumstances, so thank you very much.

 

I'd also like to acknowledge Kevin Mulcahy, who I think is tuned in from Brooklyn in the US, in New York. He is Head of Education and Community Programs and he has done the lion's share of the work with students to get them through and support them to this point.  So thank you, Kevin.

 

I think that's enough from me, so I'll hand over now and look forward to seeing all of the presentations. Thank you once again.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Thank you so much for your remarks, Lesley, Liza and Julian, and I also want to thank Kevin, who I think it might be 3.43 in the morning in New York and he is still tuning in, which I think reflects his fantastic work with our students.  So thank you, Kevin.

 

I think that those remarks help to remind us that the relationship between UTS, Allens and Neota Logic for this challenge is the foundation of it and so it was great to hear from each of you. But the challenge also would not be possible without our wonderful student teams and their amazing social justice partners, so tonight we will hear about the apps that have come from this collaboration.

 

Throughout the challenge, teams have worked closely with Kevin Mulcahy, from Neota Logic, and learnt to use the platform. From Allens and UTS colleagues, students have learned about principles of intelligent technological design, social media communication and working with not‑for‑profit clients. Each team member has been given a different role as a project manager, client liaison manager, app designer, user experience manager, and quality assurance and communications controller.

 

Teams have then worked closely with their clients to design an app while being mentored by Kevin and a team of brilliant lawyers at Allens ‑ Daniel Taha, Dominic Keenan, Sophie Leitch and Jack Baldwin. The teams have built and tested their apps, received feedback and refined their apps to optimise user experience. It has been a busy year.

 

So you can see what has been done throughout the challenge from the comfort of home, teams have developed eight‑minute videos to explain the objective that they were trying to help their social justice client achieve and explain the way that they develop their apps to respond to these objectives. As long as technology stays on our side, you will shortly see these videos. After each video, the judges will have five minutes to ask each team live questions and hear their responses.

 

While the judges are deliberating over the grand final winners, you will hear more from our challengers, who will each have three minutes to explain to you their fantastic social media campaigns. You the audience will have the chance to see the presentations and vote on a winner. This will not be an easy task.  Nor will it be easy for our three judges who are tasked with choosing between our teams to decide on tonight's overall grand final winners.

 

We're extremely lucky to be joined tonight by an expert in legal technology, UTS Honorary Industry Adjunct Professor Beth Patterson. Beth has been involved in the Law Tech Challenge since its inception. This year she has moved from helping to run the program to the challenging role of judging the teams.

 

She'll be ably joined by another technology expert from our international law firm partner Allens Legal. Lisa Kozaris is the Chief Innovation and Legal Solutions Officer and she leads the innovation and digital solutions team for Allens, so she's deeply aware of the importance of technology for law.

 

You've already heard from our third judge, UTS Dean of Law, Professor Lesley Hitchens. Lesley has been a champion of this challenge and the ground‑breaking Legal Future and Technology major at UTS. We're very lucky to have all three judges here tonight and I wish them luck in this difficult task.

 

It is now my great pleasure to introduce the first team, Ciana, working with International Social Services Australia and mentored by Sophie, Jack and Taylor. Welcome, Tristan, Molly, Brydon, Hue, and Stella. (Video played):

 

TRISTAN SALINATRO:  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Ciana presentation. Firstly, the story of Ciana was much more than creating an app. This journey saw us streamlining services to assist families suffering from international child abduction. Molly will now begin with an overview of our non‑profit.

 

MOLLY HUDSON:  Our non for profit is International Social Service, or ISS, of Australia. It provides inter‑country social work and legal services for children and families separated by international borders. In the Australian office, highly qualified lawyers provide the assistance for families experiencing international parental child abduction.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  According to Child Recovery Australia, over 250 children are abducted in or out of Australia by a parent every year. The Hague Convention is a treaty that has been signed and ratified by multiple countries. It seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of wrongful removal and retention across international boundaries. It also provides a procedure to bring about their return by providing templates that the ISS lawyers can use to create applications and accompanying affidavits.

 

Both documents contain key details such as the names of the children, the current habitual residence, the date and circumstances of their removal and the parenting arrangements or plans organised between parents. The documents are categorised depending on whether the child was wrongfully removed to a country or if they are currently being wrongfully detained.

 

Thus, it was essential that the Ciana application obtained these key details from the parents no matter the situation and auto populate a draft of the Hague affidavit, an application template associated with the child's situation. This would then be sent to the ISS lawyers after the parent finished the questionnaire.

 

Moving forward, this revised the context for the systematic obstacles that we would then identify after initial meetings with ISS.

 

MOLLY HUDSON:  After meeting with ISS lawyers Rebecca and Jenny in May, it was clear that their main problem was receiving the information from the client required to create an affidavit and an application for the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The original questionnaire is an extremely lengthy document that was often returned to ISS with missing questions and not enough detail. This resulted in back-and-forth phone calls and emails to correct and/or collect the information. These obstacles prolonged the entire service, resulting in both parties being frustrated. This lengthy process could stop or push back justice being delivered to the parents.

 

BRYDON TRUONG:  Initially, we envisioned an app that enabled parents to navigate the often confusing and frustrating process for applying for international affidavits. As we progressed, however, the app concept evolved to include even more functions which would conflict with the initial concept of the app.

 

As a result, we had to ensure the app would accommodate the necessary functions required whilst addressing the common problems with the previous process. This ultimately culminated in the design and creation of an app that was based upon the usage of consistent colours and thematic messages which would help the user complete their applications without feeling overwhelmed and reducing the back-and-forth communication regarding missing details. Hue and stella will now go through our application design and its various features.

 

STELLA XI:  The UX Has been customised beyond the standard Neota theme. Everything you see on the front end is custom CSS coded. You will notice that the app design is highly emulated on the ISS webpage.  Everything from the buttons, the font, colours and even the placement of text elements has been based of the ISS home page.

 

Although this ultimately added days to the design process, I chose to pursue this given the degree to which the app would be integrated within ISS's end‑to‑end process. I wanted to make sure that this was an app which ISS could feel a sense of ownership over and one that looked as though it was properly integrated as part of ISS's operations.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Since our application is information heavy, we created a checklist for users. A checklist of information is provided for the user to assist them in answering the question form. Our application also asks users to answer a series of questions split into five sections. These questions concern the personal details of the wrongfully removed or retained child and their parents, habitual residence, rights of custody, circumstances of the removal or retention and any applicable defences.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  We've also recognised that the questionnaire is quite long, so to make sure the end user knew what they'd be doing and what to respect, we've tried to make sure that they were properly oriented before starting the questionnaire by including time estimates.

 

It was important that we acknowledge that the end user is likely going to be stressed given the reason they're using the app is to retrieve a child. An example of how we've addressed this is the graphics on each page ‑ the soft colours of the landscapes.  Cool hues and soft tones are deliberately chosen to create a calming atmosphere.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  After ISS tested our initial application, we incorporated multiple instances to allow the user to complete our application for multiple children.  To complement the multiple instances, we created text objects with in‑line conditions in all aspects of the application, including the generated affidavit and application to reflect how many children the user had. This created a very seamless experience for users.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  We too factored in the end user experience when building the form pages. We've got a hover effect over questions, adequate spacing and text boxes that have been deliberately sized in order to guide the end user on the expected length of questions.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  The answers from section 3 onwards were also incorporated to act as prompts to give the user an example of ways they can answer the questions. And after answering the questions, the application generates an application and affidavit in accordance with the Hague Convention and provides the user and the ISS lawyers a copy of the user's responses. The user email also includes instructions for the next steps.

 

As you have seen, all of our features have improved the speed and quality of draft applications and affidavits, freeing up time for ISS lawyers and reducing the time for their clients in the initial stages of building their application.

 

BRYDON TRUONG:  As part of our quality assurance process, we created a feedback form for our early test users which would give us an insight into their thoughts on the application and where it could be improved. Additionally, Rebecca and Jenny, from the ISS, provided their own critical feedback as well as feedback from their own clients.

 

Based on feedback, we simplified the language of the introductory session by removing hard to understand or legalistic language. We also changed the clarity of the questions and included default answers to reduce the overwhelming nature of the large number of questions.

 

We also ensured that there was a clear explanation of how the parents' information was being used during the privacy disclosure section. We also ensured an email would be sent out to the parents detailing the next steps that would occur after completing the questionnaire and how the situation was being looked into.

 

TRISTAN SALINATRO:  After a month and a half of testing and feedback and further updates before the final presentation, the link to the application has been included within the lawyer's email templates to their clients. Additionally, Molly has provided a written and virtual face‑to‑face handover with Rebecca and Jenny so they may add or edit any questions they wish.

 

Thank you for being with us on this journey. This is the story of Ciana, the story of families reuniting.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  What an absolutely fantastic app. Please turn on your cameras, Tristan, Brydon, Stella, Molly and Hue. It is now time for the judges to ask you some questions.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Great. Well, well done to the team. It's a really impressive solution you've developed for ISS Australia, so thanks for taking us through it and again, well done to you all.

 

The first thing that struck me, actually, is that you've really considered the end user in the design. For me it's through the use of the colours, the default and sample answers that I saw there a moment ago and even the way you've modularised the questionnaire, I thought that was a really great way so as not to overwhelm someone during what would be a really distressing time, as you highlighted.

 

My question, however ‑ you noted that it's quite a detailed application process, there's a lot of information that an individual needs to go through and some of the sections take quite some time to complete, so my question was is an individual able to save their work and come back to it at a later point when they're completing the questionnaire as well as are they able to sort of upload pre‑prepared information or other documents?

 

STELLA XI:  Hi, everyone, I'm happy to take the question in relation to the save progress feature.

 

So during our initial testing with ISS, this was definitely an issue for users because since our application is really information heavy, ISS found that a lot of their users couldn't finish the application in one sitting, so they definitely wanted a save progress feature so that users could complete the application in more than one sitting and since this wasn't functionally possible on the Neota platform, our team sat down and we discussed ways we could address this problem without that feature and that's where we came up with the checklist feature. 

 

So essentially by adding that to our application, our application is now two applications and this checklist feature, what it does is that it prepares users to complete the application in one sitting by telling them what documents they need to have on hand before going through the questionnaire. We also implemented a landing page with time estimates to ensure there was transparency and to better prepare the user to complete the application in one sitting.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Terrific. Thanks, Stella.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Thank you again for the team. It was great work. One thing that it would seem likely is that often the users of this application may also be from non‑English speaking backgrounds and I wondered if there was any discussion around the possibility of translation, of providing the service in other languages.

 

TRISTAN SALINATRO:  I can take this answer. So on the Neota Logic platform there's actually an option through Google Translate to provide translation services when the client is completing the questionnaire.  So that's something I think all teams have integrated into the Neota Logic platform.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  That's very helpful. Thank you. And one of the things that is really lovely is that at the end of your demonstration you showed the little girl and how that application might help her and her name was Ciana, which of course helped to explain the name of the application as well. I wondered if you'd thought at all about putting that right at the front of your presentation.

 

TRISTAN SALINATRO:  I'll take this question. So I think the idea was our presentation was analogous to that of a story and it was our idea to have a happy child at the end of the story, of the epilogue you would say.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Good, thanks very much. Thanks.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Terrific. Well done, team.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Great work. Thank you, Ciana.

 

Now we're going to move on to our next team, Appollo. They are working with Respect.Now.Always and have been mentored by Dan and Jack. Welcome to Tutti, Chris, Deepali, Nick and Rania.  (Video played):

 

TUTTI COPPING:  Good evening. We're team Appollo and today we're going to discuss the application we made for our client UTS Respect.Now.Always. My name is Tutti and alongside me in the zoom you'll see my excellent colleagues:  Nick Borovik, our client liaison; Rania Joudeh, UX specialist; Christopher Cruz, our app developer; and Deepali Patil, our comms and quality assurance specialist. Before we go into our app further, we'd like to introduce you to our client UTS RNA.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  UTS RNA was created in response to the National Survey on Sexual Assault at university campuses. UTS RNA has two aims.  The first is to be a student‑facing initiative that promotes discussion around taboo topics such as consent. The second is to be a corporate‑facing entity that promotes training and initiatives at a higher level at UTS. Broadly, RNA can be defined as progressive, inclusive, bold and unafraid.

 

Our client's problem was that they had no existing infrastructure to onboard new volunteers, know who was volunteering or keep track of who wanted to update their details. The current scenario is entirely ad hoc, meaning that our client often does not remember who is volunteering or what events they volunteered at. Our client also raised the fact that they are not digital natives, meaning they wanted a solution that required as minimal technological impact from them as possible. With this problem in mind, how did we create a solution for RNA.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Our solution has three pathways. Let's take a look at how they work.

 

Meet Alex. She's in her first year of a forensic science degree here at UTS and is also a member of the SOUL award. Alex begins her journey through the volunteer intake program. Alex must agree to the privacy statement in order to comply with both New South Wales and UTS privacy guidelines.

 

The volunteer intake has been designed using universal design theory. This theory posits that instead of individuals having to go out of their way to identify their preferred name or preferred pronouns, it's already included in the app. Our goal was to make the app as accessible as possible by including these kinds of questions.

 

As Alex is moving through, she can recognise this app as part of RNA as it matches the branding RNA uses.

 

This page welcomes Alex using her preferred name. If she doesn't enter a preferred name, the logic will change to her first name. This is another way we achieved inclusivity and utilised the concept of universal design.

 

This ice cream flavour question Alex is answering is something quite unique. Ice cream is a key part of RNA branding. Whatever flavour Alex chooses, she'll get a personalised ice cream horoscope in her confirmation email, making the process that extra bit special. The logic in our app also means if individuals don't click on an option to participate in events, they won't see this events page.

 

Alex can now check and confirm that all her details are correct and she can proceed to the next page. Alex can see she's one step away from completing the volunteer process and she just needs to confirm and commit to the agreement above.

 

Once Alex has completed the form, both her and RNA receive an email. Alex receives an ice cream horoscope, information on how to join the RNA Facebook group and a link to refer a friend. RNA also receives an email and can copy the details into their volunteer base.

 

Let's see how Taylor goes when he logs his hours.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Meet Taylor. Taylor is a Law and Communications student and is part of the Brennan Justice Leadership Program. He volunteered at RNA's orientation for spring session and wants to make sure RNA has a record of his time at the event.

 

Taylor goes into the RNA volunteer hub and clicks on the already a volunteer option. Before proceeding, he must agree to the privacy notice as we are collecting his information. He adds his contact details and begins to add the events he volunteered at. He volunteered at multiple events and had two different supervisors, so instead of submitting a form twice, he can add extra events in the one submission. He can select between the events in case he needs to check for errors.

 

This sends an email output to both Taylor and RNA containing the details of Taylor's submission as a PDF attachment. This means RNA has a timely record of events Taylor wishes to claim for the Brennan program without the hassle of back-and-forth communication.

 

Let's look at Oli.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Meet Oli. She's second‑year Bachelor of Business student and has been a longstanding volunteer with RNA for the past year. She has recently decided to become vegan and also changed her mobile number. She would like to let RNA know of this information before volunteering at their next event.

 

So instead of mentioning it offhand at an event and risk the busy team forgetting to update her details, she can now go into the hub and enter the updated details herself. This enables individuals to update RNA on changes to their personal information that may be sometimes too difficult for them to raise in person.  Utilising universal design thinking principles, we included this section to enable volunteers to update their details without fear of being discriminated against or judged.

 

As Oli steps through, she's given the option to update various details. Once this is done, RNA receives an email output which notifies them of Oli's updated details and prompts them to reflect those updates in their databases. This again reinforces our focus on the universal design theory.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Our solution assists RNA in its record keeping for volunteers and also ensures there is consistency for the team in terms of how they collect volunteer information in a sensitive and appropriate way.

 

Firstly, our app complies with the relevant New South Wales and UTS privacy laws. As our app is sitting within a university, there are more stringent privacy requirements that apply. We were able to spend time negotiating with UTS Privacy in order to get the best outcome for our client in the timeframe given. We have structured our app to ensure that RNA won't have any problems with UTS privacy regarding the retention of volunteer data.

 

Our app also meets our client's goals as it's easy to maintain. There is no need for our client to go into the back end of the app and change variables unless there are changes in the law or with how RNA will operate. We strategically avoided any temporal indicators in the app, which ensures longevity and means it requires minimal updates.

 

Our app is in line with branding and messaging, which is incredibly important for RNA as they need to maintain consistency across platforms. We achieved this through designing our app using a universal design lens, which means instead of making individuals go out of their way to tell RNA about their accessibility needs, their preferred pronouns or preferred name, it's already included in the app. As a result, we have created an inclusive, accessible and unique app that provides RNA with the infrastructure to achieve their goals.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Moving on to our testing solution, we underwent three rigorous rounds of QA testing, where we utilised laptops, mobile phones, tablets and four different types of web browsers. This allowed us to make sure our app was optimised across different devices that our audience might use.

 

We undertook external testing which involved in‑depth testing on 16 individuals. This required each team member to walk through the application with an individual and note down any feedback. We had 27 individuals do blind testing, which consisted of getting top‑level, generic feedback on the app.

 

Overall, we have consistently tested the app ourselves with a total of 243 submissions made through our app while also testing alongside our client throughout the development stage to make sure we consider all their requirements.

 

CLIENT (Catharine Pruscino):  I have to say I had no clear vision of what was going to come out of this project, but I am thrilled beyond words with what they've produced.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Now we're looking forward to hearing and answering your questions.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Wow.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Well done team Appollo. There is so much I loved about your presentation and your app. I thought your presentation was amazing. Loved the way you introduced the team at the beginning and made it personal to the team. Also loved the way you used personas for the solution. Loved learning about Oli and friends. I think that makes when you're explaining a solution much more real. So well done. And I loved the video, the client video. If you want to demonstrate impact to a client, having a video makes it again really real. So well done on lots of fronts.

 

My question ‑ I have two questions and one is around the metrics for the problem and the impact and I wondered if you were able to get even rough estimates of how many volunteers this app has affected or will affect say by the month or by the year. I know it sounded like the data problem ‑ you didn't have a lot of data to work with initially, but I just wondered if you had considered maybe presenting some numbers.

 

NICK BOROVIK:  I can take this one. In terms of the amount of volunteers that will be processed, we don't have a concrete number. The numbers always change with RNA and who wants to volunteer. But with regards to metrics, it was important for RNA to be able to keep track of all the volunteers they had and any volunteers that subsequently either graduated university or no longer wanted to. So with regard to metrics, this at least allows RNA to have a more accurate vision of who is volunteering with them.  But in regards to actual metrics of volunteers going through the app, we don't have a concrete number.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Sometimes it's good to even give rough indications, knowing that you can't get exact, but were they in the hundreds?  Are there hundreds of volunteers in a year?

 

TUTTI COPPING:  Yes, I can take this from Nick. That was something we really discussed with our client because obviously the way we've designed our outputs, we don't want to be sending hundreds and hundreds of emails to her every day with new volunteers coming through and that was something we really wanted to keep in mind because our client does only consist of two people and they have a lot to do, so we didn't want to give them extra work to do.  But I think currently they have around 60 active volunteers, but obviously it does change.

 

Lots of students will come in and volunteer with RNA through something like the Brennan Program or the SOUL award, like we saw, but obviously when we're in person on campus they have more active volunteers for their events, but I would say from our discussions with Catharine, she said she usually sees around potentially six new volunteers a month in a relatively busy period.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  That's great. That gives us a sense of impact. Fantastic. My last question is, is it installed on the client platform, so are they using the app now?

 

CHRIS CRUZ:  I can take this question. So we're in the process of handing over the information to our client in terms of logging details for the Neota platform, but we envisaged the app to sit within RNA UTS's main page and we hope that the messaging around it would be more than just, "I want to volunteer" because this is a hub, we want it to be a place where volunteers ‑ like a general place for volunteers of UTS RNA where they can update their details and log events as well.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Thank you.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Thanks, Chris. A quick question from me if I may. I echo Beth's comments, professional presentation and the app looks terrific.  Well done to you all. I saw once a volunteer had completed the form ‑ I understand that RNA then receives an email with the volunteer's details and then they're able to copy and paste those details into their volunteer database, as I understand it. I'm interested to know whether your team explored the possibility of integration, you know, whether that final step of updating RNA's database could be sort of automated in any way to sort of eliminate that copy‑paste piece of work.

 

NICK BOROVIK:  Certainly, I can take this one. So we did consider a database option for RNA, but because RNA is a UTS organisation, they have to adhere to the policies of UTS privacy and so to have a database which could be updated required approval from a lot of different bodies within UTS, including Privacy and Legal, and would require RNA to enter into a contract with Neota Logic. So in the timeframe that we were given through the challenge we wanted to produce something that our client would be able to use as soon as the challenge finished and so we opted for this version. So we did consider both options of the email output and the database extensively, but in our chats with both UTS Privacy and with Neota, we opted for our email output.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  That makes a lot of sense, Appollo 2.0 perhaps. Thank you, Nick.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Fantastic. Now we move on to team number 3, which is Moral Code, whose client Autism Spectrum Australia, also known as Aspect, has worked closely with them as well as with Taylor, Daniel and Dom, their Allens mentors. So welcome to Dana, Emma, Jordan, Amelia and Annie. I'm looking forward to seeing your video.  (Video played):

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Fundraising is a critical source of income for not‑for‑profits, or NFPs.  With more than 50,000 NFPs registered in Australia, it is essential for these organisations to ensure that the fundraising process is manageable and easy to understand. In the 2015/16 financial year alone, an estimated 14.9 million Australian adults gave $12.5 billion to charities and NFP organisations, but what precious time and resource are being taken away from NFP organisations when they attempt to navigate through the matrix of legislation that exists for fundraisers from state to state within Australia?

 

Well, that's exactly what Nikki and Josan, from the Community Fundraising Team at Autism Spectrum Australia, Aspect, came to us about. Aspect is Australia's largest autism spectrum service provider with one of the biggest autism‑specific school programs in the world. Aspect provides people on the autism spectrum with the opportunity to realise their unique learning potential as well as providing support to their families, carers, friends and colleagues.

 

All of this support is done in part with the assistance of fundraisers through the Community Fundraising Team. It is therefore integral for Aspect to ensure that their fundraisers are aware of all of the legal requirements in their state or territory and that the process to undertake a fundraiser is simple and streamlined. However, Nikki and Josan were finding that they were being inundated with questions and queries about how to host a fundraiser. Aspect is a nation‑wide organisation and therefore understanding how to comply with all of the legislative requirements of each state is difficult and time‑consuming, especially for non lawyers.  Not only that, but the current manual administrative process of both applying for and approving fundraisers is complicated and laborious.

 

Initially, we wanted to focus on the gambling and gaming rules across Australia, but given the timeframe of this app, it just wasn't possible. Instead, we focused on one type of fundraising activity, raffles, which was identified by Aspect as the most useful to tackle. Now we will demonstrate our solution to this problem where we'll meet David, a potential fundraiser.

 

AMELIA QIOSESE:  David is a teacher who lives in Brisbane whose son Michael was recently diagnosed with autism. David did research into organising a raffle, however was overwhelmed by the process. He came to the Aspect website and was referred to the raffle fundraiser assistant.

 

David is presented with our welcome page. In discussion with our client, we wanted to ensure inclusive practice was throughout our app. This can be first seen with the inclusion of a translation tool that can translate our content into 98 languages.

 

David is made aware of the fact our app does not offer legal advice on our disclaimer page given the context of Aspect's privacy policy which is presented in a text box to minimise information overload as well as an easy to read document and thus begins the first part of the app's function.

 

This is the beginning of the assessment of David's eligibility to host a raffle. He's asked whether he understands what a raffle is, what state he will hold his raffle in, as well as questions relating specifically to the laws that govern raffles within Queensland. David would answer three to six questions prior to being informed of his eligibility to host a raffle based on his answers to these simple questions.

 

We chose to use a broad testing group made of individuals of all ages to help us refine our questions as well as to understand how accessible the raffle information would be to a variety of people. This led to our team rephrasing sentences as well as using an Aspect‑specific tone in the information sheets we created.

 

Now that David has progressed through the first part of the app and has come to the end of the eligibility phase, he is informed that he can host a raffle with a permit, where he is given a link to the permit application for Queensland as well as an information sheet which is also provided in an easy‑to‑read format which highlights his obligations to host said raffle. These documents were created by the Moral Code team. These documents were created in accordance with W3C standards to further expand the accessibility of our app.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  At this point David is forwarded to the document automation section, where he will submit his proposal to host a raffle to Aspect. On this proposal form he will need to provide specific details about his fundraiser. This process was initially tedious. However, after much discussion and feedback from our testers, we were able to rephrase our questions and add in text boxes which explain specific content and aided our user.

 

After just a few pages of information, the user is taken to Aspect's waiver, which also includes a hyperlink to their fundraising guidelines. This element was included to provide the client with an engaged and informed user who was aware of their duties to Aspect and to the law.

 

Finally, David has come to the end of the fundraiser assistant, where he is given feedback on his eligibility to host a raffle as well as created a proposal application. This highlights the efficiency and informative full service our application provides.

 

It does not only provide this to the user but also to the client as upon completion of his journey through the app, Aspect's community fundraising team will receive his application in real time. This includes his proposal form as well as a draft authority to fundraise form that was completed with the details he provided in the app. By drafting and automating this authority to fundraise, we are helping Aspect minimise their workload and eliminate a step in a bureaucratic process.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  After months of intensive work, we are happy to announce that our app has been finalised and is ready for upload. It will be embedded in the Aspect website using a separate URL. We have also completed the maintenance instructions, which includes advice on what to do if and when fundraising legislation changes in the future to ensure that the app stays relevant and up to date.

 

In terms of impact, this app has significant timesaving capabilities. It will allow Aspect to refocus their energy away from complex legalese and bureaucratic technicalities towards impactful work within the community. Why should they have to waste time on difficult administrative tasks when the raffle fundraising assistant can do the work for them? 

 

In the testing stage, many people were surprised that an app like this hadn't already been created, highlighting in particular the ease and efficiency of the process. Last year Aspect received $7.6 million from community fundraisers alone. By removing the legal technicalities from the fundraising process, our app will allow this donation tool to grow, thereby providing Aspect with freedom to continue doing amazing work they do.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  Ultimately, our app was built to inspire. Due to our extensive research and automation processes, we have already formulated the solution to tedious tasks, providing a strong base for further expansion without the challenges. We believe that there is a real potential to expand and scale it to other organisations as they grapple with the same problems Aspect was experiencing. This is particularly the case since many charities operate on a national basis and must deal with laws across multiple jurisdictions. 

 

But this is just the beginning. At the moment it only captures the law as it applies to raffle fundraising, but it can be adapted to cater for all fundraising events, such as fun runs, private event proceeds and even more novel circumstances, like selling Pokemon cards on eBay.

 

Through our tireless work, we are proud to be providing the not‑for‑profit sector with an innovative solution that will help channel more donations towards these vital community organisations.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  So thank you, Moral Code team. That was really tremendous and I think you've already got some potential clients through the chat section I was noticing.

 

I think that one of the ‑ so just a few general comments. The presentation was very good and I really liked how you put the problem up there very clearly, what was the problem that you were trying to solve. It was a really good statement of the problem.

 

I liked the fact that you used a persona, so we knew about ‑ I've forgotten his name, David ‑ David's situation and his use of the app and it looked very well designed, very clear, and so forth.

 

I thought particularly impressive was the accessibility features built into the app. I thought that showed a real respect for the clients of Aspect and the fact that they may be using it as well, so that was great to see. So well done.

 

And one thing ‑ it would be great if you'd introduced the team at the beginning of the presentation. That would have been really nice to know who was ‑ see the faces of everybody.  But overall it was a really, really interesting presentation and obviously a great app to have.

 

You touched on it ‑ one of the team members touched on it at the end, which is the ability to use this app in so many different ways and I wondered whether you might just comment on do you see that as ‑ have you identified other ways, other types of organisations that might be able to use this type of application and also what might be some of the challenges in doing that?

 

DANA RUTNER:  Yes, I'll take that one. So it is something that we had discussed right from the beginning. We knew that once we started to narrow down just to raffles, there was so much opportunity just to expand.

 

Our team spoke specifically about expanding to other not for profits because we know how important fundraising is and how difficult the process is. One of the challenges that we did find doing this app ‑ and I'm sure would be if we were to expand it ‑ is that the legislation is quite extensive, so it can be quite time‑consuming for just, say, us to go through it and figure out what we actually need to do in the process, but once that's done, it's quite ‑ as you saw, quite a straightforward app.  So I think that would probably be our biggest challenge if we were to expand. Thank you.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  I can second that, Dana. I agree with that statement.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  I may have missed it, Dana, but I just wondered if in that does it require then, if the legislation changes, you've got to go in ‑ is it a fairly simple operation to change the data?

 

DANA RUTNER:  Yes. We have handed in our handover sheet and in it we've put processes into what happens when legislation does change. We have also included a layout of our app which is very easily structured so that if wording does need to be changed, someone can go in quite easily and change that.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Well done.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Thanks so much, team Moral Code. I absolutely agree with Lesley's comments. I really loved the way you set up the client problem and you started from the broad this is a problem in all of Australia and then I think often it's hard ‑ people want to tackle too much and I love the way you said, "This is what we're going to do and this is what we're not doing." Often people forget that "this is what we're not doing". So it gave me a really good sense of the scope of the problem you're trying to tackle which, as you said in answer to Lesley's question, is quite a complicated area of law.

 

Loved the output and the simplification through doc automation of the proposal and the draft authority to fundraise. My question is again trying to get more detail on the impact of this app because I think it could have a phenomenal impact across the not for profits, but I wondered if you had a sense of how many fundraisers your client might have in a year and what kind of time impact this might translate into for them and the people donating to the organisation.

 

EMMA HILTON:  I can speak to ‑ I think maybe Dana can speak to impact, but I would love to say something about the sort of time‑saving capabilities that this app provides Aspect.

 

So as was sort of mentioned in the video, they were experiencing problems with being inundated with questions that they didn't quite know how to answer and because community fundraising is such an integral part of not‑for‑profit organisations, for example, for Aspect it's where they receive the most donations. So if the community fundraising team's time is being caught up with answering these queries that they're not 100% sure is correct because obviously, you know, they're not lawyers and sometimes they don't know where to start when answering these queries and basically our app completely helps them out with that. It takes the confusion completely out of the equation. It means they can refocus their time and energy on, you know, promoting their organisation and sort of focusing on more important aspects of their role.  So ultimately, yeah, our app just ‑ it automates that entire process for them.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  That's great, thank you. I love the way ‑ to Lesley's question ‑ that you thought about the broader audience and application plus not for profits. Thank you.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Fantastic. Great to see the apps, the questions and also keep the audience engagement coming. It's really fantastic to see.

 

We move on to team number 4, Empower Her, and they have been working with Women's Justice Network and mentored by Dom and Sophie. So welcome Shay, Gillian, Vidya, Patricia and Jay. (Video played):

 

Hi, everyone. We are the Empower Her team.

 

Over the past few months we've had the privilege to work with our social justice partner the Women's Justice Network. The Women's Justice Network is committed to advancing the wellbeing of women and girls affected or at risk of the criminal justice system.

 

Through facilitating mentoring sessions, the Women's Justice Network has been able to successfully empower some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged women and girls within our community. These mentoring sessions have provided women and girls with the opportunity to learn coping mechanisms, new skills and confidence, whilst encouraging them to make positive choices and lifestyle changes.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  After speaking to our client, we found that the Women's Justice Network faced three main problems with their current feedback reporting system.  Firstly, there is currently no consistent way for mentors or mentees to submit their reflective reports and as a result, they're never delivered to WJN in a timely manner. Secondly, as a result of this inconsistent reporting, the Women's Justice Network and its case workers have been unable to track the progress of individual mentees and their overall mentoring relationship. Finally, we saw that mentors and mentees did not have a confidential way of reporting any concerns to the WJN leadership team, which impacted greatly on the experience of both groups throughout their involvement in the program.

 

Our app has revolutionised this process and helps Women's Justice Network adjust these three key problems by creating a streamlined reporting process. Our app has three main user groups, the first being mentors, who we have divided into mentors with mentees living in the community and those with mentees in custody.

 

The second user group are the mentees, who'll answer more reflective‑based questions about their experience in the program. We've also incorporated visual question formats to address any gaps in reading and writing capabilities, which was an issue raised by our client and in testing. Finally, the app will be provided to a third user group, which consists of the WJN case workers and the CEO in the case of confidential concerns.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  After extensive testing and feedback, we developed our final product. The Empower Her web page allows users to quickly identify their roles and either report catch‑up feedback or a confidential concern. As per our client's request, we made sure that users had to agree with the guidelines and privacy policy before progressing.

 

Our app design is consistent with the WJN's current website and marketing material, with customised logos, colours and imagery.  We also included an acknowledgment of country throughout the app.  A key feature we include in our solution is the additional resources and donate feature in the footer, which can be accessed throughout the app.

 

Mentors will provide feedback via a range of survey‑style questions, inspired by the current WJN reports. An additional feature we included was the photos for all case workers, which allows users to easily identify who their relevant caseworkers are.

 

The questions we asked were split into specific catch‑up feedback and more general mentoring relationship feedback. Once mentors are finished with their form, they can review their answers and submit the report. This report is sent to the WJN, caseworkers and the user's email address. Users are also able to download a PDF copy onto their device.

 

As a mentee, the reporting system is very similar. However, our testing sessions showed that mentees preferred shorter and more reflective questions and wanted a more engaging app experience. To do this, we used Neota's reasoning features for both mentor and mentee questions. Users are able to interact with the slider and rating scale and our app will immediately provide suggestions based on their inputs.

 

Another highlight of the mentee reporting system is the additional resources tool. We have designed the question to allow mentees to select whether they would like further resources on sensitive issues. As this question and the resources do not appear in the final report, this provides a safe and confidential space for mentees to find out more information on issues which they may be experiencing.

 

Finally, we have a concern reporting function which was recently added to the app after feedback from multiple user groups. This feature allows mentors and mentees to report any concerns they are having in a confidential setting, with the outputs being sent directly to the CEO of WJN. Users can either describe their concerns in the form or choose to be contacted directly by Gloria over the phone, as users will be contacted within 10 days of report submission, in line with the WJN's reporting policies.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  After users have completed the required sections, the app will generate a PDF report and an email will also be sent to both the user and their caseworker. We assured that the report was easy to read and provided additional resources in order to provide tailored support.

 

When designing the email, we ensured that the subject line included key details such as the user's name and the date of the catch‑up session. This ensures that the reports are easy to find at a later date and helps WJN to track progress.

 

Our app has simplified the reporting process for the WJN system and increased accessibility to important information.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  The team ran virtual testing sessions involving three key user groups ‑ mentees, mentors and caseworkers. The first round of testing involved seven mentors and two mentees. From this round of testing we made two key changes. The first key change involved adding an additional questionnaire for mentors who have mentees in custody and the second key change involved adding more visual elements, such as the smile emojis and slider scale.

 

The second round of testing involved all WJN caseworkers. From this round of testing we were able to develop the final iteration of our app, which included the concerns page and the mentee resources.

 

As most mentees were using Android devices when filling out the form, we decided it was crucial to test the compatibility of our app. We achieved this through circulating a Google form amongst family and friends and this allowed us to see how the app operated on a range of devices such as various iPhone models, Androids, iPads and Macbooks. From this we were able to flesh out any glitches present within the app, mainly in the email output and the final report, and we were able to resolve them. We will now hear testimonials from our client.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  The app is going to be what we consider to be a game changer for us. It's going to make our mentors be able to report quickly, efficiently and provide our caseworkers with a quicker process of keeping up to date with the women that we're supporting.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  This is much better.  It used to be a Word document that I'd have to open on desktop, type it out, save it and resend. This is a massive improvement.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  And I think it enhances our program so very much by simple filing processes and it's just a wonderful, wonderful asset to our organisation.

 

NEW SPEAKER:  So what's next?  After this challenge, we will hand over the app from the Neota Logic Workbench to the Women's Justice Network. We have created a detailed maintenance manual with instructions on how to change existing features and questions in the app. This will ensure that all information and reporting questions will stay up to date within the app.

 

We are excited for the mentors, mentees and caseworkers of the Women's Justice Network to start using our app. We hope that our app will help empower women and girls who have been impacted by the justice system and create a better mentoring program experienced for all users.

 

To keep up to date with our app and find out more about the amazing work at the Women's Justice Network, please follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook. Thank you.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Well, Empower Her, fantastic. Great work. Loved your presentation, loved so much about it. You were really tackling a complex problem with three specific types of users, so that's quite a complex user challenge to solve and loved some of the things that you did.

 

I particularly was impressed with your testing rigour. I'm a bit of a stickler for testing because an app is no good unless it works once it gets out there and was impressed the number of platforms you tested it across and the number of iterations and the fact that you tested it with all the mentor group I thought was fantastic.

 

I absolutely loved the testimonials. The fact that you were able to get three of your clients to actually speak on video, I think it speaks to the importance of your app for their organisation and the impact that no doubt it will have.

 

But my question is again going back to you had three really specific types of users that you had to cater your app to. How did you actually gather the user requirements for those three different groups? 

 

PATRICIA VENG:  I might take that question. In gathering I guess the requirement for each user, as we mentioned in our presentation, we did have multiple meetings with our client. So initially we met ‑ we fleshed out we had the three main user groups and we got a lot of feedback actually through our testing sessions and we made sure we were able to test with all three of our user groups, so mentors, mentees and also the caseworkers as they had quite different requirements for each party. So as you could see, we had a lot of different iterations after all the feedback we got, so we made sure to really accommodate everything they were telling us and making sure we were balancing all the requirements they were, I guess, providing us through each testing session.

 

ADJUNCT PROF. BETH PATTERSON:  Well done. It really shows the importance of iterations that you're not going to solve the problem in one go and the fact that you interacted with your client, so well done.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Thank you, team 4. I'd also echo Beth's comments. It was a really lovely presentation and so well thought out.

 

I've got a question that I want to ask you, but just before I do that, I really just would like to generally make a comment about each of the teams and their presentations and the work that they've done. You know, NGOs work with such limited resources and yet do so much important work and we see that through each of those applications tonight, you know, serving a student community with Respect.Now.Always in a really important issue about making sure students understand the significance and the meaning of, you know, consent, and so forth.

 

We saw it with Ciana, an international program that does really crucial work in no doubt absolutely heartbreaking and complex situations; with Moral Code, where not just the resources that might be needed to answer those legal problems but the importance in terms of the reputation of the NGO to be able to make sure that all of their fundraising also complies with the law and doesn't damage their reputation, and again really important work for a significant part and valued part of our community to help make their lives better; and finally Empower Her, or the Women's Justice Network, another great example of really trying to make lives better for women who may have unfortunately had to go through the criminal justice system, but how do we make their lives better post that and no doubt again a group that might not attract support, and so forth, in the way that some other NGOs, charitable organisations, might.

 

So to each of the teams I really just want to say how much we appreciate the work that you've done. It's been valuable for you personally as well, but I think it's a kind of ‑ to see the opportunity for each of you to engage with these NGOs to really work with them and to improve the work that they are trying to deliver, the services that they're trying to deliver, and I really ‑ I think we all really appreciated, and you can see it through the chat sessions, how much genuine commitment you made to this project, the integrity that you brought to it, the listening, the understanding of the position of the client and the clients that those NGOs served as well.

 

So I just wanted to take a moment ‑ I think I can speak on behalf of the other judges ‑ to really say thank you for the work that you've done and really it's uplifting, particularly at a time when we are in a really difficult public health crisis and we see political squabbling, and so forth. It's so valuable to see this kind of work. So thank you for what you've done and we do hope the NGOs are benefited through this.

 

Now, after that long speech, team 4, I just want to come back and ask you a question and it's really about did you think ‑ and I can imagine it was a little bit complicated in this situation because you had three different client groups, as Beth was talking about, but did you think about creating personas in order to explain how it worked for each of them through your demonstration?

 

PATRICIA VENG:  I might also take that question. Yes, so when coming up with the presentation, we were considering whether or not to use personas in explaining how each user was going to interact with the app, but I guess our team ended up not using the personas just because we were aware that the I guess environment surrounding our users was a bit sensitive, especially for the mentees, and we really didn't want to I guess imply anything or add any information which might, I guess, detract from like the work that we were doing. We didn't really want to, I guess, impose on that.

 

So we chose not to use personas in the end, but we really hope that we were able to demonstrate I guess the users' input through the feedback we got and through demonstrating how we actually changed the features of the app, instead of using the personas, we were still able to include them in our presentation showing we interacted with them through the testing and feedback we got with them.

 

PROF. LESLEY HITCHENS:  Yes, definitely, so thank you for that and once again showing the sensitivity to the client and to the NGO. So thank you.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Thank you, Shay, Patricia, Vidya, Jay and Gillian for another excellent presentation and thank you to everyone involved in presenting and also for the judges for their questions. It was great to get some more insight and just hear the teams speak to their amazing apps.

 

Congratulations to all of the teams, their mentors and their social justice partners. I'm so impressed to see the way that you've used the platform to create your amazing apps.

 

I'm now going to send the judges off to make what I will expect to be a difficult decision, so thank you Lesley, Lisa and Beth. It's time to confer.

 

But wait, there's more ‑ not for the judges, but for everyone else. We're now going to move on to the presentation of the social media campaign. So the four teams are going to give you a snapshot of their social media campaign over the past few months. Each team has three minutes to give you an overview of their work and hopefully I won't need to cut them off, but they have done a lot of work on social media, so there is a lot to talk about.

 

Once you've heard from all of the four teams, it will be time to vote via a Zoom poll for your favourite social media campaign and I know that the teams are very excited to present their campaigns, but also very excited to see what the audience thinks about these different social media campaigns.

 

So let's head back to team 1 to Ciana and Ciana, hopefully you are going to be able to share your slides.

 

BRYDON TRUONG:  I can't turn on my video for some reason, but that's okay, I guess. Yes, there we go. Hi, everyone. My name is Brydon and I'm a Communications and Quality Assurance Officer at Ciana and along with Tristan, Project Manager, we'll be presenting impact of our marketing campaign during the journey of Ciana.

 

We'll begin with the foundations of the marketing. Firstly, we utilised Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to market to the 20‑ to 40‑year‑old age group, which captures our cohort, both young and mature age professionals in the international rights and legal industry and parents experiencing international child abduction. Specifically, LinkedIn and Twitter provided a useful platform for the International Social Services Australia, ISS, to share each other's content as well as professionally market on international rights and child abduction groups.

 

Additionally, we envisioned the name Ciana as it doubled as an empathetic name for parents and a professional name to symbolise our message and journey ‑ the story of hope. The name Ciana means light and we wanted this to embody the journey of the parent and child, that of finding the light and the end of the tunnel, an end to the journey.

 

We accompanied this with a slogan "Find Your Way Home" to express the narrative of our marketing, a motivating call to action that inspires hope. In that, we utilised a light blue hue and a child‑like iconography in the logo as well as in our marketing. This is in parallel to our application's purpose, which is to relieve anxiousness and establish hope within the parent. I will now pass on to Tristan to take us through our marketing campaigns.

 

TRISTAN SALINATRO:  Thanks, Brydon. Moving on, we devised four main campaigns ‑ Progress, Awareness, Application Development, and Final Sprint ‑ as well as a website for our followers to find more information on the journey. This aligned with each of the different phases of the project cycle as well as our personal uni schedules.

 

The Progress, Application Development and Final Sprint campaign highlighted the design and conceptualisation of the application as well as an interview with the ISS. Our marketing consisted of two media formats primarily in the form of infographics and videos.

 

The Awareness campaign, which we are most proud of, presented the problem and key statistics surrounding international parental child abduction. We presented how over 250 children are illegally abducted by a parent out of Australia each year and we also noted the seriousness of the issue, as nearly 46% of abductors have a criminal record, as well as 14% of any abductions involving physical force. 

 

Finally, to end the campaign, we enforced how there was a 64% return rate of any actions enforced by the Hague Convention, which aligned with how our application was assisting the ISS to speed up their consultation process. We wanted to spread the word of this serious issue in Australia as part of our application initiative and in that we're proud to say we achieved an average net engagement rate of 25% and an overall reach of over 500,000 people on all platforms combined with a LinkedIn following of 127 followers.

 

Thank you for listening and we'll now move on to the next team to present their social media campaign.

 

DEEPALI PATIL:  Good evening, everyone. I hope you're ready to find out the engaging personality behind our strategy.

 

Our strategy was measured using three simple questions ‑ what Appollo wants to do, how Appollo will do it, and how Appollo eventually did it.

 

Please use the raise hand function if you have an Instagram account. That's not surprising that most of you do as you sit within our Gen Z audience. We knew that one of the audiences we wanted to engage with our brand was Gen Z, so targeted this audience by utilising Instagram as research shows that 89% of this audience prioritises Instagram for social media, with a close 56% using Facebook.

 

For those of you who might be on the other side of 30, we didn't forget about you. We also used LinkedIn for our social media campaign. This platform was used to target our corporate audience as we know you're not a fan of the socials. We posted more "teachable content" less frequently on LinkedIn to capture and engage this audience.

 

In terms of posts, we split them into three categories. The first is personal posts. This enabled our audience to get to know us as a team and help to establish our brand identity, making Appollo come across as authentic and real. Gen Z are able to sense unauthentic material online, which we were able to prevent with our personal posts. This is reflected in our stats, where we saw a 43% increase in interaction from our audience on Instagram between our first personal post to our recent personal post.

 

We also wanted to create engaging posts. RNA's branding and content is focussed on drawing attention to their cause using unconventional methods and we wanted to reflect this. We found that our quirky content did 95% better than our other recent posts and of course we checked with our client before posting this.

 

Finally, we created insightful posts. We recognised that there was a likelihood that our followers wouldn't know about our client RNA. As a result, we aimed to educate our followers.  And did it work?  Just ask our friends who follow the page and are now experts in talking about RNA.

 

Now, you all must be across the latest trends on Instagram, right?  If you're not, we'll get you up to speed. We used stories and highlights to feature and attract our followers. We had polls for our audience to virtually interact with us. We also had board posts which was created to make a grand reveal of a client and, lastly, Q&A sessions for our followers to ask any questions they had. This helped us stay on trend and up to date with what engages people on Instagram.  Appollo has made sure to adapt RNA branding throughout each post in order to create a persona that our audience is familiar with and to associate ourselves with RNA.

 

So what do you think?  Will we be seeing you on Appollo social page?  We certainly hope so. Thank you. I'll now hand it over to the next team.

 

JORDAN ROODS:  The social media campaign allowed us to get creative and think deeply about how we want to brand moral code to the world. In terms of the content being shared, not only did we want to make it clear what our app would be able to do, but also wanted to demonstrate the social justice implications of it.

 

One of our most recent and successful posts on Instagram speaks to this. It included a testimonial from one of Aspect's fundraisers, Ashley. Ashley's son, Logan, was diagnosed in 2014 as being on the autism spectrum and in 2016, through the services Aspect provides, Logan was able to receive fortnightly occupational and speech therapies.  For this family, being able to raise funds for Aspect was an opportunity to raise awareness and celebrate autism as well as to honour all the unique things they love about Logan.

 

We think this testimonial post was so successful because it highlighted to our audience exactly why it is that raffle laws are so important, allowed people to understand our app, through the process of removing legal technicalities from the fundraising process, allows organisations like Aspect to continue to do the important work that they do. 

 

As well as this, we wanted to have fun with what we were posting so included features like interactive stories, Q&As, a raffle quiz and even a zoom bloopers reel. The content and stylistic choices of the posts reflected our core values as an organisation.  The quality of inclusivity was probably the most important value for our team.

 

Similarly to the way we designed our app, it was important our social media campaign also included accessibility features ‑ for instance, the colour scheme for our profiles was taken from the W3C accessibility standards, making the profiles more user friendly for people on the autism spectrum.  In terms of technical accessibility features, we made use of audiovisual cues and included closed captions in videos we posted.

 

You're probably wondering how we fared.  Let me list a few stats for you. On Facebook we have 120 followers and have reached a total of 2,616 people over the course of the competition. On Instagram we have 156 followers and our testimonial post that I mentioned earlier received 85 likes, representing engagement for the majority of people who currently follow us.

 

On LinkedIn, we have 88 followers and our network locations are not confined to Australia alone. We have a global reach, with individuals engaging with our content from New Zealand, Fiji, the UK, US and even Tonga and we're followed by leaders from a wide range of industries.

 

For our Twitter profile, we recognised early on it wasn't going to get the kind of traction we originally planned for. This caused us to think on our feet and readjust the campaign. We decided to channel energy into other platforms and instead use Twitter as a way of following interesting people and organisations within the not-for-profit sector.

 

Ultimately the success of our campaign owes largely to us coming together as a team unit and learning to appreciate the value and fun involved in running your own social media campaign. I now invite the next team to speak about their social media campaign.

 

VIDYA KATHIRGAMALINGAM:  My name is Vidya and I'm the Communications Manager for the Empower Her team. The Empower Her team chose to use social media with the key objective of promoting our app, raising awareness for WJN's mentoring programs and advocating for the cause.

 

When creating our strategy, we first considered the question who is our audience persona. Through liaising with the marketing team at the Women's Justice Network, we figured out that we would be marketing to women affected by the criminal justice system, advocates who are passionate about women's rights, professionals and UTS students as well as the staff at WJN.

 

We conducted an audit of WJN's social media and found that Facebook had the highest following, but Instagram had the highest rates of engagement. We chose to focus on gaining a following and posting to these two channels and we also created a LinkedIn in order to engage our professional target audience.

 

In creating a brand, we created a logo that utilised the colours of the Women's Justice Network so that we could remain consistent with their branding and we also focused on a theme of pastel colours and lavender flowers to evoke a theme of self‑care.

 

A key strength of our campaign was the creativity of our posts. In the initial stages of the campaign, we focused on posts that would be able to explain who we are, provide information about what our app aims to do, as well as informative posts and explainers about the issues that we would be helping to tackle.

 

The next stage of our marketing campaign aimed to really put a face to the team as well as the women that we would be helping. We achieved this through posting the stories of actual Women's Justice Network mentors and regularly posting about our progress. We were also able to gain more engagement from people affiliated with the Women's Justice Network by collaborating with their marketing team to repost each other's content.

 

As part of this stage, we also launched the successful Meet the WJN Women video interview series where Women's Justice Network employees had the opportunity to speak about their role, why they're passionate about helping women involved in the criminal justice system, as well as why they're excited for our app. We were able to reach over 100 accounts through this series, with 53% of these accounts not previously following us, which shows that this initiative was really successful at extending our reach.

 

In the prelaunch period we aimed to really hype up our audience. We posted user testimonials, we initiated a countdown, and the team members posted reflections on the challenge as well. During this period, we were able to increase the number of followers to our Instagram by 50% and the number of people reached on Facebook also increased by 904%. We were able to conclude the challenge with 147 followers on Instagram, 72 followers on Facebook, and 88 followers on LinkedIn.

 

Overall, our campaign was largely successful due to the fact that we focused on launching a creative and unique campaign on a few channels that we knew our audience would engage with. Thank you.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Thank you, teams, absolutely amazing work from all of you and I'm so pleased to see all of your campaigns and all the engagement and seeing the comments to hear that people are really responding to your campaigns and that they want to go and look and see what you've done and learn more about your organisations.

 

We now are going to give you a very short period of time to vote for the Social Media Champion award. So what I would like you to do is I would like you to cast your vote on the Zoom poll that is just about to come up. I'm going to give you 2 minutes, so please cast your vote.

 

We've got 10 seconds to go and 184 out of 200 people have voted. Okay, we're going to end the polling now. And we do have a clear winner, which is fantastic to see and so I'm now going to share the results and congratulate Moral Code and their client, autism Spectrum Australia, on receiving 34% of the vote. So congratulations to Moral Code. That is a fantastic result and you should be so proud.

 

All of the teams should be so incredibly proud of your social media campaigns, your efforts for social justice, the amazing work that you've done and the amazingly creative campaigns. So well done and congratulations.

 

So I've been told that the judges have in fact come to a decision, which is very exciting. So I am going to hand over to Lisa to perhaps first congratulate Moral Code on winning the Social Media Campaign award and then to announce the winner. Thanks, Lisa.

 

LISA KOZARIS:  Thanks, Genevieve. And yes, the judges are back in the house. We have been busy conferring in another room.  But yes, firstly, well done to our social media champions Moral Code, a terrific, terrific result, and well done to you all. Prizes will be headed your way shortly.

 

Look, because of the nature of this event, Beth, Lesley and I did actually have a sneak peek or a preliminary look at the videos, but I must say seeing them tonight and just hearing the way you all navigated the Q&A and some pretty curly questions, it was a really difficult decision and it really made us reflect on our initial thoughts, so really stress test our initial thinking about our decision. But we have made a decision tonight.

 

The first thing I actually said to Beth and Lesley when I saw the videos is I couldn't quite believe that these solutions had been put together by students and non‑practising lawyers as well as people that weren't trained technologists. I see solutions regularly as part of my job at Allens and I must say the standard that you've all reached in such a relatively short period of time is incredibly impressive, so hats off to all of you for your work.

 

In sharing the feedback a few moments ago, Beth, Lesley and I, we all reflected on the fact that what was clear is you've all thought deeply about your client and who's ultimately going to be engaging with the apps that you've created on a day‑to‑day basis and that's really, really come through in the design and the ultimate end solution. And we've also been, as has been touched on a little already tonight, so impressed the way you've all seamlessly pivoted to this virtual environment as well, and in fact with more than 200 people on the call tonight, I think it's been a roaring success I've got to say.

 

However, I won't hold you up any more. We have arrived at a winner and our reasons for that, we really feel the winning team developed a solution that clearly solved a tangible problem for their client and a reoccurring problem. It attempted to navigate a number of challenges, included catering to a number of different jurisdictional requirements, which isn't an easy thing to do, and they were able to really develop an app which we think would have much more application than existing case use, so really exciting.

 

I might take a pause and ask all the teams to pop on their videos, please. And as you do that, on behalf of the judges this evening and Allens more broadly, UTS Law and Neota, I'd like to award Moral Code as the winner of the challenge for their app for Autism Spectrum Australia. Well done to you all, team Moral Code, terrific job and your awards will be arriving in the not too distant future via snail mail, so stay tuned for that. But I'll hand back to you, Genevieve.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much, Lisa, and congratulations to Moral Code on a brilliant outcome. You've done so well and I am going to ask Dana, the Project Manager for Moral Code, to have a few words.

 

DANA RUTNER:  Thank you. Wow, I'm in complete shock, but my heart is pounding, but I am very, very grateful for this opportunity and I'd just like to say some thanks yous, to our mentors Dom, Dan and Taylor, to our clients at Aspect, Nikki, obviously to the most amazing team.  It has been a privilege for us to be able to put together an app that has such real‑life uses and that can expand to so much more. It was an incredible journey and we're thankful for all the support along the way. Yeah, thank you to the team as well.

 

GENEVIEVE WILKINSON:  Fantastic. So the teams, every single one of them, have heard me say so many times throughout this challenge that no matter what the outcome will be, they will all be winners. So congratulations to Dana, Emma, Jordan, Amelia and Annie, but I also want to say congratulations to Shay, Gillian, Vidya, Patricia, Jay, Tutti, Chris, Deepali, Nick, Rania, Tristan, Molly, Brydon, Hue, Stella, you have all been absolutely amazing. So thank you to every team member, every mentor, the wonderful clients, Gloria, Nikki, Josan, Rebecca, Jenny and Catharine.

 

There has been an enormous amount of work in developing these apps. The teams have been supported by Kevin and Gillian, from Neota Logic, and generously benefited from presentations and support from Liza, Amanda, Katie, Rose, James, Isabelle, Caitlin and Nicky from Allens. They've also received expert insights from Kevin, Julian, Jane and our fantastic Law Tech Challenge alumni Rachel, Ethan and Tamim.

 

So behind the scenes at UTS there has been absolutely tremendous support from Associate Dean Maxine Evers and great help from Belinda Carsen. This year the challenge would not have been possible without the tireless work of Crystal McLoughlin. She has worked magnificently behind the scenes to bring tonight's event together and worked with Bec, Monica and Thomas, who've all done a fantastic, fantastic job to make this possible. So thank you, everyone, sincerely for all of your hard work.

 

Thank you to the audience for your support of our teams and voting for our social media champions. I particularly want to thank our expert judges Lisa, Beth and Lesley for your support and your hard work tonight.

 

So it's incredibly rewarding to come to the end of this and I want to say thank you to our audience for this fantastic result, but I also want to say to the members of the audience who are part of the Brennan Program, who are thinking about being a part of this tremendous program that we will shortly be letting you know about the dates for the next iteration of the Allens Neota Logic UTS Law Tech Challenge and I hope that you will consider being a part of this challenge because it is an amazing, amazing opportunity to see everyone working so hard together for social justice. These are challenging times, but programs like the Law Tech Challenge remind us that we can all support each other to do absolutely wonderful things.

 

So good night, everyone. I hope that we see you next year.  But before then, I hope that you have a good week and stay well. Thank you.