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Delighted to be here today.

In this case study I'll be showcasing the work of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in engaging youth.  

Specifically, I'll be focusing on our private i initiative that we launched in May 2009.    

But first, a bit about why we decided to target young people as an audience.

IMPETUS

Research undertaken in the UK and Canada has shown that youth do tend to value their privacy.  But many neglect to take the necessary precautions to safeguard their personal information or indeed their life.  This unfortunately has been brought home recently by the recent murder of an 18 year old woman in Sydney by someone who befriended her on Facebook.

In Australia, my Office's Community Attitudes Survey 2007 found that young people in the 18-24 age group are less aware of the work of my Office and of privacy laws than older Australians.

It also revealed that younger people are more trusting of organisations and are more willing to provide them with their personal details.

Because of such research, and realising that additional efforts at educating young people in privacy were required, we identified young people as a key audience for its activities in our Strategic Plan 2007-2009.

While the term 'youth' or 'young people' can encompass anyone up to the age of 35, our Office decided to target the 18 to 24 age group for our private i initiative.

As many of you are aware, people in this age group often experience dramatic changes in their lives that can impact upon their privacy.  For example: entering the workforce, starting university, moving out of home and developing greater financial and social independence.

This audience are also often the target group for many products and services and therefore their personal information is highly desired for targeted advertising.

I believe it is essential that 18-24 year olds understand how to protect their personal information.  Education at this age will also lead to good privacy practice later in life.

Indeed ideally it should start even younger.  But that is another initiative....

CONCEPTUALISATION

I'd like to turn now to how our project was conceptualised, and what it entailed.

Private i involved the development of a one-off 12-page magazine using catchy images, an appealing layout, and content that was aimed at a young audience.

A detailed strategy was used to distribute and promote the publication through a number of communication channels that allow for direct engagement with young people.

I should mention that this project heavily involved staff in my Office in the 18-24 age bracket.  Those staff helped refine the concept, design the layout, draft the content, and advise on distribution avenues.  Additionally, they sought advice and feedback from family and friends who were in the same age bracket.  As did I!

Needless to say - perhaps breaking the typical stereotype that some young people have of authority figures (!) - my executive and I were very receptive to the ideas that we received from these younger members of staff and others.

Like most government agencies, my Office's existing publications were quite traditional in terms of layout and quite text-heavy.  We realised that youth are more likely to respond to information delivered in their own style and language.

Therefore, the private i magazine that we developed used many of the same characteristics found in popular magazines for this age group, such as cutting-edge images and a lifestyle type of quiz commonly found in young adult media.

With the content of the magazine we sought to address a range of privacy issues relevant to youth, and build awareness of my Office and its website as a source of privacy information.

Issues addressed in private i included:

• ID scanning at bars and clubs
• online social networking
• dealing with telemarketers
• online shopping
• health information
• blacklisting and
• ID theft.

We knew that young people would be put off from reading it if the language in the magazine looked like it was trying too hard to employ words or phrases that young people often use.  They would probably be suspicious if we threw in too many words like "gross", "sick", "heaps", and so on.

Additionally, we wanted to be inclusive, we know the youth audience is not homogenous, so we know not all phrases are common among all young people.  Although I would have like to thrown in a word or phrase like 'wicked' or 'gnarly' or 'sick one' but I was over-ruled.  But we did put in the danger of putting photos on your social networking site when you are 'off your face'.

So, we took the information we wanted to convey and made it easily digestible for young people.  We:

• put it into plain English
• made it short and snappy and
• provided practical examples for each issue that would speak to the reader.

As you can see, we also used formats to broaden its visual appeal and readability, including:

• a quiz
• dot points
• a top 10 tips
• pull-out boxes
• layout variations on different pages
• different coloured pages
• headings and parts of the text in different colours.

As you will also see from the layout and imagery, we carefully selected photos of real people in the 18-24 age group, who are pictured doing things that help to substantiate the messages in the text.

For example, the front cover shows a young woman pressing a button - it could be an ATM, an EFTPOS machine, a computer or a phone pad.

Regardless, it depicts someone providing personal information via a technological medium and supports the title of the booklet by conveying the message that privacy is something you, as a young person, should consider in your everyday transactions.

DISTRIBUTION AND PROMOTION

Creating the right publication for this age group was a major undertaking in itself.  But I've seen it happen so often in Government - something good is produced but no-one concentrates on getting it out there.

For us, the end-game wasn't producing the booklet, but rather making sure the content of the booklet had impact.

However, what my Office did in distributing and promoting private i was also a mammoth task, particularly as we sought to reach the target audience through a range of channels and, needless to say, with a limited budget of about $22,000.

As an initial step, we loaded private i to the youth portal of our website, which we launched during the 2009 Privacy Awareness Week.

As an aside - PAW is a celebration of privacy by the privacy authorities across the Asia Pacific region.  So the privacy regulators in Canada, Hong Kong, Korea, New Zealand and Australia and some Australian jurisdictions like Victoria, NSW, NT, ACT and Queensland have events and release materials to raise awareness of privacy.  This year the theme was Privacy it's in your hands, and in previous years the theme has been Good privacy is good business and Don't leave privacy to chance.

So back to private i and the youth portal.

Apart from private i itself, we also included value-added content on the site - additional magazine articles that do not appear in the print version.

In relation to the hard copy, we began with a print run of

10 000 in May 2009.  This was soon followed by an additional print run of 15 000, and then a further 25 000.  By the end of last year we had exhausted our stock of 50 000 and in January we had a further 15 000 copies printed.

Our distribution strategy was in two stages:

Stage One involved initial efforts that could be undertaken relatively easily and quickly to promote the publication, particularly the online version.

It included:

• Writing to Australian and state government offices for youth. The offices have provided online links to the publication, promoted private i to their networks, placed information in newsletters, and distributed hard copies.

• Approaching government agencies that have considerable dealings with young people, including Centrelink, Medicare, the ATO, and state roads and traffic authorities. Many have placed information and links to private i in their online materials.

• Asking privacy regulators in other States and overseas to provide links via their youth portals.

• Approaching youth advocacy groups. Many placed information in their newsletters and distributed hard copies.

Stage Two involved more labour-intensive and costly tasks aimed at distributing the hard copy of private i:

• We wrote to the privacy contact officers and libraries at almost every Australian university, asking for their help in promoting private i to students. As a result of this letter and follow-up calls and emails by my staff, some 38 universities distributed more than 17 000 copies, placing them in student orientation packs, library foyers and at campus contact points. Many also provided promotions and online links on their intranets, websites and student publications.

• Likewise with TAFE colleges. We distributed over 11 300 to privacy contact officers across 52 TAFE head offices, institutes and colleges nationally, and almost 6 000 copies to libraries at 45 TAFE colleges.

• We also employed Student Marketing Australia - a company that direct markets to tertiary students - to distribute 6000 copies by hand to students at 15 metropolitan and regional university campuses across all States and Territories.

• We wrote to Australian and State departments of education to seek their assistance to promote private i to Year 12 students. Most have placed information in the resources they provide to teachers. The ACT Department of Education and Training has distributed 5 000 copies to every government school teacher, and is looking at incorporating privacy awareness into their syllabus.

We have distributed about 56,000 copies of private i.

We have had about 30,000 hits on our own website.

Given that:

• we know teachers have shown their classes and discussed content downloaded from the website
• the booklets have made it into households, libraries, youth centres etc where a number of people would have read them
• given that other government agencies have adapted the content for their own websites and materials.

We estimate that conservatively, in total, over 200 000 young people have seen the content of private i.  We are still receiving requests for copies from all over - from youth centres, health practitioners, secondary colleges, youth festivals, and so on.

In Western Sydney a few weeks ago, a TAFE included them in showbags for young people and just this week they have been distributed at a stall in Sydney for National Law Week.

It has become a valuable resource used by teachers, year coordinators, counsellors, social workers, and many others.

We have received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Young people find the information instructive and its presentation appealing.

As we tried to write it so it wasn't 'time sensitive', a year on it is still fresh, relevant and usable.

LESSONS LEARNT

Private i was an immense success for my Office, with us having reached probably hundreds of thousands and maybe up to half a million of young people across the country, to promote privacy awareness messages.

The approaches that we used as part of the project have lessons relevant to anyone wanting to engage with youth about privacy issues:

1. Speak to the target audience.

We got young people involved in the conceptualisation and production of the magazine.

We contacted youth organisations and asked them for advice about how to best promote the product.

The success of any project targeting a particular audience depends on knowing the audience, speaking to them, and providing them with a product that will meet their needs.

2. It's also important to speak to experts on the ground. Our offices are in Sydney and Canberra, so in order to distribute the product nationally we looked for people on the ground who understood the importance of privacy and would be willing to help us. This led us to the privacy contact officers at universities and TAFEs, the vast majority of whom were only too happy to assist.

3. Avoid information overload.

There are so many privacy issues that we could have included in private i and so much we could have said about each.  However, we decided that this would not have appealed to our audience.

We whittled down each issue to the key messages, and presented it with an illustrative graphic.  The magazine serves as a teaser, and in it we provide web links where readers can go for further information.

4. Avoid being a try-hard.

We knew it would be very hard to get it right if we used the jargon that is unique to youth, and that we might be seen as authority figures trying lamely to appeal to young people.  Instead we kept our messages simple and our language as plain as possible.

5. Create a sensation.

It's a good idea to create - for want of a better word - a 'sensation', to get people talking about your product.  Arranging for static links to appear on websites visited by students, and placing copies in libraries and at various contact points on campus are a great promotional avenue.  However, youth have to actively click on the link or pick up a copy.

To make sure the publication actually reached the hands of youth, we had Student Marketing Australia distribute copies by hand on major university campuses.

Indeed for one of my kids, even though I had shown her the magazine at home, it wasn't until she was handed it on campus that she actually told me that:  "Mum, I read this and it is really good" with an admission that "I didn't know that! about credit black lists ".

6. Continue to innovate. Beyond private i, our Office is looking at a number of other initiatives to continue to communicate with youth and various other audiences. These include a strategy for engagement via social media.

We also released during PAW 2010 a Zcard on mobile phone privacy.

I understand you have it in your conference materials.

Although we've aimed it broadly, we really had young people in mind.   Do you know that based on the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Children's Participation in Cultural and Leisure Activities report, 31 per cent of children aged 5-14 years (841,000) had exclusive use of a mobile phone?

This estimate is based on a survey conducted in April 2009 which measured activity in the previous 12 months.

That's a very high number and many of these really have no idea of how valuable their personal information actually is!

While ACMA tells us there are not any statistics for smart phone take-up in Australia, a Japanese study has indicated that over 95% of children are using third generation mobile phones by the end of high school.

So my advice to young people is - privacy is a bit like youth - you don't realise how precious it is until it is gone.

We all have the power in our hands to make the best privacy choices every day.

We think private i and our website gives young people good tips and advice to help them make informed choices. 

We are very proud of it.  Happy to take questions.