On 5 February, Saffron Interactive, the award-winning digital learning company, collected silver in the sought-after category during a ceremony at The Dorchester in London. Judges were impressed by the experiential elearning and unique knowledge platform developed in close partnership with Against Violence & Abuse (AVA). The project aims to educate practitioners working with children and young people about how to identify, challenge and respond to violence against women and girls.
External Learning Solution of the Year is one of the Learning Awards’ most hotly contested categories, requiring entrants to prove that their project “is innovative in concept and has produced demonstrable performance improvement for the client.” The Learning Awards is hosted by the Learning & Performance Institute and is widely seen as the L&D sector’s leading awards ceremony.
“By adopting a digitally enabled blended approach, and creating a Digital Prevention Platform with a rich domain of content, Saffron Interactive developed a synergistic partnership with AVA to make ‘safeguarding go viral’,” noted the judging committee. “By creating a toolkit, rather than a course, Saffron has ensured this Comic Relief supported programme will save both distress and lives.”
This is the second award won by Saffron and AVA for the project, which also received the European-wide MEDEA Professional Production Award in November last year.
“As Saffron enters 2015 with another industry accolade under its belt, I want to highlight how this complex project embodies some of the key aspirations we all have for learning technologies,” comments Noorie Sazen, CEO at Saffron. “That is, evolving our solutions from linear ‘courses’ to personalised toolkits and resource-hubs which deliver better performance and behavioural change on a large scale.”
“In doing so, AVA has used technology to solve not only a knowledge management problem and a training problem, but contribute to solving an urgent political and social problem. This is learning and technology at its most exciting!”
The Digital Prevention Platform has received national media coverage and now forms the basis of campaigns to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) in schools and local authorities up and down the country.
“We are thrilled to have won another award with Saffron for our prevention platform. The award highlights how much of an impact the project has made in a short time and how it fills a much needed gap in educating people about preventing VAWG in an accessible and interactive way,” says Joanna Sharpen, children and young people’s project coordinator at AVA.
“We were delighted to partner with Saffron for this innovative project and look forward to further work together to work towards our ultimate goal of a world without violence towards women and children.”
A full list of the winners can be found here.
About AVA
Against Violence and Abuse (AVA) is a national second tier service working to end all forms of violence against women and girls. AVA provides a range of services to organisations and agencies working in the voluntary and statutory sector as well as to individual practitioners. AVA offer consultancy, training, resources and guidance. More information about AVA is available at www.avaproject.org.uk
