All Youth Divisions Editor: Justin Houben Email: Justin.Houben@stjohn.org.nz Phone: 021 105 9041

July Edition

Kia Ora everyone,

Welcome to another Cadet of the Year newsletter.

In this edition Ive included an update on my goals, updates from our Regional Cadets of the Years, information on upcoming youth events, a thank you message from the New Zealand Army and finally an update on the Youth Website. Enjoy!

Over the past few months I have been keeping busy with my studies and working away at the goals I have in place while I am National Cadet of the Year.

One of those goals was to develop internships for youth members within various departments within St John. For those of you who are super excited to be a part of this opportunity, here is a little update Firstly progress is well underway and the end goal is in sight, we are currently waiting on the final pieces of paperwork to be completed and all going well, we will be advertising some positions later in the year!

Last month I had the opportunity to visit the Putaruru Youth Division in Central Region. I was completely taken away by amount of positivity and enthusiasm the cadets and leaders show towards the Youth Programme. I would like to congratulate Mr White, the Divisional Manager and his leadership team for encouraging the cadets to work hard on their badge work and do achieve the best they can.

Thank you to the members of the Putaruru Youth Division for opening your doors and allowing me to visit your division. You all display the Values of St John well and prove that being a part of the St John Youth Programme is a great thing.

Above: Putaruru Youth Division

Myself and the other Cadets of the Year really enjoy getting out and meeting people in various divisions all over the country. While we come close to the end of our terms in our roles, I would like to encourage everyone to invite their Cadet of the Year to visit their division or attend a local youth event. This could even be done via Skype like I did with Dunedin Youth Division a few weeks back! Thanks Dunedin Youth Members, it was great to catch up!

REGIONAL UPDATES

Northern Region

Northern Region recently held their Grand Priors Award ceremony. We were very lucky to have Dame Catherine Anne Tizard ONZ GCMG GCVO DBE QSO DStJ attend to present the certificates in place of the Governor General, who was unable to attend.

It was a privilege to attend and show my support to those cadets achieving their highest award for our Youth Programme. I congratulate all the cadets who were presented awards that night, as well at the Girl Scouts who were there as well receiving their Queens Guide Award, Well done.

Northern Region is currently running their District Competitions. Congratulations to those who have already organised, run and successfully completed their competitions. A big congratulation to those competitors who gained placings and are now heading to Regional Competitions in the upcoming months.

Good luck to those who are yet to compete, train hard, remember the basics and have fun!

Regional Reminder: District Cadet of the Year applications close on the 30th of June. Be sure to get your application in as soon as possible!

Justin Houben.

Central Region

Central Region has had a busy few months with Nationals, District competitions and various badge camps and divisional outings.

This year it was my first time attending a National Youth Festival and I have to say, I was incredibly blown away by the impeccable clinical standard that our cadets illustrated throughout the competition. The weekend made me realise the hard work and dedication that the competing cadets and their training managers put in to develop and prepare for this annual event.

Central Regions Nationals results have been improving over the past 3 years and this year continues to show a positive trend toward greater success in the future. I would like to congratulate everyone who gained a placing at Nationals, especially those from Central Region who gained top spot in some of their tests!

Last month Marlene Rankin and I travelled to two of the three District Competitions held in our Region. We arrived early Saturday morning to the East Coast/Bay of Plenty Competitions then making our way up to Te Awamutu for the afternoon. The trip provided me with a chance to introduce myself and engage with the members of our Region.

Opportunity's like this are ones that I grab with two hands as they expose me to the more provincial and somewhat isolated places in which some of our most genuine, driven, hardworking members are from.

Neko Diamantis.

South Island Region

Recently, I ran the holding room at the Christchurch District competitions. I was already aware of how stressful the job could be, but only fully appreciated that after a day of constantly being on my feet. This was my first competition in attendance as a non-competitor and it was eye-opening to see how much work is put in. Those who arrive first to set up are often the last to leave.

I think this highlights just how much our leaders and assistants are committed to seeing cadets achieve and I feel this is something that is often goes unrecognised by cadets. I would therefore, on behalf of cadets across the South Island Region, like to thank all our leaders for their continued service and dedication to the programme. It really does make a difference!

It is around this time that my generation of District Cadets of the Year are relieved of their positions as we welcome in a new generation. As such, I would like to thank my team for all the work they have done within their own districts and throughout the Region.

I would also like to encourage eligible cadets to consider applying for the positions within their own Districts. The role gives you the opportunity to further develop your own leadership skills while contributing back to our organisation. You are also able to act as a bridge between adult members and fellow cadets both in communication and ideas.

Before my DCOTY team officially disbands, we are working hard to complete our Regional project of creating a South Island Regional NCO Lesson Bank. This is an online repository of resources, created by Leaders and NCOs throughout the region, which everyone will be able to access, draw inspiration from or modify to suit the programme run at their divisions. We are collecting and processing lesson/ term plans, camp plans, games, competitions training resources, fun night ideas etc. from around the region. Why constantly re-invent the wheel when someone else is likely to have thought through what you may need?

Keep up the good work everyone!

Mark Holdaway

UPCOMING REGIONAL EVENTS

Northern Region

- 4th -5th of July: Penguin, Green & Blue Competitions- All Districts

- 21st October: Youth Ball

- 12th December: Rainbows End Invasion

For more information please contact: Vicki Hawkins on Vicki.Hawkins@stjohn.org.nz

Central Region

- 27th- 28th of June: District Badge Camp- St John Badge, Wellington

- 27th- 28th June: Leader Training Day- West Coast District, Marton

- 4th July: Waikato District Orbit, Hamilton

- 7th- 9th August: Interprovincial Competitions- Northern and Central Regions, Otaki

For more information please contact: Marlene Rankin on Marlene.Rankin@stjohn.org.nz

South Island Region

- 10th- 12th of July: Cadet Leader Leadership Development Training, Waddington

- 22nd- 24th of August: MAD Hui and Regional Cadet of the Year selections, Waddington

- 25th- 27th of September: Regional Youth Competitions, Ashburton

For more information please contact: Kelly Heads on Kelly.Heads@stjohn.org.nz

NATIONAL YOUTH FESTIVAL 2016 UPDATE

Northern Region is excited to be bringing you the National Youth Competitions & Festival in 2016. Weve been busy working out the preliminary details and this announcement is to share the four key details so far

Festival Date: 23rd 26th of April 2016 Festival Venue: Kings College in South Auckland Festival Theme: International Understanding Festival Coordinators: Lynn Mosley and Elinor Swery Congratulations to both Lynn and Elinor on their appointments, we wish you the best of luck in planning this festival and we cant wait to hear more about it throughout the year!

TRANS-TASMAN ANZAC COLLABORATION

During the weeks leading up to ANZAC Day this year, cadets from six Youth Divisions in New Zealand and Australia worked together to produce St John Youth wreaths that were laid at various memorial services around both countries.

Participating Youth Divisions were;

New Zealand Australia Massey- Northern Region Blackwood- South Australia Hamilton- Central Region Knox- Victoria

Palmerston North- Central Region Launceston- Tasmania Petone- Central Region Palmerstone- Northern Territory

Halswell- South Island Region Ulverstone- Tasmania Dunedin- South Island Region Western Suburbs- New South Wales

To be continued

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who wrote a message of support on the back of the Thank You cards we had produced to celebrate this 100 Year Anniversary.

We received over 1700 post cards with various messages and pictures drawn on them. These were sent far and wide to various men and woman who are serving to protect our country.

Please find below a thank you letter from the New Zealand Army.

UPCOMING CHILD YOUTH PROTECTION POLICY REVIEW

One very important piece of work that we will be undertaking very shortly is a review of our Child and Youth Protection Policy. This policy hasnt been reviewed for a number of years, and we all know that its important that the policy remains to be relevant to ensure that we all are working safely with young people.

We will be taking staged approach for the review to ensure we get maximum feedback from all affected by the policy, and that an effective and accessible new policy is created.

Our first stage of the review is focussed on collecting your feedback. Shortly a survey link will be available for you to submit your feedback. We encourage feedback from youth members, leaders, parents and staff from other relevant functions of St John, e.g. Operations and Clinical Development. The survey will have a number of questions based on various areas of CYPP and will be open all through July.

The second stage of the review will be to collate all your feedback in and formulate a draft policy that will once again be open for your feedback. We want to ensure that its an open and transparent process and that as many people as possible help shape the policy. Ultimately, the new Child and Youth Protection Policy is what we will all need to adhere to, in order to ensure a safe and secure environment for both adults and young people.

Although we encourage you all to comment openly and freely on the currently policy, we ask you to refrain from personalising the comments or sharing anecdotes or situations where you believe there may have been some CYPP issues. If you have any CYPP concerns you wish to share, please raise these with your Regional Youth Manager.

YOUTH WEBSITE UPDATE

The St John Youth Website went live in December 2014 and since then there has been a massive uptake in the Website usage. That was to be expected as who doesnt like new tools and resources to play with.

The development of our youth website is and continues to be part of a technology roadmap that contains a plan for continual enhancement and improved capability as we grow. There will be a number of phases of implementation as we further develop the site and as funding and resource are available.

Website Reporting

St John has subscribed to a comprehensive web analysing tool know as Google Analytics which monitors our organisations websites real time providing valuable information to assist St John in understanding our audience. We can now easily review and report on whos visiting our site whats being visited, what pages are being viewed and for how long users are spending using the website. We can even drill down and find out the type of operating system and the telecommunications provider being used or the mobility device type giving St John valuable information to help future development. We have included some interesting statistics now that we have been live for just over 6 months.

In the graph below we can easily identify that there has been a significant uptake in the use of the youth Website particularly when we compare it with the same timeframe in 2014.

The Youth Website and Pay Global - Our Member Database

Its very important that we all understand that the Youth Website is just an extension of our member database, this is also called Pay Global. The Website takes a snap shot of the data held in the member database and displays it in the fun and dynamic web pages that you can see on the Youth Website. A data base however is only as good as the data being stored. If your residential address or your name is spelt incorrectly or you have moved house or your email address is wrong then asking your Regional Office to update your personal details on the member database is your first point of call.

Each night the Website runs a process that searches the member database for any changes made to members records. If your personal details have changed or you have a new appointment or you have been awarded a new badge then these changes will be updated on the Website overnight, this process runs each night while most of us are fast asleep!

Website: Updating Members Details

Phase 1 of the Website development was all about establishing our presence and getting the Youth Website up and running and enabling basic features, we exceeded in some areas of delivering what was required but some features had to be delayed as we had dependencies on other systems that could not be configured in time for integration with the Website. They are just delayed, they are not removed!

Future development work is planned to enhance the feature rich technology platform we have invested in and there is no doubt that business integration is a valuable tool and we are committed to bringing our leaders and members much improved services and tools that will reduce the administration requirements placed on you by encouraging less paper and more self-service, work-flow allows you more time to do other important things.

In future phases leaders will be able to modify members personal details online such as email, phone numbers and age level; we want to be able to workflow the processing of badge requests and to release an online camp and activity registration tool. Enabling these tool sets will take time and we have developed a phased strategy to make it so. The only constraint is funding and ICT resource to support this important development work.

Website: Resignation of 18+ Members and Leaders

Many Leaders have reported that there is a problem with resigning members from the youth website leaders area, yes there is. However there should be no problem with resigning members less than 18yrs online. We are currently experiencing a number of issues directly linked to the data held in the member data base which requires an investment in time by admin teams to resolve. The website logic relies on reporting lines for Area Youth Managers to process resignations of members aged 18+. Where no AYM reporting line has been loaded the resignation process fails, the system was meant to auto default to the next level however there is a logic bug which requires some reprogramming and this work has a high priority to resolve. If the member database has a correct Area Youth Manager reporting line loaded the resignation process will work as intended. Until the logic process is fixed or reporting lines is corrected in pay global Divisional Managers will need to process a manual resignation form using the electronic PTF when they want to resign a member over the age of 18 and send it to their manager for follow up and processing.

Whos peeking at Our Youth Website?

During the period of January 2015 to June 2015 our Youth Website was visited by over 26,000 end points, the world picture below shows whos taking an interest on what we are up to in little ol New Zealand, the blue shading below represents the country of origin from visiting IP addresses.

Website: New Member User Name and Password

Our Website Manager Richard Hitchcock is receiving a lot of requests for new users to be added. The process of adding a new user to the website is automatic. Once the new members enrolment form is sent to your regional office and the member is added to pay global by HR, their username is created automatically. By default their password is set to their date of birth. If the DOB is 5 July 1969 then the password will be 05071969. Divisional Managers can look up usernames by going to the Leaders Area on the Youth Website. Simply tick the member you want to view and click on the More option and you will then see their username displayed in their personal details directly below their full name.

Dont forget members are able to reset their own passwords if they have forgotten it. The only thing to remember here is that the member must have a valid email address in Pay Global, which is used to send the new password to. To resent your password go to the Youth Website main landing page, select sign on and then select having trouble and follow the online prompts.

How do I get a divisional list of user names? Leaders can run the Export Mail Merge Report from the Leaders Area; this report will provide a name and address listing of all your members in your Division as well as displaying all of your members website user names. This is a great tool for mail merges!

Website: What technology are we accessing the Website?

So just how are we interacting with the website? In the images below we can see that for many using the Website they still prefer the traditional desktop. However, when we compare this with what was happening last year, there has been a drop in desktop and a shift to an increase in tablet and mobile devices. Our investment in developing the Website to support mobility has certainly been worthwhile and will continue how about a 1,367% increase in tablet use alone from the same time last year.

Website: How long are we staying on the Website?

When we compare what we were doing last year, members are certainly staying longer and viewing more online pages, with a +600% increase from the same time last year.

Website: Future Phases and whats to come?

St John has committed to continue to invest funds into increasing the capability and future state of the youth Website platform. We want the Website to be our leaders tool of choice and we have had a heap of super awesome feedback that we have started something great, but we intend to make it better!

Some of the new tools we are developing or planning to bring online are as follows:

1. Leaders My Page showing awards, ATP, certifications and information more relevant to our 18+ members

2. Online Activity and Camp Registration, Survey System, Polling System

3. Divisional administration workflow, such as requesting badges, promotions

4. The ability for leaders to update members personal data online

5. Better reporting and KPI information reporting

6. Improved programme resources, tools and applications

7. The creation of a Penguin Kingdom, fun educational and interactive for our youngest!

8. Single sign on, removing the additional headache of having to login to the Hub to download

The above list is just an example of whats to come, there are some other very cool tools under consideration but we will hold onto those for now and surprise you later on!

Website Support Email Address

If you notice any of the features are not working on the website or data is incorrect, or you are seeing an error message when trying to do something please dont leave it thinking someone else will report it. Chances are that someone will also think someone else is reporting it and it will never get fixed.

Please forward any concerns or issues or requests for data correction to the Youth Website Email Address. We will review your email and advise what cause of action is being taken, if its something that requires ICT to resolve then we will log a service ticket on your behalf or if its something that your regional admin should fix we will forward it to them for action on your behalf.

The Email Address to use is youthwebsite@stjohn.org.nz If possible please attach a screen shot of your error messages and email this along with your contact information. If you have any ideas you would like us to consider for the Websites future, please jot them down and send them to use at the email address above, after all its your Website, developed by the people for the people.