RYAN LOVIE

In my previous post I spoke about my interview with Steven Wilson from YSAS. He told me that i should look into other youth services and their websites to get an idea of people who support/donate to them.

I liked the idea and i knew i would get some sort of idea of who supports and donates a youth service. But thinking about Kimberley’s assignment I really need to know who supports ReachOut, not gather my information from another service.

I was reminded by what Lisa from ReachOut said to me that most of their ’supporters’ are the people on their online community. These people are actually seeking help and becoming supporters because they ask for help as well as offer help to others making this a really well-established wonderful community.

I’ve been on online forums and most of them have a member list, a list of everyone registered to the forums and their profile information. So I thought i’d register myself on to the ReachOut Online Community and have a look

I also thought gold mine this will give me a slight bit of Demographic/Geographic information for this assignment that i need that ReachOut didn’t apparently keep.

But just as i got my hopes up i found that the members list on ReachOut’s Forum was blocked. And for some gay motherfucking reason i couldn’t access any of it. So i tried actually clicking on a member to see their profile i was also blocked out from that as well, it was fucking frustrating, ss you can understand from my language.

I realised when I read posts below each members name there was brief profile that was shown. So therefore i had to go through the whole forum and sort of keep a tally or just a recollection of what i was reading.

Example of Brief Profile:

Group: ya
Posts: 4,958
Joined: 16-June 06
From: Canberra
Member No.: 14,537
State: ACT
Postcode: 2600
Age: 18
Gender: female

I scoped all over the forums reading almost every section, thread to gather the information i was seeking. I found myself reading the posts and what they were about I found myself really depressed after it and thought maybe i should post seek help as well. Eventually it drove me fucking insane and couldn’t stand these 16 year old girls and their problems. I began to focus more of my time on profile part. And this is what i gathered:

• More Females than males ranging from an age of 16-24 just as ReachOut intends on targeting.
• Majority of the females posting on the forum were probably 15 to 16 years old.
• When it came to males, the select few of them that i came across most of them were 20+ in age i think i found one 15 year old.
• The online community were from all around Australia (WA, NSW, etc.)
• Some members tended not to show their age or location