Safeguarding Adults Week 2020 took place 16 – 22 November.
Each day of the week we aimed to raise awareness about some key safeguarding issues:
- Safeguarding and Wellbeing.
- Adult Grooming and Exploitation.
- Understanding Safeguarding Legislation.
- Creating Safer Places.
- Organisational Abuse.
- Safeguarding Adults in Sport & Activity.
- Safeguarding in Your Community.
We created a suite of resources to help people start vital conversations about these issues. And we encouraged people to use our hashtag when sharing these resources on social media: #SafeguardingAdultsWeek.
The Week in Numbers
We tracked the performance of our #SafeguardingAdultsWeek hashtag, as well as a few variations: #SafeguardingAdultsWeek; #SafeguardingWeek; #NationalSafeguardingAdultsWeek and #NationalSafeguardingWeek.
Here’s how they performed across the week:
- 12,709,612 people reached by the hashtags.
- 8,223 updates by 3,127 users which included the hashtags.
- The hashtags were seen 36,940,085 times.
And that’s just on Twitter!
In 2019, we reached just over 5.5 million people with our Safeguarding Adults Week materials. So in 2020, we reached more than twice as many as we did last year.
We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped us reach such a huge audience. Safeguarding Adults Week is all about raising awareness. If the hashtags were collectively seen nearly 40 million times, it’s fair to say we raised some awareness of these key safeguarding issues.
Who Took Part in Safeguarding Adults Week 2020?
More than 400 individuals and organisations signed up to receive our Safeguarding Adults Week resource emails. But ultimately, more than 3,000 individuals and organisations talked about the week on Twitter alone.
Here’s a small selection of the organisations who took part:
- Regional Police Forces. Including: Greater Manchester Police, West Midlands Police, West Yorkshire Police, Kent Police, GMP Manchester City Centre, Cheshire Police, South Yorkshire Police, Merseyside Police, South Wales Police, Derbyshire Police, North Wales Police, Northants Police, Cambs Police, Humberside Police, Lincolnshire Police, and Durham Constabulary.
- Local Councils. Including: Birmingham City Council, Liverpool City Council, Hampshire County Council, Kent County Council, Essex County Council, Coventry City Council – to name a few.
- Charities. Including: Age UK, Choice Support, MacIntyre, Charity Commission, Prostate Cancer UK, Respect Yourself, and Victim Support.
- Social Care. Including: Care Quality Commission, Nursing Times, SCIE, Skills for Health.
- Sport Organisations. Including: Sport England, UK Sport, Progress Wrestling, UK Coaching, Badminton England, British Rowing, Royal Yachting Association, Sport Wales, and British Judo.
- Government. Including: Disability Unit, and the Disclosure & Barring Service.
Some organisations lit up their buildings in green and other colours to mark the week:
We were pleased to see so many organisations make excellent use of our Safeguarding Adults Week resources. But many organisations also created their own resources to help raise awareness of these safeguarding issues:
A Week of Activity
Throughout the week, we hosted:
- A seminar on Adult Grooming & Exploitation with Justice For Joan’s Daphne Franks.
- A podcast on Safeguarding in Premier League football. Listen here.
- A podcast on Safeguarding in British Wrestling. Listen here.
- A seminar on Understanding the Impact of Racism in Practice with Ineke Houtenbos, Senior Training & Development Consultant, NSPCC.
We also launched our new online safeguarding training platform.
In addition to this, throughout the week organisations across the country ran activities of their own:
We Cannot Thank You Enough!
We were once again overwhelmed by the response we received.
So no matter what you did to support Safeguarding Adults Week – whether you put on an event or simply retweeted someone else – we’d like to say a massive thank you.
Safeguarding Adults Week launched in 2018. To go from zero to nearly 37 million views in just two years is fantastic. And we could not have done it without you. So once more, thank you.
Together we can make Safeguarding Adults Week 2021 even better! We’d love to hear your thoughts. So let us know what sort of themes you’d like us to cover, and what sort of resources you’d like us to produce. So get in touch!