Shout-It-Now was founded in 2007 by a group of IT and marketing experts from the U.S. and social scientists from South Africa who wanted to help address issues that affect young people, such as HIV and AIDS.
Together we developed a revolutionary solution taking the very best from social science and technology - along with the latest health research - to help South African youths take charge of their own wellness. When we started Shout-It-Now, one of the biggest challenges in South Africa was educating the youth about HIV and AIDS, and encouraging them to know their status. We committed to tackling this issue, and identified three key tools to leverage:
1. Technology, which enabled us to measure attitudes, perceptions and behaviour of our youth and also gave us the ability to measure the impact of our programmes. Through innovations such as fingerprint identification we could maintain 100% client confidentiality and anonymity.
2. Celebrities could help us reach teens because they easily attract our youth’s attention and are a perceived credible source of information for our target market. We leveraged this reality by working with celebrities to talk to our youth about the issues that matter.
3. Community-based marketing would give youths a legitimate reason to be part of our programmes without being stigmatised or feeling embarrassed.
Using these three key pillars, we developed revolutionary HIV/AIDS education programmes, featuring MTV style content, that were cool, funky, engaging and thought-provoking, helping youth to make informed decisions. Our meaningful, content-driven and technology-based education programmes were delivered in partnership with provincial and local government and community-based organisations.
Within two years of launching our voluntary HIV Testing and Counseling (HTC) programme in schools and communities we had tested more than 46,000 youth for HIV and AIDS. After participating in the education programme, 96.95% of participants agreed to be tested on the same day vs. 34,4% who were willing to undergo HIV testing prior to our programme.
We were the first South African organisation to deploy technology-based solutions to social issues on a large scale, and technology continues to drive our competitive advantage in this arena.
Today, while HIV and AIDS remain the biggest social issue facing the youth of South Africa, the challenge has evolved. We have found that 90% of our clients can answer the top 10 questions about HIV and AIDS with ease, and 91.7% of respondents interviewed in a recent study believe that they should be tested at least once every 3 months. For this reason, we have now shifted our focus from education to providing what is most needed and asked for by our clients – free, fast and friendly HIV testing and links to care. Our three key pillars continue to be at the heart of what we do.
At Shout It Now we "try fast and fail fast". Our software development methodology has to be agile. We need to react quickly to changing operational requirements and new innovations. A word of warning, any good ideas you have may become your next project. We do our best to work smart, not always hard. We deal with a whole range of architectures from on premise servers, managed hosted servers and we are now moving into cloud web services as well. We have a vibrant office, this is not a software development company so expect all sorts of different characters.
We review applications by looking at your CV to get an idea of your skill set. If we think those skills align with what we are looking for we will set up a skype/telephonic interview so we can get to know each other a little better. If that goes well you will be invited to a second and final technical interview. Hopefully, in this process you're also assessing us and determining whether we would be a good fit for you.
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