How you can help
People have asked what they can give. Not money. SafeStart is free and stays free, and there is nothing to buy here. There are three things worth more than a donation, and two of them take about a minute.
Tell us what is wrong
This is the most useful thing anyone sends us. Menus move constantly. A guide is only worth something if it matches what is actually on your screen, and the only way we find out it has stopped matching is when somebody says so.
You do not need to be sure, and you do not need to be polite about it. "Step 4 is not there any more" is a complete and perfect message.
Every correction gets published with its date, including the ones that make us look careless. There are 13 of them so far. The most recent came from the Irish Internet Hotline, who read their own page and told us we had their name wrong and had undersold what they do.
Send it to one parent
Not a share to everybody. One person you can actually picture, who is about to hand over a phone and does not know where to start. That is worth more than a hundred impressions, because they will open it.
If you want a line to send with it: this walks you through the settings that are already on the phone, it takes an evening, and it is free with no sign-up.
Tell your child's school
Schools already send things home about online safety, and they are usually looking for something practical to send. One teacher or safeguarding lead passing this on reaches more families than we ever will directly.
Who to send it to: the designated safeguarding lead, the head of year, or whoever runs the parents' newsletter. They do not need anything from us, there is nothing to sign and nothing to pay for, and they can link straight to it.
If you work at an organisation
If you work in safeguarding, child protection, education or policy, the most valuable thing you can do is tell us where we are wrong, in public or in private. We would rather hear it from you than from a parent who followed a step that had moved.
If it turns out to be useful enough to point people at, that is welcome too, and you are not asked for anything in return. Email dave@trust-raise.com.
Who pays for it, since nobody is asked to
TrustRaise does. TrustRaise is the advisory practice of Dave Byrne, after seventeen years in Responsible Media and Integrity teams at Google, TikTok, Spotify and IPG Mediabrands. It works with platforms and advertisers on trust and safety, and that is the paid work.
SafeStart is not part of it. There is no sign-up here, no mailing list, nothing is sold, and nothing about using this site turns you into a lead for anything. The hosting is a rounding error against the point of it, which is that a parent should not need to know someone in the industry to get their child's phone set up properly.
That is also why there is no donate button. The moment there is something to buy, the sentence above stops being simple. trust-raise.com