NARU - The Community Ecosystem Where Connection Turn Into Impact 🗻

Part 2 of NARU's Guide to Youth Digital Safety, see the full Guide.

This article is part of a practical, research-backed guide for youth organisations building online communities, covering platform selection, safety by design, moderation and youth led governance.

When it comes to communicating, connection, and reaching young people, most youth organisations don’t have one missing tool, they have five half-tools scattered across different platforms and none of which was built to be a complete digital home for the community they’re responsible for pre and post ban. This article gives you a scored diagnostic to assess where you stand, a framework for comparing platform types and a model for who should own the decision once it’s made

If you've read Part 1: How to Build a Safe Online Community for Young People in Australia of this guide, you know the Build Sequence starts with two decisions: platform and access, then ownership. This article is where you actually make them.

In this article, you’ll learn:

Platform Selection: How to Evaluate a Youth Community Platform
The Community Readiness Score
Choosing Between Platform Types
Ownership & Accountability: Who Is Responsible for Safety?
Safety by Design: How to Prevent Problems Before Moderation.
Examples: What This Looks Like in Practice
Action Plan: What to Do Next
FAQ
Methodology & Sources

Let’s get started.

01 Platform Selection: How to Evaluate a Youth Community Platform

For a lot of youth organisations, the problem isn’t that they don’t have a platform, it’s that they have too many.

Instagram, TikTok, Google, Youtube might be where young people or parents discover the program, WhatsApp might be where staff sends updates, Discord or Telegram might be where participants connect, an LMS might hold the learning material and emails might handle communication with parents or guardians.

Each tool can work reasonably well on its own, the problem starts when you’re trying to create one safe, connected experience across all of them, that’s why before you choose a platform or decide to build something yourself, look at what you actually need the platform to handle

02 The Community Readiness Score

Use these questions to assess your current platform or any platform you're considering.

Answer yes or no. Give yourself one point for every "yes."

Can we control who joins, including verifying age where relevant?
Do we have a defined approach to age gating, rather than relying only on members to provide accurate information?
Can a young person report something that makes them uncomfortable through more than one channel?
Do we know where private conversations are happening, including DMs?
Can we restrict or remove someone's access quickly when necessary?
Can young people interact with one another, rather than only communicating with staff?
Can we see meaningful participation data, rather than membership numbers alone?
Have we independently checked the platform's safety claims rather than relying on its marketing?
Does someone in our organisation have clear responsibility for the community?
Do we already have an incident response process written down?

8–10: Strong foundation, you just need to look at the gaps, test your processes and establish a regular review cycle.

5-7: Addressable gaps, look at the questions where you scored no, pick two that create the greatest safety or operational risk and address those first.

Under 5: Fix the foundation first, start with access, ownership, communication and incident response before you focus on growth

Hear the conversations behind this guide

This guide draws on conversations with people working across the youth sector. If you want to hear directly from some of those perspectives, listen to Raising Youth Voices, NARU's podcast exploring youth connection, belonging and safety in a changing digital environment.

Listen to Raising Youth Voices: Beyond the Ban →

03 Choosing between platform types

There isn’t one platform category that works for every youth organisation, the right choice depends on several factors including the age of your members, the type of program you’re running, how much control you need and what your team can realistically manage.

These platforms are good for discovery and reaching a wider audience, but are much harder to use as the primary home for a youth community especially post-Social media ban for under 16s because organisations have limited control over the wider environment, discovery and interactions between users, organisations accounts can also be easily banned, hacked from these platforms.

2. General messaging and community platforms:

WhatsApp groups, discord servers, circle can work for some programs, particularly bigger communities where there’s already a high level of trust, but creating a private group doesn’t automatically make it safe.

You still need a system to verify and to think about who can join, who can contact whom, what moderators can see and do, how young people can report concerns, and what happens when something goes wrong.

3. Institutional platforms

School LMS platforms and tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Email platforms, Canvas and compass makes sense when the primary purpose is structured learning, administration or communication between an organisation and participants.

They may be less effective when the goal is to create a community where young people build relationships with one another.

4. Purpose-built youth community platforms

These platforms are designed exactly for this gap including creating community, controlled membership, moderation, reporting and structured activities.

Verify, don’t assume, regardless of category

This is the part that matters regardless of which category you choose to use for your community.

A platform can advertise safety and privacy features without those features working as exactly as an organisation expects.

Independent testing by Fairplay, for example, has identified gaps between some platforms' stated safety protections and how those protections performed in practice.

So ask questions before you commit:

What happens when someone reports a problem?
Who receives the report?
Can staff control who can message whom?
What happens when a member is removed?
What information is visible to other members?
How does age verification work?
What happens to the account when a young person ages out?
What safety testing has been done independently?
What evidence can the provider give you?

Don’t choose a platform because of the marketing copies sounds convincing, choose it because it’s tested, you have spoken to someone who has used the platform and it can support the environment you’re responsible for.

04 Ownership & Accountability: Who Is Responsible for Safety?

Someone needs to be responsible for the online community, that should be obvious, but most times responsibility can become unclear very quickly.

A program manager assumes the program coordinator or lead is watching the community, and the program coordinator assumes the moderators are handling it, and the moderators aren’t sure what they are allowed to do. When something serious happens, everyone has to work out who is actually responsible for the community.

1. Name a Digital Community Lead

This can be an existing member in your team, the important part is that the responsibility is explicit, someone should have community safety and operations written into their role, rather than having it sit vaguely under “the team”.

2. Their Day to Day Includes:

The Digital community Lead might be responsible for

monitoring reports and escalations
coordinating the review cycle
maintaining the incident log
working with moderators
coordinating with the youth advisory
reviewing changes to the platform and it’s safety settings
being the main contact for the platform provider
escalating serious safeguarding concerns through the organisation’s existing procedures.

The exact responsibilities will depend on the organisation, but what is essentials is that there is a clear person connecting the day to day community operation with the organisation’s wider safeguarding responsibilities.

3. Keep oversight separate from day-to-day moderation

The community leader or whoever is in charge of the community should not need to moderate the community themselves. Their role is to make sure the system is working and also receive regular reports covering:

number and type of incidents
unresolved or escalated cases
response and resolution times
recurring issues
changes to platform policies or safety features
actions taken since the previous review

The frequency or reviews should reflect the size and risk of the community, a small, low-risk program may need a different reporting rhythm from a large youth organisation running several programs.

4. Give moderators clear boundaries

Volunteers and junior staff do play an important role in keeping a community healthy, but they shouldn’t decide what to do when every kind of incident happens.

Write down what they can handle themselves and what can be escalated, for example, a moderator may be able to remove a post that clearly breaks the community rules. At the same time, a report involving safeguarding, an adult contacting a young person, threats, bullying, suspected exploitation or an external authority should follow a different escalation process.

5. Put the structure in writing

You don’t need a 10 page governance document to make this work, you can start with one page, a simple RACI can make the gaps visible:

	Responsible	Accountable	Consulted	Informed
Day-to-day moderation	Moderator	Digital Community Lead	Safeguarding Lead	Program Manager
Safety settings configuration	Digital Community Lead	Safeguarding Lead	Platform provider	Executive Director
Serious incident resolution	Safeguarding Lead	Executive Director	Relevant specialists	Board, where required
Community management	Program Manager	Executive Director	Youth advisory	Wider team

A RACI table clarifies who is responsible for carrying out a task, who is accountable for its outcome, who needs to be consulted before decisions are made, and who needs to be kept informed.
Responsible (R): The person who does the work. For example, the community moderator receives and records a report about inappropriate behaviour.
Accountable (A): The person who owns the outcome and ensures the task is handled properly. For example, the safeguarding lead is accountable for ensuring that the report is managed according to the organisation's safeguarding procedures.
Consulted (C): The people whose advice or input is needed before a decision is made. For example, the safeguarding lead consults the program manager or a safeguarding specialist to determine the appropriate response to a serious incident.
Informed (I): The people who need to know what has happened or what decision has been made but are not directly responsible for the task or decision. For example, the program director receives an appropriate update about the incident, without being given unnecessary confidential information.
For more guidance on assigning roles and responsibilities, see Atlassian’s "guide to RACI charts", which explains the four roles and how to use the framework to clarify ownership and accountability.

The exact names and roles will differ between organisations. One person may also hold more than one role in a small organisation. However, each task should have clear ownership, and the organisation should specify who has authority to make safeguarding decisions. Being consulted does not automatically give someone decision-making authority, and being informed does not mean they need to approve the action.

Example in practice

Imagine a young person reports receiving an inappropriate private message from another member of the community. The moderator records the report and follows the established reporting procedure. The safeguarding lead takes accountability for ensuring the incident is handled appropriately. They consult the relevant safeguarding specialist or program manager when additional advice is needed, while the program director receives an update where appropriate.

Without clearly assigned roles, the moderator might assume someone else is handling the report, or the safeguarding lead might not realise that action is still required. A RACI table helps prevent these gaps by establishing responsibilities before an incident occurs.

05 Safety by Design: How to Prevent Problems Before Moderation

Most organisation treats safety as a moderation problem: write rules, assign moderators, ban people who break them. That's necessary, but it puts the entire burden on catching harm after it happens instead of designing so less of it happens at all.

A safer approach starts earlier: what can you change about the environment so that some problems are less likely to happen in the first place?

That is the difference between moderating for harm and designing for safety.

1. Understand the difference

Moderation reacts to harm that has already occurred, while safety-by-design reduces the chances harm happens in the first place through defaults, structure and who can contact them.

These defaults can prevent some problems before a moderator ever needs to intervene, rules still matters but they shouldn’t have to carry the entire safety system.

Harms can be prevented by creating environments that prevents it.

2. Consider Youth-led moderation, not just adult oversight

Young people can have useful insights into the language, behaviour and social dynamics of their own communities, that doesn’t mean young people should be left responsible for safeguarding other people, it means there may be a role for trained youth moderators or advisors alongside appropriate adult oversight.

Research from the University of Washington and KAIST on teen Discord moderators found servers led by trained teen volunteers were often better tuned to their community's actual norms than adult-only moderation.

3. Set age-appropriate defaults as concrete settings, not principles

“Protect young people online” isn’t a setting, you need to decide what that means on the platform you’re using. For example, it could mean:

should private messaging be available to everyone?
who can contact a new member?
can members discover people outside their programs?

For younger or higher-risk communities, more protective defaults may be appropriate.

The important thing is to make these decisions before launch, rather than waiting for an incident to reveal a setting you hadn't considered.

4. Design your reporting flow around how young people actually seek help

Young people may feel more comfortable telling a trusted adult, staff member or peers, the most important thing is to build multiple, clearly signposted paths, not one generic "report" button.

5. Make reporting feel safe enough to use

Having a report button doesn’t mean people will likely use it, young people may worry about getting themselves or someone else in trouble, or may feel embarrassed and may worry that reporting may make the situation worse. As an organisation, you need to reassure them explicitly every time: confidentiality is expected, but don’t promise absolute confidentiality if there are circumstances where information must be escalated to higher ups.

The goal is to make asking for help understandable, predictable and safe.

Safety isn’t one feature, there isn’t a single setting in any community platform that makes an online community safe. Safety is the combination of the platform’s defaults, access controls, community structure, moderation, reporting pathways and the people responsible for responding when something goes wrong.

06 Examples: What This Looks Like in Practice

The organisations we spoke with are already experimenting with different ways to create safer, more structured digital spaces for young people.

1. Hybrid Program Coordination tool

A separate regional program (Hume City Council) pairing in-person workshops with a shared online task-management tool to coordinate youth projects spanning primary-school to late-teen participants, digital follow-up rather than a full social platform

Future Minds Network supports young artists from culturally and linguistically diverse and migrant backgrounds across Australia, helping them turn creative passions into sustainable businesses through a three-month intensive program supporting 10+ young artists at a time, guiding them from idea to income through structured learning, personalised mentoring, and real-world experience.

Using NARU as its community hub for resource sharing, program chat and feedback, collaboration, and peer support, Future Minds Network reported engagement levels rarely seen on traditional platforms, in practice, built around structured programming rather than open social interaction.

Source: NARU’S guide on how to build gen Z communities.

2. How teen-led moderation actually gets built

11 teen moderators (aged 13–17) involved were identified by Discord's own platform staff as leaders of well-moderated servers, selected through an intensive exam and application process, alongside 2 adult mentors who volunteered to support them. That selection process is itself a useful model: it shows youth-led moderation working best when it's structured and vetted, not simply handed over informally.

Source: Empowering Teen Volunteer Discord Moderators to Design Healthy and Engaging Youth-Led Online Communities

3. A closed community with dedicated child-safety policy work

Blue Minds' Circle community as a working example of, a platform that completed dedicated child-safety policy development specifically before onboarding high-school-aged members

The example highlights an important point: choosing a platform is only part of the safety work.

Source: Blue Minds Wavechangers Program

These examples aren't presented as perfect models. They're evidence that organisations are already trying different approaches to the same problem: how do we give young people meaningful digital connection without leaving safety as an afterthought?

As NARU's own case studies develop, this chapter can be updated with those results.

07 Action Plan: What to Do Next

This week: Run the Community Readiness Score in Chapter 2 as a team, honestly, not aspirationally.
This month: If you scored under 5, don't touch platform features or grow membership. Fix the two lowest-scoring items first.
Before choosing a platform: Match your program size and staffing capacity against the platform types in Chapter 3, don't default to whatever's already familiar to your team.
In parallel: Name a Digital Community Lead, even if it's a part-time addition to an existing role, before you finalise any platform decision.
Next: Move to Part 3: Youth Engagement Online After Australia's Social Media Ban to configure the platform you've chosen correctly from day one.

08 FAQ

What platform is safest for a youth organisation to use?

There isn't one universally "safest" platform, it depends on program size, staffing, and the ages you work with. Run the Community Readiness Score in Chapter 2 and weight verified safety tooling and your ability to moderate reliably above brand familiarity.

Is there a platform built specifically for this, rather than adapted from something else?

A few categories exist. General tools like Discord or WhatsApp groups can work for programs with dedicated safety policy work layered on top (Chapter 3). School LMS platforms work well where oversight and consent already exist. And purpose-built youth community platforms including NARU designed around young people from the ground up, which is usually the better starting point once you're running more than one program or can't staff manual safety work reliably.

Do we need to migrate everything to one platform immediately?

No, but you should have a plan for consolidation, prioritised by where the Community Readiness Score shows the biggest gaps. A phased move (starting with whichever "Before" tool in Chapter 1 handles your highest-risk interactions, typically private messaging) is more realistic than an all-at-once switch.

Who should manage online safety at a youth organisation?

A single named Digital Community Lead, even part-time, with a written mandate and a standing report line to the executive director or board. Diffuse "everyone watches it" ownership is the most common failure mode practitioners described to us.

Should we age-gate our own community even if we're not covered by the ban?

Yes. The Social Media Minimum Age law applies to specific major platforms, not private community tools generally, but the underlying safeguarding logic (verified age, appropriate defaults) applies regardless of whether the law technically covers your tool.

09 Methodology & Sources

This guide draws on three layers of evidence: NARU's original interviews, published third-party research, and NARU's own synthesis of the two.

NARU's original research

The guide is primarily informed by NARU Research: Interviewee Perspectives on Australia's Under-16 Social Media Ban, based on 20 semi-structured interviews with program managers, educators and thought leaders working in youth-facing services.

The interviews were conducted between July and September 2026. Practitioner quotes and named examples in this guide come from those conversations. The full research digest, including interviewee profiles and cited quotations, is available separately.

Published research

We also drew on research and guidance from:

eSafety Commissioner. (2026). Attitudes of children and parents to social media age restrictions ahead of implementation. Australian Government.
eSafety Commissioner. (2025). Social media age restrictions. Australian Government.
Young and Resilient Research Centre, Western Sydney University, in partnership with the eSafety Commissioner. Consultations with young people to inform the eSafety Commissioner's Engagement Strategy for Young People.
Prevention United. (2026). Navigating artificial intelligence for youth mental health
Maidment, K., Tonna, Z., Houlihan, M., & Carbone, S. (2024). The impact of screentime and social media on the mental health of young Australians. Melbourne: Prevention United.
Verghese, A. (2025). Instagram Teen Accounts fail to protect children, safety tools testing reveals. Fairplay.
United Nations Human Rights Office. (2026). Getting Children's Safety Online Right.
Yoon, J., Zhang, A. X., & Seering, J. (2025). "It's Great Because It's Ran By Us": Empowering Teen Volunteer Discord Moderators to Design Healthy and Engaging Youth-Led Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(2), 1–30.

Limitations

NARU's interview sample of 20 practitioners was not designed to be statistically representative. It reflects people working in youth-facing roles rather than a random cross-section of the sector or young people themselves.

Where evidence is still developing, particularly around the effects of Australia's social media age restrictions, we have identified that uncertainty rather than presenting assumptions as findings.

Update Triggers

We will revisit this article when: eSafety releases findings from its Social Media Minimum Age evaluation (expected progressively across 2027–2028); the list of platforms covered by the Act changes; or new peer-reviewed research on youth digital communities is published.

Continue to Part 3: Youth Engagement Online After Australia's Social Media Ban →