Frequently Asked Questions

The social work campfire is a daily two minute survey for social workers to plug into professional conversations and news quickly and easily. It is designed to:

1. Be quick and easy to use - in just two minutes you learn something about what is happening in social work.

2. Feel like a community - You start by contributing your views and knowledge for two minutes. If you have more than two minutes you can dive in deeper, read the latest news and research, and contribute your views and experience to other social workers.

3. Be uplifting - because all social workers need the nourishment of feeling connection and belonging to our profession.

4. Enhance the voice and power of the social work profession by sharing their collective views with social work leaders, academics, media, policy makers and other organisations involved in supporting vulnerable people.

Our Core Principles:
📣 Voice - in sitting around the campfire, we dialogue about the important challenges and decisions that face us as a group.
💥 Sparks - we learn each other's knowledge and wisdom through dialogue, and in combining our knowledge we weave new and better ways of doing things.
🌡️ Warmth - we feel the nourishment of connecting and belonging to a community.
🛟 Safety - we enter a safe space where we can disconnect from stress
🤲🏽 Circle - our collective voice makes us strong.

The social work campfire is designed for social workers from anywhere in the UK. It is designed for those working in or alongside statutory services, and the questions and insights will be most applicable to those professional contexts. It is open to both children’s and adults social workers and sometimes the questions you receive will be tailored to your professional context. We ask basic questions about your current role when you sign up to ensure you receive the most appropriate questions.

HOWEVER, anyone working in social care from anywhere in the world can sign up to the main Campfire site - please just be aware that our questions may be less relevant to you if you are not currently in statutory practice in the UK. The questions are focussed on workplace and practice issues, so you may not be able to answer them if you are not working in social work. We will also remove answers from non-social workers from some of our analysis to ensure it is truly representative of UK social workers’ sentiments.

The Campfire is an early stage start-up. We spent six months in 2025 building the basic web application and trialling it with around 150 users.  Now we are completely rebuilding it as a mobile app, which you will be able to download for free from the apple or android app store. The app will then send you a notification each day, and we will ensure that each day’s questions take less than two minutes to complete.  Our plan is to launch in the app stores in late 2026 after a 2-3 month trial with a testing group.  Once we have enough users regularly participating, we will regularly release reports on social worker's views on a variety of subjects.  Although the web app questions were designed to be generic for all social workers, the mobile app questions will initially be targeted at child and family social workers to allow us to ask and share views on practice focussed topics.

The Campfire vision is that all responses will contribute to the daily collated results, so every user can learn from each other’s perspective. This will provide and interesting and informative insight for social workers into professional issues that are important to us. We hope to find ways to build deeper conversations on the back of results where there are a range of interesting perspectives, and where social workers want to engage more in dialogue on a topic. We also want to use your collated views to influence policy and research, and share social workers experience with the wider public in order to bring positive attention to the social work profession.

The app will cost money to develop and maintain.  In order to fund it sustainably, we intend to partner with researchers or other interested parties to allow them to put their questions in front of social workers. We will only allow those questions to every be a small portion of the questions we ask, and we will only ever ask questions that we feel are fair, which are genuinely seeking to find an answer.  Our Privacy Policy sets out clearly that we will never access or share your personal data with anyone, and we will build our systems to ensure that data is encrypted and identifiable information is never accessible.  We will never send you multiple notifications, spam you, or share your contact details with anyone. You will be able to unsubscribe at any time.

If you love the idea of a social work campfire, please help us build it by sharing this page on social media (linkedin, facebook, etc) or emailing it to colleagues. What we need most of all for the first few months is:

1. Users that consistently complete the three daily questions.

2. New users that sign up and start answering questions each day.

For active users there will be regular opportunities to suggest questions or participate in deeper conversations.  If you are a leader in your organisation please get in touch - we will share a slide deck to help you inform your workforce about the social work campfire.  If you are a content creator in social work we would love to hear from you and discuss how we can support each other's work!