Wowment - Our Safe & Secure Messaging Technology

If you know of Goal 17, you probably know us for our mentoring work – training volunteers to become incredible mentors and “independent visitors”, hand-matching them with young people and supporting these partnerships as they grow and flourish. We think we’re pretty good at it, and our hundreds of successful partnerships would say the same!

However, there’s another string to our bow – a technology called Wowment that was developed as a solution to the sticky situation of enabling safe, anonymous communication between mentor and mentee. When we first began creating mentoring partnerships, CEO and founder Francesca Salussolia noticed that there was no good method for two people to send messages to each other in a safe and anonymous way – this was the catalyst for what would become Wowment.

The First Try

The first version of the technology was launched in 2022 as an app that allowed safe communication in one-to-one relationships without sharing personal contact details. However, we got one key thing wrong with this initial version – we hadn’t considered that people (and particularly young people) really, really don’t like downloading and using new apps to do things they were doing already.

Take Two

So, don’t make them come to you – go to them. We started work on a new version of Wowment, one that worked entirely within the messaging app WhatsApp that almost everyone in the UK uses. The core concepts of this new version were:

👍Works directly through WhatsApp, where young people already are.

👍Keeps both volunteers and young people safe by removing the need to share phone numbers.

👍 Uses AI safeguarding to monitor risks and protect confidentiality.

👍Captures real-time data, giving us insights into how these relationships grow and where more support is needed.

And here’s how it works more specifically:

We launched this new version of Wowment at the start of 2025 and have already seen phenomenal success – to date, we’ve had over 16,000 conversations using the platform. Behind each one of these messages is a young person building independence and confidence and a volunteer who has chosen to stand alongside them.  

Award-winning!

We were recently honoured to win the Enabling Technology Award at the Social Value Awards 2025 and we’re always looking into whether Wowment can support other organisations and initiatives.

The entire process of mentoring is an incredibly human one, centred around a connection between two people that grows and strengthens over time. No technology will ever replace that, but we’re thrilled to have been able to create something that acts as a foundation for these strong roots of connection. Safeguarding is a constant focus in everything we do and Wowment ensures both mentor and mentee are entirely secure as they make their first steps toward a partnership.

"The origins of Wowment were incredibly personal for me. I kept seeing brilliant volunteers and young people held back by safeguarding barriers that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. We refused to accept that ‘this is just how it is’. Wowment is the result of that stubbornness – a way for people to connect safely, naturally, and on their own terms. Watching it now enable thousands of conversations is one of the proudest parts of my journey with Goal 17."
 — Francesca Salussolia

Please take a look at the Wowment website here if you’d like to learn more!