PIECE OF KIND COMMUNITY APP

Feeding the revolution in accessing volunteer support, volunteer management, service validation and support delivery.

As COVID took hold, it became clear that community support services were becoming overwhelmed. Talking to Bedfordshire CVS highlighted an even wider issue “In Bedfordshire alone there are over 3000 volunteer groups and less than 5% of these receive funding”. There are over 166,000 voluntary organisations in the UK with 82% having an income less than £100,000. With all this support, why was there no easy way to reach out for help, or help identify, validate and match volunteers to volunteer organisations and the communities needs?

Further research and discussion within Volunteering Matters uncovered that the third sector:

• Lack of efficiency in infrastructure – partly fuelled by lack of funding or funding that is not targeted
• Competition in best practice – leading to ‘ownership’ of volunteers by organisations
• Funding goes into managing delivery / people and analogue systems
• These issues existed before covid and to varying degrees will exist post-covid
• Covid saw a shift to task based social action volunteering at pace and scale – away from role-based relationship volunteering

This was not an easy challenge but Bonfire created a concept for a simple case management solution using 2-way SMS that could match a local support need with the right local support organisation/person within seconds. A fully working prototype was built, using the Liberty Create low-code platform, and entered into the Government InnovateUK innovation awards, alongside 8,600 other applicants… and won!

From there, Bonfire went on to further research, develop and test the system, UX, and branding with valuable input and support from many organisations including Volunteering Matters, Letchworth Heritage Foundation, North Hertfordshire District Council, North Hertfordshire CVS, Bedfordshire CVS, Netcall, SKORE, Loqate, Verifile, Bedford Borough Council, Bedford College, Pfizer, Bedfordshire Chamber of Commerce, Central Bedfordshire Council, Ampthill Good Neighbours, Bedford Independent, Star Medical and RNIB. We thank you for all your support and feedback.

The app continues to be value engineered, is easily customisable and has the capability to integrate with any system with a SOAP or REST API.