We’re Netcall App Of The Year 2020 Winners!
We’re incredibly proud to say that last night we picked up Netcall’s App Of The Year Award 2020 for Innovation!
The 23rd March 2020 is a date many people will never forget, with our entire lives being turned upside down over night as we entered a national lockdown. Discussions quickly began in the office and in the local community about how we can help and the feedback we kept hearing from people is that they also wanted to help but didn’t know where to start.
We set up designing a service that made this process easier, by connecting authorities, volunteering organisations and volunteers with a member of the public who needed to support by way of a simple text.
Using Liberty Create, we were able to build an MVP in a matter of days, which we then showed to as many people as we could to garner feedback and understand how we could develop the application further.
As part of its early development we entered the MVP into an InnovateUK COVID Innovation response competition alongside over 8,600 entries, and won a grant to further the project.
This allowed us to push on with research and development, onboard local, regional and national community stakeholders, and get it to a state ready to pilot.
The market challenge is huge with over 3,000 volunteer organisations in Bedfordshire alone, with less than 5% receiving funding. There almost 167,000 voluntary organisations nationally which makes for an incredibly large workforce to manage. Nevermind the 750,000 people who signed up to support the NHS as volunteers.
The App addresses a significant need to simplify the UK’s volunteer management processes, making it simpler for people in need to get the help they need, as well as making it much more efficient for authorities and volunteer organisations to onboard, process and manage volunteers.
We couldn’t have done this without the support of our partners – Innovate UK – Volunteering Matters – Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation – Netcall – Skore – Loqate – Verifile, and so many more who have listened, encouraged and provided valuable feedback these past 6 months.
Also, the hard work and dedication from the team at Bonfire CI has been instrumental in getting this project to where it is today, thank you to everyone involved.
We’ll be officially launching the app on December 3rd as part of a Netcall webinar – ‘People-centric App Development’ so come and see what it’s all about!
