Helping Alexandra Rose Charity support vulnerable families

Alexandra Rose Charity

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The Alexandra Rose Charity needed to scale their service to reach more families. We worked with traders, families and the staff administering the scheme to understand their pain points and develop digital systems to help.

The Alexandra Rose Charity (ARC) is on a mission to address health inequalities and food poverty in the UK. It tackles food inequality directly by giving families access to fresh fruit and vegetables in their communities at their local market or greengrocer. Its Rose Vouchers for Fruit and Veg Project allows families to redeem vouchers to provide them with access to healthy and affordable food.

But the process of creating and shipping Rose Vouchers to market traders, greengrocers and children’s centres was time consuming. And the ARC needed to track each voucher’s journey and understand where families needed additional support.

ARC engaged us to understand how it could use technology to reach more families and improve the voucher process that was time consuming for staff. Streamlining this process would allow more time to be spent in other critical areas of the operation. Such as applying for funding from bodies like the National Lottery Community Fund and Impact on Urban Health, and growing the project to reach more families in more areas across the country.

Challenge

Processing Rose Vouchers involved high volumes of manual work. Including recording each voucher number and related voucher activities on spreadsheets. Children’s centres had to keep distribution records on paper as well as update spreadsheets. And market traders cashing in the vouchers had to manually record the voucher numbers on paper and return them to ARC. The information was critical in helping ARC understand where and when the vouchers were being spent. But the process was extremely time consuming for everyone.

Faith Holland, Head of Operations at ARC explained how they: "were concerned that it could become a barrier to new children’s centres and traders joining the project."

The process of recording important information and generating statistics was also a challenge. For example, the number of families and children benefiting from the Rose Vouchers, and the number of traders and partners involved in the process. This was completed by manually entering the information on spreadsheets. Not only did the process take a long time, but the risk of human error reduced the reliability of the data.

What we did

Neontribe worked closely with ARC to understand their requirements. We built a digital solution that would enable the operations team, market traders and children centres to easily scan Rose Vouchers. Part of this new digital capability is an app that can be downloaded to any mobile device or handset. This made the process more efficient and improved data accuracy because the scanning process removes the potential for human error.

Result

Using technology has allowed the charity to fully understand the Rose Voucher journey from start to finish. It’s provided important information about:

  • when and where the voucher was issued
  • by which trader
  • how long it has been in circulation for before the transaction

The data analysis extends to more detailed reporting than the previous approach, helping the charity to fully understand:

  • its beneficiaries
  • the number of vouchers being distributed and used
  • which centres or traders are processing the most transactions

The increased access to data has allowed ARC to understand each voucher’s journey and apply interventions when needed to help families who may be struggling. It also gives the charity an opportunity to monitor for potential fraudulent transactions. With the whole process now digitised, they can provide greater transparency around how each voucher is being used, which is especially important to prospective funders.

Other benefits for ARC include the ability to record how many families are currently receiving help from Government initiatives such as Healthy Start, which offers formula milk, fruit, and vegetables to children under 4. This means they can store this information and, if needed, submit it to local authorities. This is significant as it provides trackable statistics and an overview of vulnerable people who may require more ongoing support. Including data on the number of people currently benefiting from the initiative.

Faith concludes: "The simplified process of scanning the Rose Vouchers using the mobile app means that children’s centres can register new families much faster. They’re also able to download and access the data which helps with the on-going management of the project and support they provide for families. For market traders using the app, payments are generated much faster which means there are no delays for the finance team. This means that we can maintain a higher retention rate for children’s centres and traders as the sign-up process is much easier. Joining up the process for everyone involved means we can support more families on the Rose Vouchers for Fruit and Veg Project than ever before and meet the increasing need for access to fresh fruit and vegetables. For ARC, the data generated is fantastic, enabling us to manage growth and to monitor spend and churn rates, as well as being a crucial part of our reporting to funders."

Since 2014 the number of:

  • traders has increased from five to 62
  • families has risen from 1116 to supporting over 4000 in 2023-24
  • children’s centres has multiplied from 15 to 73

In May 2023, ARC reached a new milestone by reaching 2 million Rose Vouchers distributed and spent with 62 different market traders and greengrocers. The pandemic and cost of living crisis have likely influenced the increased distribution of vouchers. It took 7 years to distribute the first million vouchers. The second million, only 18 months and in June 2024 vouchers distributed reached three million.

Jonathan Pauling, CEO of the Alexandra Rose Charity, says: "The digital solution Neontribe developed has allowed ARC to accelerate voucher distribution and manage soaring demand more effectively. We’ve just completed the UK’s first large-scale pilots of ‘Fruit & Veg on Prescription’, and the solid foundation Neontribe’s work has given us means we can be confident we can take this service to a larger scale."

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In June 2024 vouchers distributed reached three million.