vInspired
Task Squad is a B2B on-demand mobile work force platform developed with vInspired to support their vibrant community of young volunteers.
Through Task Squad organisations (corporates and SMEs) can post paid tasks and micro-work opportunities to vInspired's database of over 100,000 18-24 year olds. A young person, on completing a task, is paid by vInspired who collect the money from the task-setting organisation by invoice – this should significantly reduce administrative friction for the organisation.
Beyond supporting Task Squad, the money earned will go towards offering easy-to-access opportunities and support for young people to get involved with good causes in their communities.
Task Squad has been shortlisted to the prestigious Google Global Impact Challenge and is up for a £500K prize.
Task Squad has been accepted onto the Young Foundation Accelerator programme throughout the summer of 2013. The programme will culminate in the opportunity to meet and pitch to potential social investors, commissioners and grant funders.
Task Squad is accepting tasks from organisations across London with a view to extending to locations across England later this summer.
Carers UK
3 million people in the UK juggle unpaid care with a paid job. They can find it hard to get help, both in and outside the workplace, and 1 in 5 ends up leaving work to care. This simply doesn’t add up, either for the social economy – which needs families and communities to keep caring as we live longer – or for the economy – which needs people to work longer to pay growing health, care and pensions bills.
We worked with Carers UK to design and build Jointly - a mobile application that makes caring a bit easier by making it a lot more organised.
Care is a massive issue. Nothing seems to be joined up. Communication with professional care workers and health-care services is hard. Co-ordinating with friends and families is tough. Keeping medical journal isn't easy. There's taking care of finance. There's never enough time in the day. It's all very lonely. In all this complexity, our simple insight is that whilst project management is the surface issue, the real problem and opportunity is in improving communication between different players in the system.
Jointly has two main functions.
The first is a private and secure group messaging. Communicate on the go, from anywhere, with everyone in your circle with this simple messaging board.
It works just like text messaging only it’s for group and it’s cheaper.
The other area are the shared lists.
Lists will help you organise and store any important information. You can create as many lists as you want for the things that are important for your collaborative caring.
CarersUK are now piloting the tool with few organisations in their network of the top UK employers.
Inaura
Narrative is an online collaboration platform for cross-agency support of young pupils at risk of permanent exclusion.
Inaura, a small charity from Somerset has been instrumental in reducing national figures of permanent exclusion and developing a quality alternative provision through research, policy, campaigning and running their own school. They had a first hand experience of the communication problems between the different 'players' and support agencies - schools, referral units, alternative providers, social workers and even parents and students themselves.
Narrative aims to solve this difficult challenge. It's a tool that put the pupil at the heart of cross-agency collaboration and allows effortless collaboration. The platform wants to capture the social narrative of a pupil - the conversations agents will have in the kitchen when they wait for the kettle to be boiled. It's the daily anecdotes that can be so valuable if captured and tracked over time.
Inaura and Narrative have been accepted to the Young Foundation Accelerator to get help with further developing their business model. They have landed their first major contract with Somerset LA and the tool will be piloted across all Pupil Referral Units across the county.
Comic Relief
Comic Relief asked us a simple question - can we help them raise more money throughout the year (over and above Red Nose Day) using digital. While this was slightly outside of the scope of Sidekick School, we couldn't refuse working with this remarkable charity .
We put forward the Exploralaboratorium as our solution - a six week hack lab to make at least six products. The lab would focus on moving ideas into prototypes, quickly. And so we did - we helped them to created 6 apps in 6 weeks to increase financial / mobile giving.
Dare Roulette - an app that encourages you to do stupid things for money.
Topic Telly, a video platform that reduces churn amongst the schools that do Red Nose Day and sport relief and thus increase donations.
Mega Miles Challenge - an app that aggregates running data and allows all year round joggers to set sponsorship goals for long term challenges.
Have the Last Laugh reinvent legacy giving by helping you make a legal will, in 5 minutes, and leave a gift to Comic Relief.
The Napp Challenge, challenges people who are addicted to their smartphones to leave their mobile alone during social occasions and if they fail, they donate to Comic Relief.
Fundeer, the last hack, brings together fundraising and volunteering to get people to get sponsored to do worthwhile stuff for Comic Relief supported causes.
Both Napp Challenge and Have the Last Lough are now in the pipeline to turn into a proper products to be launched to the public in the following months.
