Speaker 1: 0:00

Have you ever thought about the fact that at some point in your life, you're either going to become a carer or be cared for? Now? Imagine being a carer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no time off to refuel or even just be yourself. Today's guest found a way to change that, using technology, empathy and some very clever thinking. Hello, this is Problems Worth Solving the podcast where we meet people transforming health and care through human-centred design and digital innovation. I'm Sam Mentor, founder and Managing Director at Healthier, the collaborative service design consultancy. If you enjoy listening, you can subscribe to this podcast and the accompanying newsletter at healthierservices.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Today's guest is Charlotte Newman, founding member and chief executive of Carefree, a charity doing incredible things for unpaid carers. It's a brilliant example of social innovation in action. It's won multiple awards for service design, technology and sustainability, and is one of the UK's leading digital charities. Under Charlotte's leadership, carefree has grown fast. With her team, she shaped the vision, secured funding, designed the frontline service and built the operational backbone, all while running the charity more like a tech startup than a traditional non-profit. Today, we're going to talk about what bigger organisations can learn from lean, mission-driven teams, how AI can help charities do more with less, and why Charlotte thinks the future of care lies in partnerships, not just policy. Charlotte, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's dive straight in. What's the big problem you've been trying to solve?

Speaker 2: 1:49

It's access to respite for unpaid carers. So a few of us realise it, but there are 5.7 million unpaid carers in the UK. They're saving the public purse £183 billion a year, which is more than the entire NHS budget. They're providing 80% of home care and yet 68% won't get access to a break this year.

Speaker 1: 2:09

How are you solving this problem?

Speaker 2: 2:11

So there are 1 million unsold hotel rooms in the UK every week. We have basically created a tech platform that enables hotels to easily donate their excess capacity to us that we can then distribute out to unpaid carers, so they can choose when and where they want to take a break away. They can take a companion with them, they can get access to overnight respite, which is just something that the system has not been able to offer before, and with that access to overnight respite, they're able to really center in on finding themselves again, getting good night's sleep, doing things like going for a walk or going for a swim. These are the types of things that we take for granted as being part of our everyday weekend, and it's just something that is just not possible for somebody who's looking after somebody full-time in the home.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Why is this important? What's it like being a full-time carer in the UK at the moment?

Speaker 2: 3:01

It's really harrowing. There's problems at so many different levels. So if you look at the fight to try and get the needs of your cared for person met, that's part of the journey is that you're constantly trying to fight for access to services. There's a reduction in provision of, for example, respite, so that you've got a care worker that would come in for an hour to give you a break and things like that. So a lot of carers are running on empty, like in a live-in role with the person they're caring for. They'll be up through the night because, depending on that careful person's needs, they might need to be doing kind of personal hygiene stuff for that careful person through the night, or giving them medication or checking in on them.

Speaker 2: 3:37

So a lot of carers just won't have slept for years at a time.

Speaker 2: 3:41

They'll become very socially isolated because in terms of thinking through and navigating, where can I go, what places are accessible, finding time separated from their careful person to be able to meet up with a friend or go out for dinner with their husband, there's very little in the kind of the norms of what it is to have social connections, and so there's a closing in of their world really shrinking, and so there's a closing in of their world really shrinking, and then, of course, there's the physical exhaustion of it, because typically they'll be supporting somebody with their physical needs as well as their other additional needs, and so it's a huge amount of work, and that's what's really sad about this picture is that actually, this will affect every family at some point.

Speaker 2: 4:19

You know you're either going to be cared for or become a carer at some point in your life, but we're dealing with this in the home. It's not really spoken about or talked about and it's just seen as being kind of something that we have to do and something that we just have to get on with, and very rarely do we step back and recognize. Actually, I am kind of part of a big umbrella community of people that are holding our health and social care system together, and I need support structures that can enable me to carry on doing this.

Speaker 1: 4:50

The psychological burden of it as well must be hard.

Speaker 2: 4:53

Yeah, in lockdown. I think I spent five and a half months at home with my parents, isolating. We were going through the back-to-back cancer scenario with my parents and I don't think I've ever recovered from five and a half months of not leaving the house. And for many carers that journey didn't end with lockdown. They are still very much stuck within the home for very deep periods of time without social interaction. I think it was the University of Essex that did some research where one in six carers have contemplated suicide. Fewer have taken an.

Speaker 2: 5:22

But it is the desperation of I can't go on tends to be the critical point that people can reach because we don't have enough prevention systems like Carefree that are really trying to get carers that interjection of being able to step away from their caring role to reset and people can dismiss Carefree and say, oh, what difference does it make to give somebody two nights away and actually carers will say to us this was totally life-changing or this saved my life. And for us that's very clear when we're speaking with and engaging with carers that the need for carers to have a right to respite is really acute and it's not something that's actually prescribed within our system. You know you're an informal workforce. It's not like you get rights of holidays. You don't. The level of burnout within the system is really acute at the moment.

Speaker 1: 6:07

Do you have a personal connection with the mission?

Speaker 2: 6:09

Yeah, I mean. My first encounter with how care can disrupt your life was when I was 10. My grandmother, who was she, was blind and she had seen a dementia, and she came to live with us after my grandfather passed away and the situation that my parents faced and it's so acute in my memory was really difficult. It wasn't just the care burden of looking after my grandmother. I was the only person she recognized, and so I ended up taking on a lot of those kind of young carer responsibilities. I missed a lot of school, failed my 11 plus and it got to the point where we really needed to make that move of putting her into a care home. And it got to the point where we really needed to make that move of putting her into a care home, and then that created a huge amount of financial pressure, we lost our home.

Speaker 2: 6:49

You know, it's these sorts of things that kind of set you on a bit of a journey with your life. And then when I met Charlie and James, who were the people that had the original idea for Carefree, I just knew that this was something that I could build and really the difference that it would make.

Speaker 1: 7:04

And tell me a bit about how your journey before Carefree. How did you go into this world?

Speaker 2: 7:12

A lot of stuff in the social sector space. You know, typical thing of what does a work experience placement do for you. You know, when I was 15, I worked at a youth magazine in Haringey and the editor from that brought me into working kind of social investment space. I was doing internships with him from when I was 18. I always worked in the nonprofit sector. I managed to get some exposure into the startup space, which was really interesting. And I guess I started connecting the dots on wow, if you really brought startup design methods into the social sector and into the charity sector, what could you achieve?

Speaker 1: 7:41

And I guess that laid the groundwork for Carefree One of the things I was really interested to talk to you about when we were researching this podcast was you've described Carefree as a charity that operates like a startup, and I wondered what does that really mean in practice for you?

Speaker 2: 7:54

Oh gosh, I mean everything from.

Speaker 2: 7:57

If you look at the nature of our team, it's broken down into product business development, marketing, customer support, project management cycles.

Speaker 2: 8:05

You know, this sprint is something that I guess we would like to talk a lot about when we started, but now we do a we do a very fancy nct framework of narrative commitments and tasks where we break down into quarter, into different projects and everybody's kind of running to to sprint across a lot of the different sides of the organization. I guess funding wise, the way we think about our kind of burn rate and how we're running, but also our delivery system, is tech based, and so the scale journey that we're doing is really centered on how many users are we bringing in, how many new partnerships are we building, how much money are we earning each month to be able to sustain our kind of baseline operating costs? And then I think, the pressures that we face, as well as an organization where we've just turned to 10 people this week We've been eight people since before this week, but we have 35,000 users now and so the economies of scale that we're trying to drive with our initiative are very much what you would expect to see within a startup.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Have you previously worked in big organizations and how does it feel different in Carefree? No? Have you previously worked in big organizations and how does it feel different in Carefree? No?

Speaker 2: 9:07

I have never worked in a big organization.

Speaker 2: 9:08

I've always worked in very small charities. To have a charity that goes from a two-person team to an eight-person team and now a 10-person team feels mega. But we've always tried to deliver a corporate standard and I think that I'm very lucky with my CTO, joey, who's an incredible person. He's kind of the machine behind what we're doing at the moment, but we've always had this kind of vision of we want our brand to be exceptional. Any piece of work that we're doing needs to be at corporate standard, and the way we think about things is, I think, what you would expect to see within a startup that was trying to deliver returns for its investors, and for us, that's the public benefit I mean we incorporated as a charity because we truly believe in the mission of working purely in the public benefit. But how we want to deliver that social intervention is to create game-changing scale and to really solve a problem for carers that nobody else has been able to do before, and to really solve a problem for carers that nobody else has been able to do before.

Speaker 1: 10:05

When you were thinking about the charity from scratch? How did you design the way that you wanted it to work?

Speaker 2: 10:11

Yeah, I mean the theory of change was absolutely fundamental. At the time we were reading a lot and there was a Harvard Business Review article on creating social value, like economic and social value at the same time, and how that can create this kind of win-win space for innovation and growth. We are very dependent on our work with corporate partners, so the hotels that are donating rooms to us are the linchpin in this kind of ecosystem of our theory of change. So we have to be delivering a service to them that fits with all of their operating requirements and doesn't create any cost or friction to their business. So the theory of change was like a very key anchor that led to kind of a picture of what do we need to build a product level.

Speaker 2: 10:51

So, in terms of the tech, so although Carefree is a very simple idea or you've got these unsold hotel rooms, you've got carers in need of a break our platform has a number of different sides.

Speaker 2: 11:00

So, for example, a lot of carers in the UK are hidden, unidentified, they're not registered with any care support services. So we had to build a whole digital self-referral pathway that's very sophisticated, literally meets NatWest Bank standards of you know when you're doing digital identity verification for a user. We had to build a community referral pathway so that we could easily connect in with local carer support organizations to refer carers, an app for our hotel partners where they could easily access their kind of inventory and impact dashboards, and then, of course, you've got the Breaks Hub platform for the carers, and then our own internal operating systems and tech, which is a lot of like big customer support systems run through Intercom and things like that huge number of things to think about when it comes to the architecture that was built on top of the theory of change to deliver what we're doing and you're running all that with 10 people eight until this week, but, yes, 10 now.

Speaker 2: 11:57

We've just had our first growth marketing person and we've just hired a development manager as well oh wow, that's really exciting yeah, then absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Can I just go back to the theory of change you were talking about there? Can you summarise what your theory of change is for this?

Speaker 2: 12:12

Yeah. So it is about creating a more regenerative social care system. So the premise that we will always be relying on unpaid carers to provide this backbone of our health and social care system. We need them to be able to carry on caring in their caring role. And so what's that funnel of access to respite create for them? So for them, it creates increased wellbeing outcomes like more coping resilience within their role.

Speaker 2: 12:39

For care support organisations and local authorities, it means that they are able to do something that can promote carer well-being.

Speaker 2: 12:47

That doesn't come at a with a budget line attached to it for them, so they can maximize the use of their very limited resources.

Speaker 2: 12:55

When it comes to the budgets that they have to support carers, there was some research a few years ago that said that in terms of kind of carer breaks funding that was going through from central government and the better care fund down to local authority level, it's 19 pounds per person.

Speaker 2: 13:09

19 pounds is never going to pay for an overnight break for a carer. And so opening up that excess capacity from the hotel industry, again with the theory of change for our hotels, it means that they can have direct impact at an individual level, but also a societal. Societal level again for something that's quite cost neutral for them. So they are subsidizing the cost of the turner of the room, the laundry charge. It's breakfast included, but it might be that the carer has dinner in the hotel or something like that. Hopefully it balances out for them, but it does mean that they can create what's called like more resource efficiency from an ESG perspective out of what would otherwise be wasted assets. And then, looking at the long welfare picture, when we think about the general public, three in five of us will become an unpaid carer at some point in our lives and so, having this system where, when it's your turn and you can actually have a respite mechanism, it's important to invest in a system like this because that's what's going to create long welfare in this country.

Speaker 1: 14:11

When you were first thinking about the model, thinking about the whole way this charity and service might work, how did you test ideas and how did you involve carers and kind of hoteliers and other people in this?

Speaker 2: 14:24

Yeah, it was such a joint effort around building a small network of connections that would foster the kind of pilot period for what we were doing. So a friend of one of our co-founders who had six hotel properties that we could pilot with going down and spending a lot of time with what was Cornell Carer Service down in Cornwall to understand what their needs would be in terms of being part of an initiative like this from a referrals pathway and a verification perspective. And then we ran. We tried to do. Our first pilot was code based on a kind of custom built code platform that had been donated to us, which was really difficult, and we very quickly realized the mammoth challenge of being a small organization and trying to do anything with custom code. And then in our beta pilot where we worked with 1,200 carers, we ran all of that through Airtable and so we were able to have very extensive notes on what each person's barrier to booking a break might be, what they worked for them, what didn't.

Speaker 2: 15:23

So there was just a huge amount of information that we were gathering in our first kind of couple of years and then we finished our beta pilot in 2019, had to pull in and stop because we ran out of money as often happens in that kind of journey of small organizations trying to get a social innovation through and then, of course, the pandemic hit, and so we had this really, on the one hand, positive two and a half year period where we'd secured some social investment that could carry us through and that enabled us to just focus on building a no-code architecture that we really believed could run at volume for when we wanted to relaunch after the pandemic and we wouldn't have had that kind of heads down time without being in a situation where there wasn't a pressure to run broke delivery.

Speaker 2: 16:07

But when we went back online in kind of November 2021 with our platform, we actually ended up building another platform after that in February 2022. But since then we've delivered over 14,000 breaks and registered over 30,000 more carers. It's been a really powerful kind of post-pandemic journey for us.

Speaker 1: 16:24

What were some of the challenges when you were designing the model?

Speaker 2: 16:27

A very typical one would be if you imagine kind of hotel access capacity and when they think they're going to have vacant rooms, that would be last minute for a carer wanting to go on a break. They need a lot of notice to organize the interim care in that process and so really finding a way and means of working that that kind of fitted for both parties was. There was a journey of like, very strong design journey and now we've settled into hotels, release to us what they think their forecast excess capacity is going to be 45 to 60 days in advance. So when you're logging onto our platform you're not seeing all of our inventory for the year or at once You're seeing about 60 days worth of inventory.

Speaker 2: 17:07

So overall we'll have about 40,000 nights on the platform across the year, but that will be reduced down into the kind of three month chunks essentially. But that will be reduced down into the kind of three month chunks essentially. One of the things for Carefree is that, as an issue, this has been a pretty invisible issue from the Trusts and Foundations space or the grant funders space. There's a lot of traditional criticisms around our model. So, for example, trusts and Foundations might say, well, this can't be a sustained intervention because it's just two nights away for a carer. That's not providing a continuous support, and I think that's just something that really doesn't fit with or account with the digital frameworks of delivery. You know, if we're an organization that's providing continuous online support for 35,000 users at the moment, that is continuous support and it's providing a continuous service that the carers can access. It's also reflective of the thing that carers say that they need most, not what other people might think that they should need or they should want, and so it's. It's really.

Speaker 2: 18:06

I do feel there's a very strong beneficiary voice that's led our journey in terms of this was the problem that needed solving.

Speaker 2: 18:14

That isn't mirrored on the outside. And then another thing that people might accuse us of, which again feels really unfair, is that this would just be a whitewashing initiative for hotels and really like a. This is an initiative that was created for carers, by carers, but also the hotel partners that we're working with could not have been more generous in terms of really incubating the small charity with a big idea to to create some really radical social change. And, yeah, I think that that there's a very, it's very weird how corporate partnerships are interpreted within the social sector space and very easy lines that people can say of oh, that's just whitewashing or that's just this and it actually it really detracts from when there really are amazing things that are happening. Our most generous donor, they have a small number of properties I think it's about 20 properties and, my goodness, do they go above and beyond for our carers? They'll have flowers in the room. I mean, they really just throw everything at this initiative and it's really amazing to see.

Speaker 1: 19:16

That's fantastic. And who's on your radar, who you'd love to work with but isn't signed up yet?

Speaker 2: 19:20

We'd love to work with something like the Leonardo Hotel Group, who have like very big exposure in kind of the northwest of England. We're always looking for more properties in the southwest, in Cornwall and Wales. Northern Ireland is our kind of dream boat scenario. There's a very acute need in Northern Ireland and just a huge gulf of provision. But actually with Northern Ireland you've got a lot of independent owners and operators and so it's about really finding those people and making connections with them. And you know, our business development capacity is capped. Our amazing director of delivery is doing so much, and when are you getting that space to step outside and go and try and find hotel supply? Like, when am I getting space to go outside and try and find new funders? There's always competing priorities in this sort of setup.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Do you see yourselves as a tech starter?

Speaker 2: 20:08

Yeah, absolutely. As I say, fundamental to us is that we are a charity and we want to demonstrate what a charity that kind of is designed with what tools are available to us in the digital economy in the 21st century can be when you push the potential of what's possible. But at our core, because our scale of our ambition is that every full-time unpaid carer in the UK can get access to an annual break we want to go into Europe and the US. Yeah, that's really. That really is our journey. And also, from a brand perspective, we're trying to cement our brand in the way that a tech startup would try to, or any kind of corporate company.

Speaker 1: 20:46

How about this concept of moving fast and breaking things that's fundamental to the way that lots of these startups operate? Is that something you apply to your work, and how do you do that if you're working with vulnerable people?

Speaker 2: 20:56

yeah, absolutely not is what we would say so small, continuous improvements. We use a system called intercom, which is our kind of customer service framework, and we are literally catching every single interaction and conversation and communication with the carer. Any feedback that we're getting on is acted on immediately and that's what, you know, creates like we have tremendous customer service satisfaction scores loyalty. Carers really feel like this service is there for them. What we do like to do is a little bit more of a kind of start with a skateboard, and this is very much our CTO, joe Koonin Taylor's, philosophy of start with a skateboard. Let's put something up as long as it can be reversed quickly. If it doesn. A skateboard, let's put something up as long as it can be reversed quickly. If it doesn't work, let's try it.

Speaker 2: 21:40

And so, I think it was about 10 days ago, joey said oh, I had an idea about an AI travel agent that we could. You know, once the carers had a break, confirmation, let's, let's do something to help them get ready on their break journey, send them potential travel routes and what they could do in terms of the area that they're going to, and 10 days later, we pretty much have an AI travel bot that we'll be testing out. Wow. So we do like to try things, but we'll do them with segments of our users. We'll say, okay, we'll launch this with. We have funding from the City Bridge Foundation, so a lot of our experimentation is actually being fueled in London right now. So we'll say, ok, we'll launch that travel agent chatbot with carers registered in London and see how that goes, and then we'll expand out from there.

Speaker 1: 22:23

What are some of the pivots or mindset shifts you've had to make as you've gone through this journey?

Speaker 2: 22:28

Yeah, like, definitely no code was the major one. I mean, at some stage, when we need to do API linkups with hotel groups, we will have to transition to a custom code platform, but for the next two years, we're working with a fantastic company called Glide. That's providing the baseline of our platform infrastructure and really giving us a lot of flexibility to build and change and shift and grow in the way that we need to. The big learning I had from myself as a manager was, I think, how to bring people along with you. When Joey came into the organization, he really became a translator for everybody else in terms of the vision piece that I had of how I thought things could link together. Actually, you asked me to describe the theory of change today written as a diagram. It's an incredibly complex kind of cycle and so being able to translate that for people and put things into a kind of a much more simple framing, I think we've learned a lot about simplicity and actually, from a mind shift perspective, the thing that I'm most proud of is that we really don't do big strategies. We do a strategy in a sentence.

Speaker 2: 23:32

In 2021, our strategy for the year was let's make the operation single on the outside. And for us that was like we really want to nail customer service operations and how our flow of monthly break bookings and the next year we're like, okay, let's make the operation single on the outside. And then we're like, okay, let's look at our marketing infrastructure and, you know, let's check out our external comms and how we're taking people through the user journey of from registration through to bookings. And this year it's about getting people to come to us and we've set that as our kind of our benchmark for the year and, sure enough, healthier kind of came along and said, hey, would you contribute to our ai report? And now we're sitting doing this podcast today fantastic.

Speaker 1: 24:14

I'd like to talk about the finances a little bit and sustainability, because that's at the heart of what can make things happen, and it's easy to gloss over some of that stuff sometimes, but in terms of the kind of the financial model, how did you initially imagine this would work and how are you now funded?

Speaker 2: 24:32

we had always set out to be a majority self-sustaining charity. So we charge a £33 fee for the breaks that we facilitate. That can be paid for by the carer or by the carer service referring them, or a local authority, or there's lots of mechanisms with how that can be covered. And the other income stream that we've had to introduce was for our community partners. We were shouldering a lot of. We had designed this theory of change where we've had to introduce was for our community partners. We were we were shouldering a lot of. We had designed this theory of change where we really wanted to be connected in and joined up to the existing social sector. So we wanted community organizations to be able to refer carers. But it was costing us about 150k a year to have that infrastructure and so we started asking for a flat rate contribution of 0.1% of their turnover as a kind of membership contribution. So our earned income today, I think, is probably going to cover about 35% to 40% of our operating costs this year.

Speaker 2: 25:26

Social investment for the last few years we've done three very small rounds of social investment in comparison to what around could be, but typically we would try to secure 150k of social investment per year, which would be about 20% of our costs, and then grant funding is the other kind of 50% really, and that's. I would love it to be a little bit more diversified, where we had networks for public fundraising or high net worth donors or corporate sponsorship, but we're just not. We're not a big enough organization yet to have that visibility in those spaces to be able to generate income from those sectors. So in a couple of years time I really hope that we can, but for the moment it is.

Speaker 2: 26:08

I guess the centerpiece of what enables Carefree to keep going is the earned income and the reliability that we know we're going to bring in 20 or 30k a month against a spend of 70 or 80k or something like that. So for us, because we're focused on volume, rather than having a handful of partners where we have to charge a lot of money, we would rather have a lot of partners where we can charge as little as possible. So for local authorities, we're developing a new package which is around three to five thousand pounds a year. They will be able to have kind of group level access to see and understand which services within the area are referring carers to us, how many carers are signing up, how much inventory has been being donated by hotels in the area. So a lot of very useful data for them in terms of how they can prove that they are supporting carers and contributing to this infrastructure for brakes delivery, but it's something that's really not hitting into a major cost line for them.

Speaker 1: 27:06

Has it been quite intentional to not rely on local authorities in your growth?

Speaker 2: 27:09

Yeah, there's been a few pressure points around and there were a couple of opportunities last year of local authorities wanting to put. There was something called the accelerated reform fund. That was a very a one-off piece of funding from the government to to fuel care innovation, and so a couple of local authorities wanted to do a. Can we set up a digital platform for breaks access, donated breaks access and things like that and we didn't bid for those opportunities because our infrastructure and way of working is so tight, so lean, so efficient and also, like the way in which we work we know works for carers and all the parties involved a lot of the kind of the descriptions of how people envisage these things should work are different. What they want you to deliver against is changing your model into a different way that we wouldn't have as much confidence in, and so we just said, no, we're going to. We're just going to keep our heads down and keep moving forwards on what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 28:10

How do you balance supply and demand? I would imagine there's a huge demand for your service and the supply might be more of a challenge.

Speaker 2: 28:17

Yeah, I think we are hitting a bit of a squeeze point because it is more difficult to sign up new hotel groups at the moment.

Speaker 2: 28:23

We immediately felt the effects of the October budget with the, the increase in employers, national insurance and the hospitality industry just went a little bit into free fall, and so getting new hotels to think about ESG and social impact when they are very frightened within their businesses is harder than it used to be. So our timeline for signing up and converting a hotel group is about nine months at the moment, which means that our inventory is staying more static where and actually our existing hotel groups are giving us more and more, which is what's enabling us to keep growing. We're doing about 500 to 700 breaks a month at the moment, but our carer demand is very steadily increasing. So we're getting at least 1,000 new carer referrals every month. That will be carers signing up predominantly through the self-referral pathway, and that is word of mouth among carers, that is, people just hearing about the initiative. We've reached a level of maturity now, at seven years old, where we are a little bit more known, and I think that is where our organic growth is coming from.

Speaker 1: 29:25

Does it cost the hotels anything to work with you?

Speaker 2: 29:27

Yeah, it costs them about. Actually, we just commissioned some economic research into this. It costs them about £25 per break that they're subsidising. The reason why we've commissioned some economic research into basically to value what the breaks are doing at the public sector level. So if we're preventing five percent of carers from burning out in their role, that could lead to 200 million pounds worth of public sector savings. And so can we leverage this model to say to the government if you would provide hotels with a nominal fixed corporate tax rebate of, say, £25 for each break that they give away, that is what would really unlock volume for us in terms of moving this initiative to the scale that we want it to be. So that's where we'll be going over the next year or two is really focused on that agenda.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Let's move on to talking about technology. So AI is the talk of the town. Everyone's excited, terrified. There's different ends of the spectrum. You've been doing lots of work with ai and I think that was how we first connected, when we were doing the research around ways that people were running support services using ai. Can you tell me a bit more about how you've been using ai to help your organization grow?

Speaker 2: 30:46

yeah, sure, so sure. So I think people have probably picked up in this conversation that our ability to expand our headcount is extremely limited because we're not sure of earning enough money to be able to sustain kind of additional roles. And our customer service team was at the forefront of this. Oh my gosh, we're adding a thousand new users a month. How do you deal with that? And so we have a customer service system that's built in Intercom.

Speaker 2: 31:12

They launched a chatbot called FinAI and we immediately stepped into trying to develop FinAI as something that could create that kind of frontline for our service delivery. It started with a kind of an out of office hours approach, so when we trade kind of nine to five, Monday to Friday, like turning thin AI on for kind of inquiries, and outside of that, we were training it on both like our big database of help articles. So they had and it's a closed system so it's not learning from anything else other than the information that we're feeding it. So we had lots of help articles. But if you just left a help articles, the AI would get stuck over if this, then that and that wouldn't really get users to a place where they were having their issues resolved. So what it also has access to is anonymized data from. We have about 3000 support requests a month, so it uses the anonymized data from those conversations to learn and understand. Okay, this is what somebody is asking or this is what they need in terms of their issue being resolved, and it's been fantastic.

Speaker 2: 32:13

I mean, we've obviously done this in a very controlled way and in a very staged way and in order to get the balance right.

Speaker 2: 32:20

But if you think about 3000 queries, we've got two people on our customer support team. If you're working off a normal formula of a full-time week, 15 minutes per customer, they would probably only be able to deal with 150 cases a week. What we're now doing and we have FinAI turned on all the time is that basically only about 30% of cases will be surfaced through to our customer support team, so a manageable load for them, because over 70% of cases are now being resolved by FinAI with a 93% satisfaction rate from our carers. We're very transparent to our carers that this is a chatbot and give it a go if it will help. But what we're really proud of is the people that are coming through to our customer support team is that we're able to surface through who are the highest needs users, and then we're able to put our time and attention onto those people that kind of really need that human support. So, yeah, it's been brilliant and I think it is what we will be doing more of this as we grow and move forward.

Speaker 1: 33:19

How have you made sure that those chatbots are able to reflect your core values? That warmth and care and that side of things.

Speaker 2: 33:31

Yeah, I mean I think this is the customer service team and the language that they always use, the way in which they behave. They've really treated it like an additional team member in how they talk to it and how they adjust it. Also, all of the FinAI conversations will be reviewed by our director of delivery and our head of customer service and putting in that base layer of if FinAI has done something or said something that doesn't feel quite right tonally, they'll tell it like, they'll feed back to it, and so there is this kind of constant feedback loop that's happening as well. That, I think, has been really important.

Speaker 1: 33:56

So it's like training a new member of staff.

Speaker 2: 33:58

Totally yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:00

And how do you think about the balance between kind of technology and human connection in care?

Speaker 2: 34:05

I mean, it varies in terms of I really believe that in terms of, like social services and charity services, being better able to meet people where they are. At the end of the day, we we live in a digital world, with digital devices making life easier in terms of what we're able to access from our smartphones, and so much of a carer's time is spent really trying to fight to kind of phone calls, letters, trying to get access to the medical appointments, all these things that could, or even like benefits applications. There's so much scope in that sense to make people's lives easier in accessing services through the intervention of digital technology.

Speaker 1: 34:44

Let's zoom out for a moment and look at the sector and thinking about change in the sector. What do you think are the biggest blockers to change and innovation in the care and the charity world today?

Speaker 2: 34:56

I mean, financing is the thing that you can't avoid talking about at this point. You know, when we were starting out back in 2017, there were some small parts of there was Social Tech Trust for 45 grand. There was Comic Relief's Tech for Good pot for 45 grand Little things like that. The National Lottery did a digital fund program which we got access to, but they only did that for one year. There is no centered digital funding within the sector and that obviously critically affects the pipeline of organizations that would be starting to try and set up now from a charity base. Obviously, there is a lot more kind of for-profit, for-purpose organizations and they'll be incubated through things like Zinc, vc or essential ventures, things like that. So I think that if you look at the charity sector as a whole trying to do something in the digital space, there isn't really the support framework there within the funding space From a block. In terms of the innovation standpoint, yeah, it amazes me how, if you contrast the small business community with the charity sector, community with the charity sector, so apps like air table or no code software products like air table, which can automate a huge amount of kind of back office processes for you, your stripe payments, your zero cloud accounting with this, that and the other, your slack your.

Speaker 2: 36:20

It really surprises me that in the small business sector there is such a fast level of adoption of no code products. That in the small business sector there is such a fast level of adoption of no-code products. That is the basis of their business models. They charge $12 a user because they're expecting that they're going to get lots and lots of small businesses to sign up to use their services because it makes their businesses more efficient. Weirdly, with charities, we don't just take the leap to oh, that could help. There is something in the whether it's the way that everything needs to be very heavily vetted before it's applied. There needs to be so much sign-off at so many different levels, but there isn't a oh, we could just use this tool and get that done and that would make our lives easier. And I just fundamentally think that there's a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle under the hood of making everybody's lives easier by adopting really basic no-code products into very small business processes. That gives you a lot more space to do the more radical innovation stuff.

Speaker 1: 37:17

If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change and how would you redesign the system?

Speaker 2: 37:22

I mean, I think, the recognising. I think it was the Centre for Social Justice that came out with a report a couple of months ago that over 70,000 grant pots closed in the charity sector last year. Also, withdrawal of governmental funding and of corporate sponsorship. There's hundreds of millions going out of the sector right now, which means that charities really need to switch into more of a social enterprise model in order to be able to sustain their operating base and, like carefree, have some sort of earned income stream to supplement their services. The magic wand that I think we need is how do we open up social investment to enable charities to do that?

Speaker 2: 37:58

And currently social investment is completely unaffordable for the charity sector. It's eight to twelve percent in terms of the repayments and you also in terms of the interest. The repayment period is five to six years. If you're having to start an income stream and get it rolling, the biggest single switch that I think we could do is just say okay, flat rate 10-year repayment periods. That's going to offset the negative impacts of the high interest rates, it's going to make the financing much more affordable to organizations and it's going to create a wider spread of how many organizations can actually get access to that money. So that would be. My big wish is that we try to use the social investment space for what it was designed for.

Speaker 1: 38:40

What's next for Carefree? What are you excited about?

Speaker 2: 38:43

Well, we've just filed all of our trademarks around our brand, so that felt like a bit of a moment. Apparently, it's 18 months until the trademarking people actually give you the trademark. There'll be a wait. What I would love to see is an expansion of the hotels that become involved with our initiative. Getting a bit more mainstream media coverage. We've been very under the radar getting a bit more mainstream media coverage. We've been very under the radar and I really hope that when we have this economic research that's being being released in September, that it does basically become a bit of a turning point in our ability to really move into that public policy space and to start getting people to see that this isn't just a nice to have little care of breaks initiative. This is about how do we create a better care future for us all.

Speaker 1: 39:29

How can people help?

Speaker 2: 39:30

If they know a hotel group, send them our way. If they know a carer that wants a break, please do send them to our website. And also, if they're interested in I think we're going to be looking at more social investment this year, so if they want to get involved on that level, please do give me a call.

Speaker 1: 39:46

If someone's thinking of starting a mission-led organization today, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 2: 39:57

Product market fit first. There's a trend in the startup space that try something if it's not working, pivot. We don't have the time or the financial bandwidth to be able to do pivots when we're working within the resource constraints that we have. So nailing in that you you really have an idea that will fix a need, that will solve a problem and that people are going to want and that has an earned income stream that people will pay for behind it. Those are the most important things, because if you just have something that you think would be great and you think would be nice and you think people would want that's really, you're going to line yourself up for years and years of sleepless nights and stress because it's not good enough to think that something's a good thing. Unfortunately, it has to really be proven out that this is something people will want, need and pay for.

Speaker 1: 40:44

And at the other end of the spectrum, what advice would you give to bigger organizations who want to operate in a more agile way?

Speaker 2: 40:50

Take down your internal barriers to change. That is the key thing and a lot of those organizations are still. They have a very fixed IT infrastructure and within the tech and the software space, there's much more of a transition to DevOps and to basically project management is really being phased out within the tech sector. So having more of a focus on product management, being able to understand what are your for want of a better word like business processes or operating processes, what tech tools can support those operating processes to operate more efficiently? Just unhook yourself from the IT infrastructure that you've had and be more experimental.

Speaker 1: 41:32

To end with, I'd like to know one belief that you hold that others might not agree with, but you think is true, and it doesn't have to be related to care or to health. I'm just curious.

Speaker 2: 41:43

I really believe in the value of having like business values and business principles and that you benchmark your decisions against that and I said I mentioned earlier about like single line phrases that we have, but the things that I'm really proud of with carefree is one of the phrases that we had was carers will never have to sing for their supper. So everything that we design will be as easy as possible for people. But you've got to find your hallmark phrases and your mantras that kind of really become the belief system of how you build what you're building, and I think people, people don't take the time to define what those things are for themselves and they should really do a lot more of that thank you, charlotte.

Speaker 1: 42:23

It's been a privilege to talk to you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come along.

Speaker 2: 42:27

Thank you, sam, really appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 42:39

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