Carefree has a vitally important charitable mission. It supports unpaid carers by matching them with unsold hotel rooms and giving them a free holiday that they desperately deserve and need. In fact, 52% of all unpaid carers in the UK haven't had a break in the last five years.
However, the behind-the-scenes logistics of this simple act of care are immensely complex. The team at Carefree needed to:
Connect with Community Partners to find unpaid carers across the UK.
Communicate with and verify unpaid carers so that they can provide them with breaks.
And connect with a wide array of legacy hospitality software to gain real-time visibility into hotel locations and room vacancies.
Custom coding software that could do all of this wasn’t possible. “The main problem was money for us originally,” explained Joey Ceunen-Taylor, Carefree’s CTO. “As a charity, we are relying on public donations, grant funding, and the generosity of everyday people.”
“Custom tech is expensive to design, build, and maintain. For most charities, it’s completely out of reach. We landed with Glide and that changed it all for us really.”
They started working with Glide and now they have a suite of sophisticated apps running everything from hotel partnerships to personal outreach with carers.
Building intuitive mobile apps for unpaid carers
Carefree serves about 45,000 unpaid carers every month. That user base needed a custom software environment that was intuitive and easy to access from their phones while busy doing care work.
“The last thing they want to do is go on a computer after a day of caring for the person. They're usually tired and exhausted,” said Joey. “You want to make it as easy as possible for them to get verified with us, get registered, and get access to our main app.” Joey describes that app as “a sort of mini booking.com.”
The app also needed to have watertight security. “We have about a thousand new users sign up every month with us, and they go through a serious verification process, completely built in Glide. It uses lots of different integrations where we do an ID verification and go through a self-flow pathway for their caring status. We balance that line between automation, without losing the humanity of the sign-up process.”
Quickly iterating 3 essential apps to meet users' needs
Over the last two years, with the help of Glide Expert Petr Shemyagin, the Carefree team has been able to build interconnected apps that run their entire operation.”We have three stakeholder groups that need their own custom environments, their own ways for us to communicate with them.” Glide's speed of development makes it possible to meet all those needs.
“We're constantly getting to know our users better and what they need, purely from the feedback that we get from them using the app,” said Joey. “It's so easy for us to just push something out, see how they respond, and iterate.”
“That speed and that freedom are really what you get from Glide.”
“If we realize carers are struggling with something, we can make a change overnight,” said Miruna Harpa, Head of Breaks Delivery. “If our hotel partners want a new feature, it can literally happen the same day. We can make sure everyone's happy and they have what they need. The growth that we've seen is because of that ability.”
Integrating with challenging hospitality systems.
Carefree also works with about 200 hospitality partners. Every one of those hotels has a unique—and often challenging to integrate with—system. “Some of the hotels operate within a group. Others are individual properties where we work with the hotel manager directly. Others have a reservations team in India. We need to accommodate all of those different scenarios.”
They use a hotel partners app to centralize the data from every one of these systems in real time. Without that real-time sync, they wouldn't be able to effectively pair carers with currently available rooms in the right geographic area. “We constantly build and expand our current setup in Glide to reach the needs of those hotels,” said Joey.
“We couldn’t reach many of the people we serve or deliver the numbers we’re doing now without Glide. We simply wouldn't be able to offer the help we do at the scale we do.”