Age UK works to counter the threat of loneliness in older people. Back in 2016, their digital team came to us with a simple but inspiring tool - the Telephone Friendship Service.

Age UK’s Telephone Friendship Service acts as a lifeline for older people experiencing loneliness, matching them with volunteers with shared interests who, after training and assessments, connect with that older person for a 30 minute call once a week. When thousands of older people go for long periods without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member, the power of another person’s voice and time has a monumental impact on quality of life.

The technical approach is innovative; triggering and recording real world calls using Twilio’s API, client-side javascript frameworks and serverless architecture that allows the service – and the costs – to scale with demand. What this means is that the tech which operates the phone network and connects the calls to both the volunteer and older person keeps the end user experience incredibly simple.

The Trussell Trust runs a network of over 440 local food banks. The amount of time it was taking to manage all of the websites was causing serious problems. They needed an effective charity website and a method for creating and managing local foodbank sites.

We created a website cloning system so that The Trussell Trust can quickly create and manage new foodbank websites. The charity’s local foodbank teams now have the ability to effortlessly make and update multiple local sites.