The Client

The Trussell Trust has a network of over 400 food banks across the United Kingdom. Each food bank is run by a team of volunteers.

The Challenge

The Trussell Trust wanted to conduct an annual survey that asked the volunteers within each food bank questions about their food bank's strengths and areas for improvement. The pilot edition of the OCAT survey required a labour intensive analysis process: staff had to transfer survey responses to a spreadsheet and create charts that showed how the commonalities and differences between answers from the volunteers within a single food bank. Those results were then transferred to a PowerPoint presentation which could be used in a learning workshop with the members of the foodbank. This multi-stage process was administratively heavy and meant that scaling up the survey across the entire network of food banks would potentially become prohibitive due to the costs and time required. The Trussell Trust wanted a way to systemise their process.

The Solution

We worked with the operations team at The Trussell Trust to create an end-to-end solution which addressed the following problems with the existing process:

• Survey responses needed to be automatically linked to the food bank which they related to
• Some volunteers were willing to respond but needed to be reminded to complete the survey. This required a member of staff to manually review all the survey responses that had been received so far to see which volunteers needed to be chased up
• Once survey responses were collated, the process of summarising the results to each of the fifty questions was time-consuming

As well as talking through how to solve the problems with the current process, we made space to explore the dream scenario; in other words, looking at what else a system could do to provide additional insights or introduce time savings. We ran several workshops over the Design process and identified the following additional wins:

• The Trussell Trust wanted to understand how the perspectives from three sets of stakeholders compared with each other; namely, (1) the perspectives of volunteers, (2) the perspective of each foodbank's chief executive, (3) the perspective of the Area Manager employed by Trussell Trust who was responsible for that particular foodbank
• While the drive for this project was to better understand the performance of individual foodbanks, we identified another opportunity - which was to aggregate results from across the network so as to understand how foodbanks fared against each other. This would enable Trussell Trust to identify strong performers who could be invited to share their approach with other foodbanks via the Learning Programme which ran alongside this initiative.

The Result

The Trussell Trust now use Makerble to:

• conduct their OCAT surveys
• analyse results from the various sets of stakeholder for each individual food bank
• compare performance between food banks so that managers can understand how each food bank is faring

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