Dare to Differ Case Study
About the Client
Dare to Differ is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to improving the wellbeing and mental health of children and young people across South East England. They offer crucial support for young people (up to the age of 25) during pivotal developmental and transition periods.
Dare to Differ work with schools, local authorities, and increasingly in young people’s homes to provide direct support.
The Challenge
Dare to Differ found that an increasing number of its project workers were working directly in people’s homes. According to Director Sam Watson, some of his clients would be classed as ‘vulnerable’ with many having experienced neglect, trauma or abuse.
Having a staff member work alone in the home of a vulnerable 25 year old raises a considerable amount of risk. The young person may not always recognise that their project worker is there to help, and may be prone to unpredictable responses to seemingly normal situations. Sam wanted to find a way of making sure his staff were safe in these high-risk roles.
In one situation, a staff member made a visit to a young person (who had a history of violence with professionals) and subsequently went missing for over an hour. After investigating, they found their missing staff member back at the office and the worker had simply forgotten to notify their team by call or text (as was their system at the time). This may have been a simple mistake, but it highlighted the risks associated with the higher risk cases, and the need for a better system.
Sam was also struggling to keep track of his team while they were travelling and visiting other young people and organisations. He is proud to say that his staff are, in many ways, their ‘own bosses’; they plan out their own schedules, and will spend the majority of their day outside of the office. Whilst this allows the team more flexibility to meet their clients’ needs, it posed a real logistical issue and often Sam would lose track of who was supposed to be where. This is key to scheduling and for safety reasons.
The Solution
Safety
Dare to Differ equipped their staff with Safepoint’s app-based solution. The team creates tasks when they are driving, and when they begin a client visit. Over the course of a day, Sam can see who is on the road and who is in a meeting right from his desktop with the Safepoint Portal. If an emergency is triggered, or if a staff member simply forgets to check in, Sam receives an alert and he can call and check everything is okay.
After using Safepoint for a few months, Sam was incredibly positive about the solution. He told us ‘adopting Safepoint is one of the best decisions Dare to Differ have made internally’ and that it has completely met the safety needs of his team.
In fact, without Safepoint, Sam believes that his team would not have been able to have taken on many of their contracts.
What’s more, Dare to Differ have found that regular use of Safepoint across their team has led to a fuller understanding of their safety practices and an all round better culture towards safety.
“The app forces them to think about their own safety, and think about the safety of others. In regards to that, it’s been 100% a success”
Organisation
On top of the increased safety, Dare to Differ has seen an array of organisational and auditing benefits to using Safepoint.
Because project workers at Dare to Differ use Safepoint throughout their working day, including travelling to appointments, management have been able to use it to get a better understanding of their staff’s work patterns. This means their staff can spend more time doing what they are passionate about: working with young people.
Using the historical data, management can see how long their team have been driving, whether certain appointments tend to overrun, and they can even provide vital auditing information to clients.
Safepoint has even helped with Dare to Differ’s running costs. For instance, one of the organisation's project workers was struggling to meet all their assigned appointments, due to spending too much time driving from location to location. After checking the Safepoint Portal, Sam realised that the worker was driving much farther than they needed to, and was using a SatNav that defaulted to quieter roads. Having access to all the extra data Safepoint provides saved that worker nearly an hour’s travel every day, leading to a noticeable saving in time and money for the organisation.
“I would highly recommend Safepoint to all companies and organisations that have their staff members leave the office and travel. Not only does this system provide vital safeguarding to keep the team safe but, it also acts as a organisational tool to help with tracking.”
– Sam Watson, DIrector | Dare to Differ