The Online Tool That Helps Fight Loneliness For The Elderly Is Sweeping The Awards

Call In Time – There are over 1.2 million lonely older people in England. Age UK is working to end later life loneliness on a national scale by using digital to help scale their telephone befriending service ‘Call in time’.

The ‘Call in Time’ service, is an essential service provided by Age UK where Volunteers sign up online to make a weekly half-hour phone call to an older person to chat, discuss, befriend and enlighten each other’s lives. Age UK have been manually matching older people with volunteers and scheduling calls for years. It was a high-quality service but was impossible to deliver an impact at the scale required. Age UK wanted to utilise digital to automate the process while still making sure that every call is a rewarding and safe experience.

Following research and service design by Webcredible, the new service has helped increase thousands of volunteers, and elderly befriend each other through an easy to use interface. Webcredible designed and validated the digital service, delivering an engaging user experience. The results have been incredible.

The new Call in Time service went live successfully in November and was announced on Good Morning Britain as part of a national later life loneliness campaign reaching over 1 million people. Age UK was inundated with would-be volunteers signing up, with over 2,600 new volunteers and over 500 more older people for the waiting list. All this has been achieved without the need to scale the Age UK team.

The campaign was so successful Age UK had to pause new volunteer applications to enable us to bring more older people into the service to meet the British public’s desire to help.

The industry has been quick to recognise the hard work of Webcredible, Reason Digital and Age UK project picking up two BIMA 2017 awards for the ‘Product and Service Design: Conscience’ and ‘Advanced Award for Conscience’ and a Third Sector Award for ‘Breakthrough of the Year’.

Andy Ingle, Experience Director at Webcredible, said “We’re delighted to win this award in acknowledgement of all the work we’ve been doing with Age UK to help them transform into a digitally-led charity. Of all our work the projects we truly value are the ones that make a difference to the lives of those in need.”

Lara Burns, Chief Digital officer at Age UK said: “I’m really proud of what we have been able to achieve with the Call in Time website which has ultimately ensured that more volunteers can connect with lonely older people through our vital befriending service which offers the only contact some older people have on a regular basis.”