The Product that Foodbanks could be.
A speculative proposal to integrate Foodbank functionality into Tesco Online’s Shelf, Basket and User Profile
22 min readAug 7, 2019
Foodbank use is on the rise.
In response to an invitation to help create an online foodbank, I have sketched a counter proposal that the nimble benefits of launching this as a startup would be vastly outweighed by the advantages of recruiting such-as-Tesco to sponsor and integrate this, to provide the national/local distribution rails for the food, to supercharge the digital reach and the immediate social impact of this by extending this functionality into an existing app.
This is my open bid to Tesco Labs or equivalent to let me run this research, and my appeal to everyone for feedback on the idea.
In brief, it ought to be easy and low-risk for Tesco (or other supermarket) to run micro-localised opt-in trials of this, and if successful, as well as the innate good of helping the vulnerable, they would stand to gain at least these three things:
- Sticky and authentic CSR — locally and globally. If you can solve for Foodbank incorporation into the app, you can integrate all causes into user’s profiles and become the micro-philanthropy platform, especially for local causes. Tesco crucially have this street-presence advantage over Amazon — and can legitimately, if counter-intuitively, position themselves as the good guys against the globalising digital disruptors.
- Viral Customer Retention and Acquisition. Non-linear matched giving. If Tesco matches my giving (at 100% or just adding 20%), and doubles the matching amount after a certain milestone (eg. £100 donated) and triples it after another (eg. 50-week-giving-streak, or 3-friends-giving-together) — I will lose that multiplication if I give elsewhere. If the more I/we give, the more Tesco gives, then the more I’ll advocate others to give through this channel to supercharge their generosity, with a golden ticket I could send them.
- Hard-to-reach user recruitment and insightful behaviour research. Using the goodwill around this charitable exercise to recruit significant but hard-to-reach late-adopting user-group testers who typically overlap with the Foodbank volunteering demographic, and gaming the finding of UX solutions suitable for them. And, also to field test the R&D of inventory user interfaces to generate a proto-IOT stock replenishing apps. A/B test visualisations for consumer domestic inventorying in non-domestic contexts where there is good-will via tangible at-scale efficiency gains through streamlining repetitive processes.
Product: tesco.com/groceries
Change: Foodbank donation integration
Roadmap of Possible Direction of Travel:
[0.1 Discovery] Low-tech/no-tech prototype: Simulate back end: inventory input → visual reporting → social donor communication generation → commits/purchase. Analytics on user interactions to qualify user stories and product brief, create a demand for specific product from all stakeholders.
[1.0 MVP] Click to Donate from static list— Shopping inside Tesco App from a fixed list of typical items, matched-giving displayed on receipt.
[1.1] Click to Donate from dynamic list — a live updated stock-tracking inventory generated by geographically relevant Foodbank
[2.0] User Profile Giving Portal: 2 way comms, analytics, Foodbank profiles, trends, exports, tax and gift-aid automated
[3.0] Open Platform for personal giving portfolio: gallery for cause discovery, two-sided market for giving, self-onboarding for multiple charities
As-Is Stakeholder Diagram
- Donors don’t know what is needed in what quantities, don’t know where it goes or what impact it has. Foodbanks don’t know what they have, what they’re getting or from what donors, what will be required by what clients.
- Donations are sporadically received, manually entered, reactively managed. Often wasting surplus, often short-falls in basic needs.
- Food is manually delivered, warehouse-to-store; store-to-home; home-to-foodbank-box; foodbank-box-to-foodbank, triple handling of goods.
- Working around data opacity requires substantial data-entry time, reducing the available volunteer availability for the more holistic care which Foodbanks theoretically exist as a vehicle for.
- Digital products which carry the same information (food types, quantities, locations..) are used peripherally and unconnectedly by donors to order (via Tesco) and Foodbanks to receive and monitor(via Trussell Trust weigh in)
- Foodbanks are growing in number, usage and in public profile — relying significantly on physical, in-location, donations, often to in-store donation boxes.
- Online shopping is growing in geographic reach, population adoption and technological sophistication — in a trajectory that will ultimately diminish the role of in-store shopping, where much Foodbank donation happens.
- Trussell Trust franchises a kite-mark for good practice, and provides a toolkit for foodbanks, and harvests very low resolution data on foodbank usage. The ambition is to leverage this data to lobby for social reform.
- Foodbanks serve clients from Referral Agencies, using a low transparency, high friction voucher system.
Proposed Stakeholder Diagram
- Front End Shopper/Donor Interface— elective Foodbank Basket Integration, User Profile portal to live food item need requirements, impact feedback and reporting, matched-giving by Tesco, other charitable cause discovery, social integration for signalling and giver/shopper recruitment.
- Back End Foodbank Inventory Interface — Foodbank Manager stock visualisation and prediction (as with Tesco stores), Foodbank Volunteer (Assisted-Digital) UI, Foodbank analytics dashboard, in/out Donor messaging portal, in/out to Referral Agency vouchers digitised and anonymised, in/out Trussel Trust granular data aggregation visualisation and export.
- Middle End / Platform — Food stock-taking, communications, physical delivery (timing, quantities), Donor User IDs, runs on Tesco’s rails.
- Extensions to port other charities into user’s profile — eg. Poppy Appeal.
Example Personas + User Stories
Example User Story 1 — Aran: Tesco Shopper + Occasional Donor — 24 — London — Digitally Native — Post-Grad Student
Does the online shop for a 10-person shared house once a week. Wants to be more involved in the needs of his area, and to enthuse others to do likewise.
- Tesco online is convenient but Foodbank has to be done manually. Creating bespoke shopping lists each week is trouble enough. Claiming expenses with Tesco is painful because of the disconnect between estimate and invoice
“As a shopper for a large household, I need a regular giving function/subscription, so we all agree what we’re giving”
Example User Story 2 — Jo (& Amelia): Tesco Shopper + Donor — 37 — London — Digitally Capable — Full time parent
Runs household with 1.5 kids, shops from mobile on as-need basis
Needs / Pain Points:
- A convenient way to give spontaneously when prompted
- “As a busy mother concerned about food poverty, I need to know what’s needed in a readable way (maybe push notified), so that I can give when it will really make a difference”
Example User Story 3 — Vicky: Foodbank Manager — 30 — London — Digitally Fluent — PT 0.2/week
- Enters weights and best-before dates of incoming food — particularly for Trussell Trust franchise requirements
- Plans volunteer hours
- Manages the space available (Community Hall)
- Tracks referral agents’ vouchers
- Interacts with users, pastorally, and signposting other services
- Needs: Predictability, accountability re food safety, legal liability
- Wants: Personal satisfaction — Maximum impact for social transformation
“As a Foodbank manager, I need to generate a projection for the average food quantity given each week (visually?), so that donors can give appropriate quantities”
Primary Key Personas to interview
Donor/Shoppers, Foodbank Client/User, Foodbank Volunteer, User Referral Agent, Tesco Delivery/Store Manager, Foodbank Host (eg. Church Administrator)
Tertiary Key Personas to consider/interview
Trussel Trust Data Analyst / Lobbyist, Tesco CSR Rep, Tesco UI R&D
Product Development Testing and Strategy
Minimum Viable Product (but, first, Riskiest Assumption Test)
Automating inventory and broadcast communication for Foodbank Manager — What we need [-] What we have [=] Itemised Shopping List with Quantities — to go to social media automatically — needs a spreadsheet and a UI for input and a UI for output
Risky Assumptions to test towards
- Viability of robust data entry by typical Foodbank volunteers
- Appetite to engage smart digital giving by donors
What does it do in a cycle?
- Templates data entry in robust form, stable on all platforms
- Files data in a secure way; Automatically notifies social visually; Iterates assumptions
What does it need in order to do that minimally?
- UI input to database (could be a simple spreadsheet)
- Visualising script (could simulate manually)
- Automated social outputs (could simulate manually)
- Ordering+Delivery API (could simulate manual delivery)
- Admin access, review policy (could be supervised)
Definition of success? (In discovery and beta)
- Do people use it and recommend it to others? People actually prefer to give in a data-driven way rather than their philanthropic needs being met more conveniently in blind giving.
- Does the reporting build trust and so build generosity from donors? — updates are accurate, leading to streamlined just-in-time donations, so credible impact reporting leads to smart-giving where people inclined to be more generous and more strategically generous. More of the most needed stuff is given when it is most needed.
- Does it grow adoption/demand for this solution by additional foodbanks? — beta-users bring on board other foodbanks, because it solves a pain point for foodbank managers.
- Does it reduce time for volunteers on administrative activity (and so increase time/quality of holistic care)? Change in number of meals enabled per volunteer hour and the level of improvement to justify setup+maintenance costs of system. Local groups to generate impact metric to measure for — as an ambition to see reduction in poverty indicator beyond simply hunger-amelioration (eg kids school attendance/performance)
- Does it create and increase tech fluency among users (particularly donors/volunteers)? — creates a market — lowering the bar for entry. Foodbank volunteers are being developed as more advanced digital users, consumers, mentors and so as foodbank tech cause advocates.
- Is it cost-neutral for Tesco? Outlay vs revenue. Depth of engagement, breadth of participation (esp if wider adoption of assisted digital eg. can be facilitated); persistence to completion, and individual spend for Tesco users in app; then, for the brand more widely, before/after surveys of randomised users. Tesco to define KPI
- Does it generate socially/politically influential data? Quality of reporting data available to articulate causes of food poverty — Trussell Trust to define an outline what good-enough data would be.
Testing Plan? — embed team with Foodbank as volunteers, user interviews re holistic care, analytics on supply/demand
Prioritisation Process and Risk Analysis
Prioritisation In Discovery/MVP
- Stress test assumptions, especially about users — limit testing the foodbank infrastructure. Want it to fail for the right reasons as quick as possible.
- Mapping assumptions — and ordering by the cost if they are wrong, and the speed at which they can be tested
Prioritisation In Design/Beta
- Impact/Effort Matrix — via Team estimation ~ Generating a clear Why — against which tasks are measurable
- Impact desired/anticipated — not easy, as some of this is intangible, Measuring against the Why; Biggest Why for your buck, as it were
- Effort needed/predicted — especially based on what can be begged/borrowed/stolen re inventorying hack and API?
- Reach-Impact-Confidence-Effort for elevating features to solve for.
Speculative Wireframes for functions (post-Discovery)
Example Wireframe For Donor Interface: Shelf browsing
- Labelling on shelf highlights relevant items for Foodbank, with option to donate, option to click through to rest of Foodbank shelf
- Foodbank filter/widget can be turned off (off by default)
- All giving is matched by vendor (potentially in a non-linear way according longevity of giver’s profile — loyalty is gamed, rewarded and visible)
Example Wireframe For Donor Interface: Basket summary
- Checkout summarises regular basket and charity basket
- Matched giving in column
- Option to add gift-aid to donation automatically
Example Wireframe For Donor Interface: User Profile and Cause Discovery
- Summary of User info includes a profile of giving, allowing retrospective review and protospective planning of giving
- Scroll through available local causes integrations for giving which your Tesco supports ~ activate them to layer shelves with current needs you can donate. Eg. you could switch Poppy Appeal, or donate to multiple foodbanks in your area.
Example Wireframe For Donor Interface: Foodbank Profile
- Cause Profile can be managed at backend by Vauxhall Foodbank to include stories and relevant info for further holistic support and volunteering opportunities
- Follow impact trends in user’s personal giving and milestones
- See other reviews for this Cause
- See Pantry inventory live (Beta for Tesco R&D in UI for user personal pantry integrations) — buy/commit direct from screen.
Existing Products, Precedents, Competitors
Foodbank App
See: http://foodbankapp.co.uk/
- Shopping list is too static — no confidence that it is up to date
- Not updated. It seems updating the list or explaining itself requires too much for the incumbent foodbank
- Pricing seems prohibitively flat-rate, no freemium, no incentive,
- Initial funding of £30k
- Traffic light system is a positive simplification. Strong clear UI representing variable stock and timesensitive nature of supply.
- Not obvious how the inventory is tracked and relayed to the shopping list — no feedback loop on wins
- Much is made of an “increase by 100% donations at Canterbury Foodbank” — not necessarily the metric to measure for — the question is the right stuff for the right needs, which needs granularity
- Output is to the app, it is all in app— but I think the MVP wants to not need all donors to be on-app. It wants more immediately to automatically create collateral for social, which is responsive, — in future, if that’s communicating well — run through an app that is personal/tailored etc.
Food Cloud
https://food.cloud/ also FoodCloud
- App ~ unclear how current this is? 2016
- Guardian Review
- Explained as an app to list waste food — Supply focussed rather than demand focussed ~ is this a more powerful incentive structure?
- Onus on donor to fill out donation details. Potentially a convenient task to delegate away from central admin to each inspecting their own donation. Probably a risk in data quality control. Potentially not the best use of goodwill.
Bankuet
- Single foodbank on trial
- Static list, no hierarchy, or codified prioritisation.
- Opaque supply chain, opaque profit,
- No feedback on impact
Food to Donate
- https://www.foodtodonate.com/donors
- Notes manual forms to list donations (paper to post/fax !?)
- Addresses Tax benefits of documentation for large scale donors
Olio
- Peer-to-peer food waste reduction — not quite the same emphasis on intermediate institutions organised for holistic care and referring agencies.
- Strong on intuitive UI and mapping, notifications and gamefulness.
Link 2 Feed
https://www.link2feed.com/food-bank-software/pantry-inventory-software/
- Quite high maintenance — takes on a lot of roles of referring agency — to do with client details and so on
- Achieves heat mapping of client locations — looks really powerful, as a granular, planning and lobbying tool to impact systemic change.
- Doesn’t seem to have the same focus on communicating to donors and creating a user experience for volunteers facilitating relationships — it’s more industrial food managing and client managing
Other Apps
Other Links
Ocado: Foodbank cashcash donations loses all the benefits of being a food distributor, and of having access to geographically nuanced data on donors Cash vs in-kind ~ note, people have paid to sponsor-a-goats for ages — even though it’s a gimmick. Giving cash, matching that giving — it’s all good, but technically bring donors closer to the emotional story — track, trace and maximise impact of sponsored food parcel.
Amazon Smile: Integration of % giving in online shopping — feels quite abstract by comparison — a detached process which feels like it benefits amazon and the giver in a sort of cerebral guilt-apeasing sort of way, rather than promoting closer relationship with the cause of the disadvantaged
https://www.tescoplc.com/tesco-and-society/#ref_corporate-responsibility — #404
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/people/community/sainsburys-to-label-products-most-useful-to-food-banks/574201.article — Shelf labelling already exists in store — the same could exist on virtual shelving — as a private power-up to your UI for signups
Other Git projects
- Actively maintained — maybe worth looking into
- Build a food bank management tool that allows a charitable organisation/food bank to receive, distribute, manage, and track food inventory. — not sure if it has achieved a working version — no update since 2015
Product Interview Questions
Why you would make the changes you propose?
[1] The right answer is that it adds value for Users
- Disruption: Does something quicker (fewer steps) that they are already doing in a less efficient way (vs direct donation, tins in boxes)
- It gives them the option to more easily perform an action they are already doing, and there’s some demonstrable demand for this sort of facility (see petition 45,000 people want this. ~ unknown who these petitionees are)
- Note. This Proof of Concept then applies to Poppies, RedNoseDay, BigIssue but in all these cases makes the experience of giving both easier AND richer — automated but with an option to follow up the impact of your giving.
- Disruption: Does something better that they are already doing with less feedback/transparency
- Donation Tracking giving allows it to be a more informed choice by the donor — in a way that collection boxes have no ability to.
- End-to-end providence tracking in all things is going to be inevitable. Two blue ticks on your giving. Star-rating on your gift’s impact.
- Smart and traceable giving allows match-funding games and tax efficient giving via GiftAid.
- Disruption: It creates entirely new possibilities — It meets that demand and rewards them in the short term AND it opens the door to long term growth in the social offering of these services offered to the user. Everyone wins — every user within a society has a better user experience of that society if it is more equal, more transparent
[2] The Big Vision
- Why? To ameliorate food poverty ~ this would be a sufficient why but it is vulnerable to its own specificity (and it’s a bit-teach-a-man-to-fish etc)
- Why? Proof-Of-Concept and initial architecture to enable an intuitive forum/bridge for the elective perpetual redistribution of all privilege and all poverty within private sector — against an existing lack of transparency and lack of facility for doing this strategically.
- Why? Over and against certain self-reinforcing patterns of (eg atomised/siloised modes of consumption of Amazon) disrupt the platform capitalists using local distributed infrastructure (Tesco Stores + Foodbank) relationship (story-telling, reporting, invitation) and compassion (creating spaces for this to be meaningful)
[3] Whys for all stakeholders
- All I believe it’s worth testing because even with in a load of variables, and presently untested hypotheses, I looks like it can turn up a Win-win
- All Small quick wins (not dependent on bigger wins for validity) which potentially set up bigger wins (food first then social issues around loneliness and broader causes of injustice. Emotional user engagement then holistic lifestyle integration. Position benefactor as social leader in transparency of charity and interactivity of giving)
- Reward for Social Investor — It feels like the right thing to do, the right direction of travel, I hypothesise that it’s low cost (existing tech) (relatively little opportunity cost), low risk (segmentable), and potentially high reward/impact (social gain, customer acquisition / network capture for partner Tesco).
- Reward for Retail Partner (Tesco) — Social impact that is local and national
- Reward for Tesco — customer acquisition — if Foodbank donors can give through matched giving on Tesco but not others, this will incent adoption by previous non-Tesco or non-online shoppers
- Reward for Tesco — data on CSR responsiveness — feedback on what sorts of charitable contributions from Tesco generate positive behaviours in target. (DATA yes, causality hard to establish?)
- Reward for Tesco — R&D — Potential for Tesco to trial dynamic pantry integration — where in foodbanks you have willing volunteers submitting data into a loop — that simulates what IOT device could do. Like Amazon dash buttons. Simulating various UIs for pantry integration in a context where the list of items is highly controllable, predictable.
- Reward for Tesco — expanding adoption of their platform — I hypothesise that high-needs, low-digital individuals are more highly represented in Foodbank volunteers (retirees, out-of-work), Foodbank users (complex roots of poverty and marginalisation), and potentially Foodbank donors (unsure % personal giving by poorer quartiles is counterintuitively high, empathy amongst disadvantaged vs. image of middle class giving, and vs. image of younger charity activists — to check)
- Reward for Tesco — First Mover advantage Vs Threat — Otherwise someone else like Coop will do it. The reward for solving this seems obvious, and you could gamify loyalty by non-linear matchfunding to consolidate platform dominance (unless cynical) (CHECK)
- Reward for Trussell Trust Network — Raising awareness of food poverty issue, raising the profile of Foodbanks as a solution and a siren
- Reward for Foodbank — More food means helping more people better. But, perhaps more importantly, more stable, predictable in/out of food means the staff can be better used to serve the holistic needs of users
- Reward for Society/Government — More and better data on the wider causes of food poverty
How you would assess risks to the change?
Managing the risk
- Make risk assessment as a team (severity / likelihood)
- Overall, all risk is containable because the Tesco shop happens inside of a login, even a public beta can be private. Participation can be localised to regional/store manager’s discretion and vetting of specific Foodbank relationships and compliance.
Sketch of possible risks:
Reputational
- Non-reversible service provision creating dependency (managed by private beta, seconding prototype facilitators to Foodbanks — small set of established Foodbanks who have the resource to pilot and not be affected by variation that pilot might cause)
- Linking with associated network, religious organisations (See Ocado precedent, seems to manage ok?) ~ due dil on Trussell Trust Foodbank as kitemark — diversifying beneficiaries, third party certificator offsets risk.
- Accusation of greenwashing — Not a threat — These donations don’t have to be tokenism, and it’s not creating a new category of giving — this type of giving already exists. Greenwashing and woke-washing etc are problematic when their publicised care over steps their actual compassionate provision and impact. The sort of viral altruism involved in donations of this kind could be kept local and still powerfully speak for itself.
- The ethical and political ambiguity of foodbanks — Left and Right are both opposed to the existence of foodbanks — making them more “efficient” is ethically complicated (Ocado, has managed this, partly via opt in only, so the provision can be invisible to those not interested)
- Managing expectations — not positioning Tesco as a brand offering to solve food poverty ~ sets up to fail / backlash against unreasonable expectations (Keep claims humble, give choices to the users, be transparent about full supply chain, diversify causes served)
- Risk that it is difficult to retire — if this feature was to be retired for all sorts of legitimate reasons, it would cause direct harm if dependencies were not managed, and it would cause reputational harm if it could be construed as ostracising/robbing the disadvantaged. (Products do get retired — users could be migrated to third party giving platform via export options, a managed retreat with a well communicated journey, maintaining an active support community throughout)
- Reputational — How to locate the culpability for the fallibility of Foodbanks within Foodbank’s own domain and not absorb inevitable less-than professionalisms into to Tesco’s brand (including eg. Freeloading, or informal Foodbank use) (perhaps making routing to Foodbank strictly elective by customer — not all eggs in one basket — some onus on Kite Marking by third part(ies) (Trussell Trust, Charities Commission or other) some onus on customer to DYOR related to the local Foodbank they elect to support) Tesco enables donations, without, necessarily vetting the causes to the nth degree.
- Brand — Enabling people to give without “asking” anyone to give — the internet is already full of Guardian and Wikipedia appeals to give more — it would be a significant fail to smuggle a chugger into the Tesco UI, even slightly (always frame as opt-in only for widget and all comms, invitations based on multiplied impact not urgency of need?
Legal/Compliance Risk
- Selling items at profit, for charity — Legal ie. buying Tesco chickpeas at profit, so that Tesco can give them to Foodbank — ambiguous motives for promotion — Not sure, although it would seem arguable that this is only doing digitally exactly what is equivalent in store. Possible to categorise donated items as not-for-profit. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/charity-trading-selling-goods-and-services
Supply/Demand Risks
- How much food is actually demanded to any given location, does it result in intuitive packages of deliverables — or do we end up having to deliver 1.5 tins of chickpeas to Hackney in a given week. Who covers the cost of delivery — in this initial volatile supply/demand experiment
- Supply not tracking with demand — it has to keep track — so demand-side needs diversity and supply-side needs a format that can handle variability without fatiguing interest. Tailoring/curating the bridge between these two variables needs to be automatable to be scalable
- Too much supply and you overwhelm the Foodbank, if their back of house inefficiencies can’t deliver. Too much food donated and no one wins, it’s not sustainable, it would create a potentially public scandal of waste, which would undermine trust.
- Too much demand and supply feels like a drop in the bucket, donors don’t feel like they make a meaningful difference (it would be almost better to not know)
- Too little supply and it’s not worth the Foodbank’s time to integrate/train etc.
- Too little demand for food and users lose interest in the story — there is too little good to do.
- Risk of disruption/competition in the Foodbank food provider space by other supermarkets. It is potentially controversial to monopolise provision Tesco-as-exclusive-provider. If the distribution rails are not exclusively Tesco’s but administrated by a third party trust, then the CSR win and user data win for Tesco are diminished, and efficiencies of scale are also lost. Potentially inefficient to compete/cooperate. (User experience keeps the giving profile inside Tesco’s ecosystem builds loyalty as positively disruption resistant. UX extends as a multifaceted added-value inside the existing user experience — is all upside for user and a given Foodbank to stay in platform.)
- Risk of disruption by a larger entity dominating the micro-philanthropy platform eg Facebook Fundraiser. And if profile is portable, in a culture of own-your-own data, Tesco’s scheme could be disrupted by other brands who open-platformed giving profiles into a portfolio (Tying regular foodbank giving into more robust weekly rhythms, like the weekly family shop —can withstand competition. Incently loyalty by tying it to local face-to-face participation, and non-linear rewards for repeat/group-giving. Tesco could build in nice-to-use functionality preemptively — at the Foodbank manager interface, for receiving donations from other providers to hedge against the friction of competing platforms)
Functional Risks
- Functional — non-linear associated costs? Race against disappointed expectations around scaling a local trial — especially via global social, the bottlenecks of training implementation at Foodbank re data and staffing. Risk of going too far too fast and not keeping back of house tidy. (start small thorough and private, win eg. Trussel to incent training, build in financial contingency, prepare for non-linear scaling, esp of training Foodbank usage)
- Functional — website speed — extra to load, extra pages between shop (see how others, eg Amazon smile achieve integration)
- Functional — Does optioning confuse/dilute the overall product offering — limited screen space — especially on mobile (could be solved by optioning it ~ equivalent to locating Foodbank collection box off the main thoroughfare of a shop)
- Functional— web down time — what offline option for foodbanks if relying exclusively on one set of delivery rails?
- Functional — website security re personal information— interfacing private user info (Tesco shoppers; Referring Agency’s vulnerable clients) with a third party — Foodbanks not highly known for professionalism or technical proficiency. No personal data needs to run through Foodbank systems.
- Functional — too many stakeholders who are not intrinsically incented to participate in the upfront adoption cost — eg. in order to stabilise demand the platform needs to onboard the Referring Agencies, to a seamless platform — creates technical and political complexity
- Functional — The meeting of two national networks — each with local instances — with a vested interested in keeping that local. Risks around that sensitivity and around the local diversity of the instances. Greatest risk might be in the damaging the foodbank’s relational idiosyncracy, patronising it, flattening it with efficiency (but let’s not be sentimental, there’s a lot of chaos that could be removed that would not make of it a cold machine — but rather improve the retention and the pastoral effectiveness of staff/volunteers)
