Supporting community outreach worldwide during COVID-19

When pandemic quarantines and lockdown measures forced communities worldwide to be isolated in their homes, many were unable to shop for food or collect prescriptions. While charities and community outreach organizers were quick to realize people needed help, there was a problem: Most didn’t have a big enough team to make sure everyone in the community was looked after. Volunteers needed to be found — and once found, needed to be coordinated.

In Nairn, a town of 11,000 people in the north of Scotland, a call went out from the newly formed Nairn Task Force. Could anyone build an app to help it marshal volunteers and assign tasks requested by vulnerable people and families in the town?

A scalable platform assembled in weeks

That call was heard by the head of the Cognizant Outreach Program for the UK and Ireland, who swiftly brought the requirement to Cognizant’s regional head for Digital Business’s Resilience and Reliability Engineering.

Using their expertise in building rapid digital solutions to solve real-world problems, a team of six Cognizant consultants in the UK and India quickly assembled to develop a cloud-based open-source platform, Cognizant® Assist, to help organizations like the Nairn Task Force communicate with volunteers and beneficiaries and manage relief efforts at scale.

Just four weeks later — and after a last-minute 12-hour marathon to get legal, security and data privacy signoff — the community outreach platform went live for the Nairn Task Force on April 27 2020.

The impact was felt immediately and on an ongoing basis. To date, 450 volunteers have signed up for the Nairn Task Force, creating a team that has completed over 300 support requests to date and helped to reinstate resilience in the community.

Replicating success one organization at a time

Nairn was just the start. In May 2020, the regional head approached his own local authority, Havering Council in East London, which was also looking to marshal community outreach efforts during the pandemic. Learning that Cognizant had a platform ready to go, the council took up the offer of help.

A year on, Cognizant® Assist is now used by multiple organizations in Havering to recruit volunteers and match them to support requests from the community. Over 2,500 Havering residents have volunteered their services to support a community of 260,000 people.

As word of Cognizant® Assist has spread, so has its uptake. It’s now in use by nine non-profits and counting, including six in India, where the platform is being used to coordinate initiatives such as those focused on animal rescue, food waste and support for underprivileged students.

Meanwhile in the UK, it has been recognized by Digital Leaders, a cross-industry community of senior leaders involved in digital transformation initiatives, which has shortlisted Cognizant® Assist for its 2021 Social Transformation award.

Digital transformation is Social transformation, too

Digital transformation is often viewed as the domain of business and government. But our experience shows it’s just as critical for not-for-profit organizations that are focused on tackling social inequalities and supporting those in need. 

These organizations need to be able to mobilize resources, attract volunteers and funding, and organize their activities. All of these things can be made easier and more efficient with technology, but not-for-profits often lack the budget and digital know-how at senior levels to leverage it to best effect.

We’ve been able to help not just by offering a solution free of charge, but also by working with organizations on a pro bono basis to help them make best use of the platform. In doing so, we’ve found that staying focused on the problem to be solved, rather than on the features and functions of the technology, leads to the greatest uptake in the shortest time.

In the case of Cognizant® Assist, for example, the problem was the need to recruit volunteers and match them to tasks. Keeping that in mind, we’ve built a streamlined and flexible platform that’s easy to use for any organization that needs to recruit and assign volunteers.

While we’ve sometimes been asked to add further functionality, such as reporting, we’ve felt that adding complexity would make the platform less user-friendly for organizations that lack advanced digital skills.

Our key takeaway for any organization looking to harness technology for social good would be to stay focused on the problem to be solved and not be distracted by the potential of the technology — which, after all, is practically limitless.

If you’d like to talk to us about using Cognizant® Assist for your not-for-profit initiative, please contact us at infouk@cognizant.com.