Save the Children is the world's leading independent organisation for children, comprised of 29 international member organisations operating in over 68 countries. Save the Children UK (SCUK) is one of the member organisations.
Enabling the Family Grants Programme through digital innovation
SCUK ensures children’s unique needs are met and their voices are heard. They deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach. Dedicated to do whatever it takes for children – every day and in times of crisis – transforming their lives and the future we share.
SCUK Family Grants Programme is a key component of the SCUK strategy – to work to ensure families have the money, services and power to end child poverty – by helping to build communities of people who care about children, listen to what’s important to them and work together to make things better. The programme focuses on empowering people and services to offer long-lasting support to families in need.
In collaboration with local regional partners, they deliver small grants to families across the UK to support their immediate needs. The grants help alleviate some of the financial pressures and challenges of living in poverty faced by families. The family grants also provide the community-based partners the opportunity to listen to the family so they can identify any additional ongoing support that can be offered e.g. access to local services.
Save the Children UK were seeking a new platform that could deliver greater efficiencies for their teams, send more flexible support to those in need, and adapt to the future development of the programme.
As their previous contract came to an end, and a new strategy had broadened the scope of their support to families, they were seeking a provider who could move forward with their desired development and future growth opportunities.
SCUK family grants are delivered across the UK with an established network of referral partner organisations, therefore the platform needed to allow for the management and distribution of grants across the UK via referral partners, country teams and central teams. This meant they required various access levels for over 200 users.
The increased scope of grants also now required greater flexibility and choice of vouchers available to families. As the programme developed, SCUK needed to find a system that would provide the end to end solution for grant delivery: from completion of the application form, automatic assessment against set criteria, choice of vouchers and then distribution of the vouchers directly to the family. They also needed to manage the distribution of grants to the individual Referral Partners and use the rich data they obtained from the application forms to report on the impact of poverty on families across the UK and the difference the grant programme was making.
SCUK needed a new provider who offered:
“Evouchers was the only provider who offered a full end-to-end process. A lot of the others could either do the application side of things, or the voucher distribution”
– Dan Kettle | SCUK
Evouchers presented a market-leading solution that connects organisations with families and individuals in need, offering flexible, user-friendly tools to manage voucher distribution and fund allocation securely and effectively. The collaborative project demonstrated the adaptability and development of the platform to meet the ongoing needs of SCUK.
Evouchers offers direct access to 100 retailers, allowing SCUK greater flexibility to choose a vast range of retail vouchers which were in line with the values of the grant programme, including “more affordable supermarkets, home improvements or other household essentials” (Dan Kettle, SCUK), which they had struggled to access in the past.
Evouchers’ multi-level access permissions gave the central team at SCUK greater control of users, streamlined processes and improved workflows. This alongside Evouchers’ helpdesk and support team allowed users to self-serve or raise queries directly, saving valuable time and reducing the need for triage processes that previously drained resources.
Evouchers API integration has empowered SCUK to access live data via their dashboards with up-to-date information. This data is then used to identify common themes about living in poverty to drive SCUK’s influencing and advocacy campaigns.
“Every 24 hours it’s up to date, whereas before someone used to do it once a month. Anyone that needs to pull a report or pull [data] for a presentation, they can rely on that”
– Dan Kettle | SCUK
The API removes the need and risk of manual downloads, and saves the teams hours of reporting as well as provides tracking and evidence that the family grants are reaching those who need it most.
“I think from that point we knew we made the right choice and we kind of had a sigh of relief”
– Dan Kettle | SCUK
Currently, Save the Children UK have uploaded 728 grants to the Evouchers platform for distribution to families in need in 2025.
SCUK family grants programme has secured funding to increase the number of grants delivered to families next year, therefore the collaboration between Evouchers and SCUK to develop the platform to meet the programme’s evolving needs continues to grow.
With future plans that focus on more reporting and identifying greater efficiencies throughout the grant and voucher distribution process, both organisations are dedicated to supporting families experiencing poverty.
“Everybody really put that kind of team effort in, and Save and Evouchers worked together to deliver the completed platform as one team, making sure the resulting system would enable us to support our strategy of ending child poverty.”
– Dan Kettle | SCUK
Tuesday 3rd March
10:30am
Wednesday 4th March
12:00pm
Thursday 5th March
14:00pm