Missing People
Winner – Transforming With Digital
About the Charity
Someone is reported missing every 90 seconds in the UK, the majority due to mental health and exploitation. When they disappear, people face new risks like homelessness and abuse. Every family affected is in frightening limbo, waiting desperately for news. Missing People was founded by volunteers following the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh. Today, the charity helps people across the UK and is the only provider dedicated to the cause.
Missing People provides a free Helpline assigned by Ofcom to ‘protect people in great difficulty’. Its confidential and accredited services provide children and adults with emotional support, ways to stay safe and to reconnect with their loved ones. Partnering with every police force in the UK, Missing People ensures that those who are reported missing, at any age, and their loved ones are given access to the charity’s services.
Charity number: 1020419 | www.missingpeople.org.uk
Advice Services | England – London | 26-100 paid staff | 26-100 volunteers
What the Board Achieved
Going ‘missing’ is an ever-present risk for hundreds of thousands of people facing the most serious issues in our society. An estimated one million people are impacted each year. When people go missing, they become more vulnerable to harm. Their families, friends and colleagues face unimaginable heartache and anxiety as they try to cope with living without a loved one.
During 2012-2015, demand for Missing People’s services had doubled, but the charity was only helping 1% (10,400) of all those affected. Trustees set an ambitious five-year strategy to double the number of people helped each year – aiming for 20,000 in 2021. Taking the lead, trustees considered how the charity could realise this ambition, like increasing referral pathways. However, the challenge identified was how to increase capacity to meet existing needs. Three needs/opportunities were identified:
1) Missing children wanted to access support digitally. Phone calls from children had reduced by 47% year-on-year. The children who needed the charity’s support were not making contact. Missing People and NSPCC’s consultation with young victims of exploitation (often reported missing), led by Dame Esther Rantzen, highlighted they felt ‘too old’ for support aimed at children. They worried about accessing support, fearing reprisals, or information being passed to police. They wanted an anonymous digital service.
2) Missing adults wanted to access support digitally too. In 2017/18, website visits represented the fastest growing channel for adults to seek out help — up by more than 30% on the previous year, paired with a drop of 39% in adults using the charity’s phone services.
3) Two in three families said they would like content and guidance written by people with lived experience, and a safe online space just for them.
Missing People responded with a programme of digital transformation, called One Safe Click, with trustees showing leadership and support to the staff team throughout the process. The establishment of Advisory Groups helped keep the charity focused and explore digital user journeys for its support services. Meanwhile the trustees took time to learn about the digital roadblocks within the charity’s infrastructure – like an old website, ageing servers, siloed IT services, and limited staff resources for admin tasks. Outcomes needed to address these issues, allowing the charity to expand online support but minimise the burden of admin tasks on staff and volunteers.
The charity led a pilot that offered an anonymous chatbot service to vulnerable young people at risk of exploitation and ‘missing’, in partnership with NSPCC, called ‘Is This OK?’, and expanded live chat for missing people of all ages. A new website helped the charity integrate a responsive customer relationship management system to embed user journeys, creative a responsive online support platform, and connect their services more effectively to those in need. Finally, a new online community to provide peer-led support for family members.
The aim of One Safe Click was that any missing person or loved one left behind would be ‘one safe click’ from support – anywhere, on any device. One Safe Click represents a multi-channel digital transformation that supports a broad range of beneficiaries – children, adults and families. Making Missing People’s services digitally accessible and the charity’s infrastructure scalable, responsive, integrated and effective. It means more people can access help, information and systems to empower them to be safe, and to link to others in the same situation to seek support. This creates the potential to sustainably scale up the charity’s reach and help, without the need to increase numbers of frontline people and costs on the same levels. Ongoing data collection and impact monitoring is leading to further improvements that mean the charity is increasingly expanding its reach, getting help to more vulnerable people on the edge of exploitation and those in crisis.
What Inspired Our Judges
Judges believed that the board of Missing People were true advocates for digital transformation and that commitment made this entry stand out. The judges commended the board for being extremely engaged and highly active in securing funds to make One Safe Click active, as well as embracing risk, supporting the executive team and helping to establish Advisory Groups. The building of a cloud-based CRM system to replace ageing servers was also a highlight; judges saw this as evidence that the board was embracing digital at all levels of the organisation.
