Tempo Time Credits is the largest time recognition scheme in the UK. They work in partnership with organisations across the UK to involve more people in their communities.
Tempo Time Credits encourage more people to get involved in volunteering and enjoy the benefits it brings - like feeling healthier and happier, learning new skills, making new friends and gaining confidence.
Tempo had grown organically over 10 years, achieving great success. However, this had also meant legacy, mostly off-line processes that they had identified a need to move away from to ensure they could continue to grow and deliver on their ambitious strategy. Digitisation of Tempo Time Credits offered a way to address these challenges and open up other transformative opportunities.
They required a digital partner to work with them across this journey, right from understanding the problems and those who use Time Credits (volunteers, community groups, recognition partners and staff) through to design and eventual deployment of a new digital platform.
The now deployed digital tool has much the same functionality you might expect from financial apps from Santander to Monzo. Users are able to:
The platform also serves as a marketplace to promote ways people can earn and spend Time Credits:
And finally, it's an easy way for communities and organisations to manage their volunteering activity:
A big part of the work was to ensure Tempo had much better oversight on the Time Credits ecosystem. The physical process meant it was very hard to track where Time Credits were being earned, spent and the impact being delivered.
We created a dashboard that enabled the tracking of every single Time Credit, right from when it was first issued through to being spent. With data visualisation, management features and the ability to export, this gave Tempo granular details to truly understand how Time Credits were being used and to measure the impact internally and for partners.
However, throughout all of this a key focus for Tempo was always to protect the privacy of their users. We worked closely with them through design, continual user testing and security testing to ensure only the data that was absolutely needed was collected and shared, following best practices throughout.
The goals for the product were ambitious. There were lots of features that all seemed important and a number of different types of users, all with very different needs, behaviours and attitudes to technology. So it was important to break the work down into a series of short design & development bursts and releases, to ensure we were continually going back to the user to test and make sure we were developing the features they wanted, in a way they could use them.
This also meant Tempo and ourselves could review our processes, constantly looking to learn and improve our ways of working as a team.
This iterative process was also useful considering the impact of Covid-19. Working closely with Tempo we quickly pivoted feature priorities to include opportunities for earning / spending Time Credits that can exist purely online, ensuring Tempo can still support communities while physical access is so limited.
A key aim, as with all our products, is to build in a sustainable way that ensures you can continue to develop your products beyond any work you've booked in with us. This means developing with a strategy to minimise technical debt, and transparency with our partners so they fully understand and have ownership of the product we help develop with you. Right from the start we always involved Tempo in all parts of the decision making, explaining our reasoning for technologies we used and the overall data architecture.
Following our initial work and deployment of the digital product, we have agreed further iterations with Tempo going into 2021, building on our existing ways of working to ensure the product to continues to develop always with the user's needs at the centre.
Yalla have been central to the successful development of online Time Credits, which was a significant investment in digital transformation by Tempo. Working with Yalla has been absolutely brilliant – they are insightful, creative, energetic and very hard working, always going the extra mile to ensure success.
They have helped us build in-house skills and capacity and worked in partnership with us – we’ve really felt like one team. I wholeheartedly recommend working with them!