U-evolve Edinburgh

Mental Health Charity Improves Lines of Communication with Young People

Edinburgh-based U-evolve provides direct support to young people aged 11 to 18 who are facing mental health and wellbeing challenges in addition to sharing trauma-informed knowledge and education to frontline professionals.

U-evolve works with the young people on a one-to-one basis to help create positive coping strategies and give them support to overcome the trauma they have experienced. U-evolve strongly believes in working with young people before the point of crisis and giving them the emotional tools required to continue with and succeed in their education.

Challenges

With a growing number of young people facing mental health challenges across the area, the U-evolve team needed reliable mobile phones to communicate with their key audiences – the young people themselves, but also parents/carers, support/guidance teachers and other professionals. Furthermore, mobile phones were also required for therapeutic coaches to use in the event of emergencies.

The charity also needed smartphones with a reasonable camera for taking high quality images of the various activities on offer – for social media and general marketing use – but all on a very tight budget!

Eilidh Macdonald-Harte, Founder and Chair of U-evolve commented, “We are a small but perfectly formed grass-roots charitable organisation doing critical work in the North Edinburgh community.  Our small budget is mainly used for staff costs and project resources rather than phones, however, as we started to grow, having mobile phones was critical to supporting the young people particularly outside of school term.”

Assessment and Recommendations

After having their needs assessed, GoodCall set up three lines, two for the therapeutic coaches and one for the CEO.

Eilidh continued, “When we started discussing our need for mobile phones in the charity, our colleague and GoodCall Director Caroline McKenna made us aware of GoodCall’s dedicated service for non-profits and the cost savings that would be available to us.  It made perfect sense given our desire to keep costs down but also to ‘buy social’. We truly believe in supporting other social enterprises and charitable organisations and the fact that all profits come back to us in the form of line rental or better handsets was very appealing.

“GoodCall kept us informed at every stage and forwarded a proposal with low-cost tariffs which the Board was extremely impressed with. They went on to recommend Android phones, which really do a great job, in fact the staff were really excited by them.

 The Benefits

 Although the team did not use mobile phones before, they had tried to obtain mobile phones from a high street seller but found them too costly.

Eilidh explained, “We have certainly saved money compared to going to a local seller. It’s made communication as a team so much easier. We also now have a social media messaging group for any quick questions or support, it’s been so worthwhile.

“Making these savings, in the knowledge that we are supporting another non-profit dedicated to helping other charities and social enterprises, is a win-win! It was also a very simple and quick process and we’re delighted with our lines and handsets – we haven’t needed any after-care but Elaine has already been in touch to ask how we are getting on and if there is anything more they can do, so we know that  the GoodCall team are there if we need them.”

You can read more about U-evolve Edinburgh’s work on their website at https://u-evolve.org/.