Founded in 1992, Real Life Options is a national charity that gives people with learning disabilities and autism a strong voice and real choices in life.
Real Life Options believes that all people deserve dignity, respect, status, rights, and enablement to reach their full potential.
Social support and care is a high turnover industry, with an average staff turnover of 30 percent per year in the UK. Real Life Options, like many organizations, has struggled to retain staff.
Real Life Options faced a challenge to connect the disconnected, with 90% of employees with little or no access to company devices. Only around 200 desk-based employees can easily access email, which was previously the primary source of information, in addition to the quarterly in-house newsletter.
Real Life Options needed an easy-to-use app that all employees, even the non-tech-savvy ones, could use from their phones. Company management also required a high level of segmentation, so specific locations and business units could be reached without spamming the entire workforce with irrelevant information.
After discovering Speakap at an event, Real Life Options rolled out a trial of the Speakap solution to 150 employees in December 2018. The feedback was highly positive; trial users particularly appreciated the increased access to real-time information.
In April 2019, Real Life Options rolled out Speakap – branded internally as Real Talk – to the broader organization. Deployment was quick and easy as Speakap synced directly to the Real Life Options HR system to assign roles, groups, and rights.
Within just a few months, the organization saw an enormous change in the way, and the speed, that information was being shared. While content sharing from head office into the field was the primary use case, the organization has also seen an explosion of interaction and private messaging between employees who share advice, support, and best practices with each other.
In addition to the HR user sync, having a structured communications plan in place from the start has been key to delivering high adoption and usage of Speakap throughout Real Life Options.
“Real Talk is a fast and easy way to share essential updates and great news from any device, at any time.”
PAUL CUSWORTH, HEAD OF IT, BUSINESS & ORGANISATION ARCHITECTURE