Social Value
Addiction Recovery Agency (Ara) is a registered charity and helps people recover from mental health, drug and alcohol and gambling harms. At the beginning of 2022, Ara received 50% of their gambling referrals from a third party and had observed a decrease in these clients receiving therapy. They needed to increase the number of people they offer support to and improve their direct referral process.
As part of the ongoing pro-bono work BMT does with several charities, Ara tasked us to:
- Provide insight to improve their referral process to help more people suffering from gambling harms.
- Improve Ara’s ability to engage with and support 18–34-year-olds.
Optimising their digital capability was at the core of BMT’s recommendation to increase the number of people they can support. Our recommendations were based on insights gained through our conversations with stakeholders and subsequently reinforced with external research data. Our solution consisted of:
- Streamlining the referral process and working towards it being more automated.
- Integrating social media into the charity’s business strategy.
- Using social media as a tool to better engage with clients and raise awareness.
- Improve their social media reporting and website analytics to ensure the charity can continue to make improvements.
We took a stepped approach to our recommendations to ensure Ara could achieve continuous improvements and have the correct infrastructures in place before tackling the next recommendation. The solution we presented to Ara incorporated the insights from our internal research and were reinforced by data from our external research. This approach was key to Ara’s success as it ensured the fundamentals were in place and were united in the same overall goal – improve Ara’s ability to help more people.
Once the immediate recommendations were addressed, we included long term goals to help Ara remain efficient, further grow their community, and therefore increase the number of people they offer support to.
We worked closely with the Gambling Service Manager and Director of Recovery and Resettlement and had weekly updates where we discussed our ideas openly and they provided feedback. This allowed us to consider any potential resistance and what could be done to rectify this and incorporate the solution within our recommendation.
Since presenting our solutions, Ara has implemented our recommendations, leading directly to an increase in clients using their service and therefore supporting more people suffering from gambling harms.
Key Results:
- Self-referrals via Ara’s website increased by 2000% and now represent 40% of their total monthly referrals.
- Ara have increased their efficiency and saw an increase of 12% of the total number of clients seen for gambling harms support and treatment.
“BMT’s pro bono work with my charity directly led to improvements in the referral pathways for one of our key services (supporting people with gambling harms).”
Robbie Thornhill, Director of Recovery and Resettlement
View the BMT profile in the MCA Members Directory.