Hear from our CEO and Co-founder, Charlotte!
This week I gave a lightning talk to a room of charity leaders at Barnwood’s Investing in Change event. For everyone in the room - this become a thought experiment on what their organisation looks like through tech lens. Here's the breakdown for anyone who couldn't be there.
"I haven't had a holiday in over 21 years. I am literally on call night and day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's exhausting. I just carry on, carrying on. This break meant the world to me."
— A Carefree carer
Start with one really clear problem
The first thing you do when forming a tech-led social intervention is find a really clear problem to work on. For us, that problem is simple to say: how do we open up access to overnight breaks for unpaid carers?
Unpaid carers provide around 80% of home care in the UK. That care saves the public sector an estimated £184bn a year. Meanwhile, local authorities overspent on adult social care by £774m in 2024/25. The people holding the system together are the ones least able to take a night off.
What we've achieved so far
To date, Carefree has delivered 23,393 breaks, registered 56,025 carers and secured £6.2m worth of donated hotel stays.
Please don't read those figures and assume we're a well-heeled organisation. This year we haven't had more than a month or two’s worth of funding ahead of us. We have just eight staff, and an average of 1,500 new carers sign up every month.
Building technology without building technology
So how did we do it? One of the key ways we've kept costs down is that we never took on the role of building technology in the typical sense.
Instead, we took off-the-shelf software and used it like Lego blocks. Each block powers a different part of our no-code platform, so that every stakeholder can take part in the ecosystem:
Carers register through a self-referral pathway. We verify their caring status and run a digital ID check, then they book through our Carer Breaks Hub.
Hotel partners receive booking requests by email and through their Inventory App, and confirm or decline them. They can also refer their own employees who are carers, and see live impact reporting.
Community partners refer local carers through their Partner Referral App. In turn, we refer hidden carers back to them for local support.
Our team runs everything behind the scenes through an internal back-of-house app.
Three things a tech-led charity focuses on
1. User-led design
Carefree sounds like a simple idea: match unsold hotel rooms with unpaid carers. In practice, it's incredibly complex to pull off.
Any successful social intervention has to meet people and organisations where they are. A carer needs a long lead time to put interim care in place. A hotel needs a short lead time, so it isn't giving away room nights it could otherwise sell. That's a design problem. How quickly would our idea have broken down if we hadn't built a bridge between the two?
It took us about four years to crack. There's usually a simple solution waiting at the end of the process, but it takes a long time to hone it. And it never really stops: every interaction with a stakeholder is a signal for what to tweak, build or create next. Making a service accessible is a constant quest.
2. Product-market fit
Why do so many tech start-ups fail? Often it's because they had an idea that looked great on paper, took a product to market they were hoping people would use or buy, and then couldn't attract users or keep them long enough to create repeat revenue.
The charity sector has its own version of this. We're asked to identify need, show we're best placed to deliver, and prove the difference we make. All important. But at another level, that framework pulls us away from the value we create for our stakeholders: the thing that keeps them using our service and coming back to it.
3. Stakeholder value
We all work in an incredibly unstable environment. But how much does that need to hold us back?
It's easy to focus on what we don't have. But if you focus on the value you can create for others, the ground beneath you begins to stabilise. More organisations and individuals become motivated to use, buy into and endorse what you do. In my team, our drive and satisfaction come from taking the focus off ourselves and putting it on what we can do for others. I believe that's what keeps winning us the supporters to keep going: threadbare, but still here.
Measuring social and economic value
This approach also gave us a way to look at our work through the lens of social and economic value creation. Independent research by Just Economics found that:
77% of carers said a Carefree break prevented the crisis breakdown of their caring arrangements "a lot".
52% of carers said a Carefree break reduced the need to start paid care "a lot".
That's value for carers, and value for a stretched public purse.
Back to the thought experiment: applying this to your organisation
So how do you apply some of this to your own organisation? One tool I've found useful is the clock model, a metaphor I learnt on a Section4 course. It maps the stages at which your stakeholders interact with your service, and shows where you're investing and where the gaps are.
Here's how Carefree's clock looks today:
Stage | What it drives | Carefree initiatives | Where we are |
|---|---|---|---|
How they find you | Traffic | Marketing comms, blogs and features, third-party referrals, word of mouth, help articles | Strong infrastructure held back by lack of wider public awareness about us. |
How they interact with you | Conversion | The Carefree platform experience, customer service, range of hotel inventory, payment options for affordability | Our highest investment to date, across tech, service design and customer service |
How they feel about you | Retention | Automated communications, our Breakmaker programme, transparent impact reporting, strong feedback loops | A strong set-up for partner and carer retention that keeps us steady at over 90% satisfaction rate across all stakeholder groups |
To put it into practice in your own organisation:
Work through the clock for each of your stakeholder groups: how they find you, use you and interact with you.
Make strategic recommendations to your teams on how to bring your value to life across that journey.
Set your north star metrics, so you can benchmark your progress.
A few extra tips:
Follow the market trend. Find the social and cultural narratives that will support adoption of what you offer.
Know your user value. Understand the core value you deliver, and keep investing in it to lock in retention.
Build a content framework. Give your teams a clear framework for creating and delivering content, so you're consistent across the organisation.
Let's keep talking
You don't need a big budget or an in-house tech team to think like a tech-led organisation. You need a clear problem, a real understanding of what your stakeholders value, and the patience to keep refining until the simple solution appears.
If you'd like to talk through any of this, I'd love to hear from you. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Charlotte Newman, CEO, Carefree
