When war broke out in Ukraine, we at Valcon put our heads to work to come up with ways in which we could use our skills to help Ukrainian refugees. Since then, various initiatives have been launched. One of these is a collaboration with TakeCareBNB, a non-profit organisation that connects status holders with host families who open their homes to refugee families for three months.

TakeCareBNB was founded in 2015 and has matched around 1,000 refugees with temporary homes. Since the war broke out, the number of applications from host families has increased enormously. About 30,000 applications were processed in April 2022 alone. Valcon offered to support TakeCareBNB to manage the increased number of requests by providing resources and experience in process consultancy and data – free of charge.

 

Upscaling the process

Due to the large increase in both refugees and host families, arrears arose in the process of placing refugees. Valcon helped TakeCareBNB adapt its existing processes to be able to handle the new volumes. Furthermore, agreements about tasks and responsibilities were made, and instructions were drawn up for the execution of the work. By tackling this together, employees from the non-profit organisation were trained quickly, and as a result, the arrears were cleared within a few weeks. Based on experiences with the new process, improvements are now being implemented to scale further in the future.

 

Creating insights: Control on operational performance

Due to the increase in the number of applications, the need to gain insights into the operational performance of the organisation grew. These insights were necessary to manage operational performance internally and to report externally. The existing system had limited reporting capabilities and did not meet the need to provide diverse insights quickly.

Valcon assisted TakeCareBNB by setting up an Azure cloud solution in combination with PowerBI in a matter of weeks. Dashboards have been developed in PowerBI to create insights into operational performance, such as workload with unscreened host families, unanswered statement of conduct requests and the number of matches made. In addition, the dashboard is used by external partners such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army to see how host families are distributed throughout the Netherlands.

 

In the context of corporate social responsibility, Valcon has provided 400 hours of capacity to TakeCareBNB in ​​May 2022 to help manage the increase in the number of applications.