tl;dr: In 2021, with the sponsorship of Michael Cheah (Executive Director, HealthServe), the better.sg team (led by Kiat) recommended solutions that enabled HealthServe to receive donations-in-kind with a stronger accounting system.
Within two months, better.sg put together a team that defined the project scope, interviewed key stakeholders, and provided a report of recommendations to facilitate downstream prototyping and IT implementation.
The Start: Addressing a technical need
In the first half of 2021, the COVID pandemic continued to restrict and dampen the mood and economics of many countries. This included Singapore, wherein migrant workers faced poorer prospects with dampened demand for services in a country foreign to them. A silver lining was donations-in-kind made to charities such as HealthServe, an IPC-registered charity that supports vulnerable migrant worker communities through holistic healthcare offerings among other forms of assistance.
| HealthServe serves the holistic care needs of migrant workers in Singapore through subsidised health services, a mental health programme launched in 2019, casework support, and community outreach and engagement. In 2021, this meant over 8,000 medical consultations and 35,000 cases of social assistance cases on top of mental health helpline support and care pack distribution. |
However, the outflow of compassion faced technical challenges: accepting donations in kind required accounting and reporting for this. This was against the backdrop of scaling its existing accounting system for strong expense management operations. When HealthServe reached out to better.sg, volunteer consultants led by Kiat kicked into action to help pave the groundwork and remove this obstacle.
Journey and Outcomes
The first step was problem definition and project scoping. As Kiat, the team lead, interviewed stakeholders in the HealthServe organisation, the team started to set up the relevant structure and communications to make the problem and scope concrete. The better.sg team spoke with various stakeholders at HealthServe to understand how the relevant functions (e.g. finance and admin) operated and the tools they used.
The interview process took about two weeks and the team realised that there was a plethora of tools and applications used. Getting into the details, they realised that data lived, sometimes in duplicate, across systems. Workflows could be more efficient, and where inefficiencies (e.g. manual extraction) existed, there were opportunity costs to the organisation in downstream outcomes generation.
The team then worked on synthesising findings and preparing an insights and recommendations report. This was done over the next three weeks.
Understanding what was happening on the ground was important. Team interviews had shown how, in daily work, documentation was typically made. Donations-in-kind used to be recorded by HealthServe teams via Microsoft Excel without much structure. It was hence understandable that a standard solution would reduce complexity in receiving and accounting for such donations especially when required for HealthServe’s corporate reporting and governance.
One of the key outputs of the better.sg team was a report that registered gaps in existing systems (and duplication of work) that would later aid HealthServe in optimising work streams and commissioning relevant customisations. The volunteer team also looked into IT solutions relevant to the beneficiary’s requirements. One possibility suggested was to have a donations-in-kind app that spoke to systems like Quickbook (accounting) and UNO (inventory management) while having the respective stakeholder touchpoints (e.g. inputs interface for registering prospective donors and items for donation).
Completion
The HealthServe team was glad to have the support of Kiat and the better.sg team in the discovery phase of this project. As the team handed off its recommendations, the project moved into the prototyping phase, wherein HealthServe received support from an IT consultant to prototype and complete the project.
Reach out to better.sg!
Do you want to support meaningful organisations like HealthServe in a tech-for-good initiative? Or are you part of an organisation that would love to have some passionate volunteer consultants helping out in a similar way?
Contact us at info@better.sg or sign up as a volunteer via this form!
This case study was compiled by Yangxiang Lim and edited by Rovik Robert, and the infographic was designed by Yiqi Ng. All of them are better.sg volunteers. Special thanks to Yvonne Lim for providing input to the article and Kiat Lim for sharing pictures.
