Following the announcement that the Household Support Fund has been extended again, Huggg, the specialist platform which allows organisations to send and manage retail vouchers at scale to those in need, has launched a number of new initiatives. These are designed to help local authorities and their Third Party partner organisations (TPOs) get these vital funds quickly and efficiently to recipients with vouchers to pay for groceries, clothing, essential household items and free school meals
This move acknowledges that whilst councils in England are best placed to decide how to spend their allocation to support people in their local area drawing from local knowledge and direct contact with people in the community, they often struggle with the additional workload. This includes mandatory marketing, detailed DWP compliant reporting and provision of redemption data.
To provide further support on this, Huggg has created a guide to Delivering HSF with Impact, which includes templates such as delivery plans, working with TPOs, MI templates, as well as marketing plans, guidance and content for messaging that can be used across all media and social media platforms. For those councils that are using TPOs such as charities, housing associations and CAB to help administer the funds, the Huggg platform will also support with full transparency of how they are using the funds and links with reporting/controls
Stefan Allsebrook at Huggg said: “The role of distributing the HSF funds is often given to hard pushed teams that have a heavy workload already and our platform enables them to work at scale and allow and distribute thousands of vouchers quickly and easily with built in reporting and redemption data. These new initiatives are designed to help further reduce time spent on planning and marketing the schemes and ensure that the funds are distributed quickly and efficiently.”
The Huggg platform is free of charge to public authorities and charitable organisations and enables them to send groceries, clothing and/or home essentials vouchers to recipients across the community. Each recipient can decide which retailer they will spend their voucher with, giving them the power and the dignity of choice. Huggg also provides 7 day a week support to both its client organisations and recipients.
To find out more about best practice when it comes to delivery of the Household Support Fund, click here.
