Plus Dane: Empowering tenants to find support through data driven outreach

Lightning Reach partner, Plus Dane Housing, is a housing association which supports over 14,000 households across Cheshire and Merseyside, and provides a broad range of crisis assistance. As cost-of-living pressures mount and funding becomes tighter, organisation has had to rethink how it delivers support, ensuring their limited resources go further, without leaving tenants behind. We spoke to Jade Morris, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Plus Dane Housing about the role of Lightning Reach in meeting their tenants’ needs.

Meeting high demand for crisis help

Like many housing associations, Plus Dane has seen a sharp rise in requests for help with essentials, from food to furniture to fuel. Many tenants are turning to the organisation not just for housing, but for holistic support navigating financial hardship. Plus Dane maintains both a mitigation fund (delivered via partners) and a hardship fund for direct customer support, including food and fuel vouchers. However, with limited funding and more repeat customers (especially for big-ticket needs like white goods) Plus Dane needed a way to widen access to external support without overloading staff or duplicating effort.

Enabling tenant support at speed

The team saw Lightning Reach as a way to help tenants self-serve and take ownership of accessing support. Jade explained that their staff were already well-versed in helping people apply for grants, so the platform felt like a natural extension of their work, allowing them to scale their impact without scaling workloads. On average, tenants were matched to over 30 schemes, hugely extending the variety of support and advice available for users after they had reached their limit of internal funds.

Jade explained that a key benefit for Plus Dane is the speed at which users are connected to support. In the past, Plus Dane users faced significant wait times to speak to the Welfare team. Lightning Reach enables instant, self-serve access to financial support (with the average Plus Dane user taking only 11 minutes to complete the process) helping users bypass long wait times for welfare advice.

“Everything's at the click of a button now and people want answers immediately. It’s really useful to have a self-serve tool where people can get their support options, check their benefits, and in some cases be £1000 better off!”

Using data to reach the right tenants

Another benefit of using the Lightning Reach portal as a tool to support their residents is the rich, real-time data they receive about their tenants. Whilst Plus Dane did hold some tenant data in the past, the team often found that it could be inaccurate or missing data as tenants were reluctant to hand over their information for fear that it would somehow impact their tenancy options.  

Through Lightning Reach, Plus Dane tenants complete a profile and are encouraged regularly to ensure that their information is up to date, in order that they see the most up to date support options. In turn, this increases the quality of data visible to Plus Dane through the Lightning Reach dashboards. 

The dashboards allows the team to:

• Understand the demographics and needs of their tenants

• See what support is being accessed and where gaps may be

• Optimise resource allocation and engagement strategies

“The reporting dashboard is really good and really important - we like to see that there's a diverse population of our tenants accessing the portal. It gives us a good indication of where we need to fine-tune our resources.”

Plus Dane has used data to inform targeted SMS campaigns to priority groups, such as lone parents and people with disabilities. These messages, which included direct sign-up links, significantly increased engagement in support, and data shows the efforts are successfully reaching those with the highest needs:

• 87% of Plus Dane tenants engaged through the Lightning Reach portal have under £1,000 in monthly income

• 70% are in debt

• 88% are receiving benefits

Looking ahead

The impact for Plus Dane is clear. Lightning Reach enables Plus Dane to use real-time data to maximise the way they use their resources, and give their tenants fast, wraparound support.

Join us

Want to find out more about how Lightning Reach can help your organisation? Get in touch via www.lightningreach.org/partners