Neighbourly
The Situation
Local community projects want corporate sponsors (and vice versa)
As part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments, large companies want to support projects that have a positive impact on local communities, but struggle to find reliable partners to work with.
At the same time, local community groups need funding, but lack the means or connections to approach large companies for grants.
The Problem
High profile attempts to connect corporations and local groups struggled
In many ways, the project was a huge success, funding projects that supported over 400 local communities and schools.
In other ways, the programme faced impossible challenges. The vast majority of the over 120,000 funding proposals were not successful, leaving 99.7% of applicants disappointed.
Sifting through the huge number of proposals was also a headache for Pepsi, especially as community groups often lack the infrastructure and manpower to put together a thorough grant application.
The Task
Creating a two-way marketplace for corporations and community groups
Inspired by media coverage of Pepsi’s experience, entrepreneur Nick Davies drew up an extensive business plan for a two-way digital marketplace to match corporate donors with local community initiatives.
Aware of how many corporate social responsibility initiatives descend into mere tick-box exercises, Nick wanted to create a platform that not only made the process easier, but also enabled projects that made a real difference to communities.
After meeting with Rocketmaker’s CEO Richard Godfrey, Nick asked Rocketmakers to build the first version of his new marketplace platform.
From our very first meeting it was clear that Rocketmakers understood our ambition and were able to support that. They are a good fun bunch of guys and it has to be that way, if you’re going to work in partnership with a team they really have to live and breathe the product through that design phase.
Our Approach
Catering to the needs of two radically different user groups
The new Neighbourly platform would need to provide an excellent user experience to two very divergent groups.
For community group leaders, the Rocketmakers design team created “pages” based on Facebook pages, with a user-friendly, easy to manage user interface.
Corporate CSR managers needed access to much more data and an organised way to display it. The design team created dashboards, and a search function which could locate community projects by geographic area, tags, budget, size, materials, and manpower. Although a common feature today, the use of geospatial queries was groundbreaking at the time.
The front-end was built using Durandal, an open source framework written in JavaScipt. Then a cutting edge technology, Durandal was one of the first frameworks to facilitate the creation of Single Page Applications.
The back-end was built using .NET, which remains an important part of Rocketmakers’ tech stack today.
Fanbloodytastic!!!! Brilliant work : )
The Result
Launching a successful startup and preparing it for further growth
Rocketmakers design and development turned Nick’s vision of a double-marketplace CSR platform into a reality, and helped Neighbourly navigate through the startup phase to become the successful enterprise it is today.
In addition to building Neighbourly’s initial software, Rocketmakers also helped Neighbourly recruit its first in-house tech team, training them on the new system and turning over responsibility for maintenance and further development a few years later.
The Impact
Launching one company and reshaping another
Today, Neighbourly is a global leader in CSR, and partners with some of the biggest companies in the world including Coca-Cola, Penguin, and Marks & Spencer. While the technology that powers Neighbourly has changed several times since 2014, the first Rocketmakers version created the opportunity for it to become the company it is today.
Just a few years into its own corporate journey, Rocketmakers was also profoundly shaped by its time working with Neighbourly. This was Rocketmakers’ first Tech for Good project - a category that has been an important part of what Rocketmakers does ever since. Rocketmakers was also inspired by Neighbourly to become certified as a B Corp, something it first accomplished in January 2023.
