Membership charity organisation for homelessness services in England uses Conga to award more than £6 million of funding to frontline homelessness charities affected during the pandemic
London, UK – Conga, a leader in revenue operations management, today announced that Homeless Link, a national membership charity for organisations working directly with people who become homeless in England, is using Conga solutions – including Conga Composer, Conga Batch and Conga Sign – to optimise its COVID-19 Homelessness Response Fund.
With around 800 members, Homeless Link works with the homelessness sector to improve services and to end homelessness. It also works with the Government to improve the policies that affect people experiencing homelessness. As charities face a predicted £12.4 billion loss of income as a result of the pandemic, Homeless Link launched its COVID-19 Homelessness Response Fund in May 2020 to distribute £6 million of emergency funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to homelessness organisations across England, enabling them to adapt and expand their services in response to the pandemic.
Built on the Salesforce platform, Homeless Link implemented Conga’s end-to-end solution to help collect applications, carry out assessments and create legally-binding documents for successful grantees. Conga Composer is used to help with the grant decision process, by automatically generating grant assessment summaries for its independent grants panel. Conga Batch, an add-on to Composer, creates customised grant offers and legal agreements for successful grantees, while Conga Sign securely and effortlessly captures electronic signatures.
“Homelessness didn’t stop with the pandemic and the emergency funding was critical to helping homelessness organisations avoid closure, service cuts and staff redundancies during these uncertain times,” said Matt Harrison, Deputy CEO at Homeless Link. “With such a short amount of time to get funding into the hands of homelessness organisations, as well as our entire workforce working remotely, it was an ambitious project. However, Conga has been critical to streamlining the grant process and helping us to distribute essential funding that will help to continue providing critical support to frontline services.”
It took just four weeks from being asked by the Government to distribute funding to getting the emergency grants out to homelessness organisations. Since implementing Conga, Homeless Link has processed 300 applications, 300 assessments and awarded more than 130 emergency grants to frontline homelessness charities so that they can continue providing their vital services. The membership charity was awarded a further £5.5 million and its second round of funding has seen a further 34 grants distributed to homelessness organisations.