Samana
Creating an integrated digital platform for a health service organization
Digitalization of a non profit organization
Samana strives to improve the quality of the lives of people with a chronic disease or people who have a chronic careneed. They do this by organising activities and travels in concert with a host of local departments of volunteers and caregivers.
Organising such activities and travels for over 30.000 volunteers in more than 1.100 local departments requires a lot of coordination. Until 2016, all the administration of these initiatives was performed manually. For example, written registrations for holidays first had to find their way to the qualified person at Samana, who then had to enter the data into the system. It became clear that Samana was in need of a thorough digitization of their processes.
An additional challenge was that most of the members of Samana are older adults, which has implications both for user experience design and the digitalisation strategy.
Collaboration as partners
The collaboration started when Samana was in need of a hosting partner for their website. Later, when Samana was seeking to digitise their processes, they consulted Lemon, their hosting partner for advice on how to approach their upcoming trajectory.
The discussions led to a more intense collaboration and starting from 2016 Samana started gradually digitising their organisation together with Lemon as their 360 degree IT partner.
In the following years, Lemon developed a web application that manages the entire administrative process of Samana and its initiatives, ranging from brochures, registrations and confirmations of hotels to the distribution of materials. In this way, in addition to building Samana's own website, Lemon was able to support the digitalisation of the ‘Continue to Travel' and 'Local Action' initiatives.
Continuous development
After the first successful projects were delivered, a partnership model was set up that allowed Lemon and Samana to continuously expand and improve the digital landscape of Samana. In this way, Samana could anticipate the evolving needs of and insights about the Samana members throughout their digitization journey. In this way, for example, some features were added to foresee printables for integrated optional offline administrative processes that were still required to reach the most senior members of Samana.
Some recent additions are a tool that calculates the subsidies of the local departments and a lottery tool that could replace an important fundraiser for Samana during covid times.
A platform that engages volunteers and decreases overhead
During a partnership of over 6 years, Lemon and Samana have successfully collaborated on the realisation of a digitisation of Samana’s administration.
To give an idea of the administrative overhead that could be reduced as a result of this: the application that supports the ‘Continue to travel’ and ‘Local Activity’ initiatives currently has over 20.000 registered and active users and processes a total of 13.000 travel requests, 20.000 activities and 7.000 user registrations per year.
