Dates: 7-8 October 2024
Location: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Wrapping Up the 2nd Commons Affordable Housing Sprint!
We were thrilled to gather in Newcastle for our second-ever Commons Affordable Housing Sprint for two days of brainstorming, creating impactful solutions with a dedicated focus on Affordable Housing.
Earlier this year, we announced the Commons Affordable Housing Program, in which the Nonprofit Community Team and the UK Housing Team at Salesforce partnered to address the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations.
This special community has articulated the longstanding need for collaboration on technology solutions among UK social housing associations so the grounds were set for bringing this community together to innovate collectively.
Housing Associations come together to build solutions, October 2024
Bringing together Housing Associations across the UK
A remarkable 61 attendees joined us in person, representing an array of folks working within the Social Housing and Salesforce ecosystems, including End Users, Administrators, Developers, Architects, etc from Housing Associations and Industry Partners from the UK and surrounding regions. A group of housing associations gathered together like this earlier this year in March (see the overview from the March sprint!) with the specific intention to come together to innovate and create open-source solutions together.
Thank you to everyone who joined and dedicated precious time away from their daily responsibilities. Your commitment to sharing your skills made this event truly exceptional. Thank you for making our collective effort such a success.
Common Themes - what the issues the Housing Associations are focusing on during the Sprint, October 2024
After a fantastic networking breakfast, Cori O’Brien (Director, Commons Community) kicked off the Sprint, sharing her immense gratitude for the work the community is doing to support each other in the region and spend time at the Sprint. Alongside Cori, we had Thomas Lancefield ** (Housing Lead EMEA) and Etienne De Klerk (Housing Solutions Team) extend a warm welcome to everyone, emphasising the significance of the group and the need to unite Housing Associations in developing shared solutions.
Overall, the energy in the room was buzzing and folks were eager to get started identifying challenges and getting their hands on building solutions. Let’s get into what was worked on during the next two days…
Check out the 6 community-led projects that participated:
In alphabetical order
1. NEW: AI for Complaints
Some complaint records can have hundreds of data points which can be very time-consuming and difficult for a colleague to summarise. This results in a large amount of time spent on admin. Sometimes, the data captured initially is not in a suitable format for presenting back to customers. Using AI, this group plans to professionalise and standardise responses.
Work performed at this sprint:
- Using flow to make prompts dynamic.
- Build flow into flow into our environment, and created new templates.
- Created two field gen prompts on complaint reason and complaint findings.
- Refined our prompts to use them to create email prompts, experimenting with different parameters (e.g. reading age, Dutch language, length of output).
- Validated these using other tools / native speakers and were pleased with the results. These were tested on real cases with anonymised data.
- Tried to create a Contact Summary Flex Prompt, with mixed results. The group worked on refining the flow, which improved the results although there is still work to be done. We documented the steps for doing this piece of work.
Next steps:
- To tidy up the documentation we have started and aim to publish it so that it is available for other Housing Associations to use.
The AI for Complaints group in action during the Sprint, October 2024
2. NEW: Awaab’s Law
A bit of context: Awaab’s Law came about following the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak from Rochdale who died due to a respiratory condition brought on by extensive mould in the social housing he was living in. Despite the family reporting mould to the landlord, no action had been taken to treat the issue in the three years between the notification of mould and Awaab’s death. Awaab’s Law will require social housing landlords to adhere to strict time limits to address dangerous hazards such as damp and mold in their properties, and forms part of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act.
The problem that this team was tackling is that Awaab’s Law covers 29 distinct hazards, each with different requirements, urgency levels, and priorities. These hazards delt with individually would require multiple handling processes, making management complex. The risk is over-complication of process and dealing with numerous edge cases individually, creating “noise”, difficulty of adopting, solution over complication and poor reporting.
Work performed at this sprint:
- The group wanted to focus on how to overcome the challenge of the unknown. Awaab’s Law is so new for us and we quickly identified that we are working with different understanding due to the complexity.
- The group created a simplified blue print for the minimum required to log and comply with Awaab’s Law.
Next steps:
- To produce the documentation around best practises.
3. NEW: Housing Arrears Management
A bit of context: Arrears management refers to the strategies and actions taken by property managers or landlords to address and collect overdue rent payments.
This team joined together to start this group after identifying a need to build out a centralised Arrears Collection Process. The goal is to build out a data model, to look at creating automations to take away the manual steps and standardise the process across Housing Associations and then create documentation and provide best practice guidance for it’s use.
Work performed at this sprint:
- Made great progress with the build; finished the object model & fields, created BRE Flows, created Flow Automation, and created Action Plans.
- All the above is mapped out in a User Process Map we created that shows the journey a user will go on to manage tenant arrears and the config that has been built to support this is documented here.
Next steps:
- Refine Business Rules Engine and add in Payment Integration for automated collections.
4. Housing Community Self-Serve
This group is looking to explore self-serve options for the Housing Community.
Work performed at this sprint:
- Progressed the self-serve portal as a proof of concept including: Landing page, My home, My Payments, My Repairs (inc. case deflection), and My Enquiries.
- Progressed the shared document expanded on assumptions and bulked out sections including: My Home, My Agreement, De-registration / Account Closure, My Payments, and Knowledge Base.
Next steps:
- Continue to develop document & dev org, begin collaborating with other groups to implement their solutions into the portal.
5. Housing Complaints
This group focused on using Salesforce to build an end-to-end complaint management system, including delivering to the ombudsman.
Work performed at this sprint:
- Created a new record type, page layout, path discussions, data model, and object model.
- Researched different ways the path could progress a complaint through the 3 stages.
- Established what relationships each object needs to have.
- Built out the data and object model further.
- Updated our “How to” configuration guide.
Next steps:
- Collaborate virtually, sort out Milestones and Entitlements in our org.
Housing Complaints group in action during the Sprint, October 2024
6. NEW: Voids Process
A bit of context: In the context of social housing, a void period refers to the time when a property is unoccupied between two tenancies. During this void period, the property isn’t generating any rental income, which can have financial implications for social housing providers.
Every Housing Associate has slightly different processes for the voids process; the goal of this group was to try to keep their work on addressing the voids process fairly generic to be applicable to as many associations as possible.
Work performed at this sprint:
- Created Flows that generate relevant cases and related Tasks where appropriate.
- Record Updates based on statuses.
Next steps:
- Review what has been created and try to cutomise it for Riverside’s void processes.