About Vintage Vibes

Vintage Vibes work to tackle isolation and loneliness among over 60s in Edinburgh. They create long lasting one-on-one friendships with volunteers to offer support, companionship and help lonely older people be more socially connected and active in their community.

How they use Makerble

Previously, Vintage Vibes were using spreadsheets to manage their work and onboarding was a lengthy process. It was a “faff”, time consuming and there was a lot of room for human error, human error that would later cost them if they lost a vital piece of information for reporting.

They were “keen to be in a position to scale”, so they moved their operations to Makerble.

Makerble’s impact on the day-to-day

Time

Time is a valuable resource, particularly for an organisation reliant on volunteer person-hours. Makerble’s software has eliminated a variety of time-wasters for Vintage Vibes. It has minimised the space for human error and done away with duplication by eliminating the need for repeated manual data entry. 

By having all their information centralised, Vintage Vibes can now avoid time-wasting miscommunications and ensure that the right volunteers are assigned to the right beneficiaries.

Breadth

Vintage Vibes uses Makerble across their entire organisation. Makerble is the only system they need and it is there for them at every step. Previously, Vintage Vibes used a variety of systems that could do one specific thing. They found that no other system was tailored to their specific needs in the same way as Makerble.

Makerble’s impact on staff and volunteers

Productivity

Thanks to Makerble the staff and volunteers across the whole team at Vintage Vibes can operate with independence and confidence. In turn, the productivity of supervisors has increased because they have fewer “where’s this?” and “how do I do that?” conversations. 

Training new staff to use Makerble takes a couple of half-days, whereas previously training had to be spread out over several weeks because the systems they used were not neat and intuitive. 

Personal benefits

Makerble’s social media style interface brings the team together. Even when working from home, the timeline makes each individual feel involved without the need for constant meetings.

Impact tracking has helped reframe the work in the minds of Vintage Vibes staff. Of course, they know how important their work is, but sometimes it helps to see it. It’s also a nice feeling when you realise you’re doing more than you thought.

Makerble’s impact on fundraising

Before Makerble, Vintage Vibes were not keeping track of their event attendance. Their funders did not ask for it and they did not think it was important. But they have found value in unexpected insight. 

Now data collection and impact tracking are an inherent part of what Vintage Vibes do. This means that their funding applications can be specific because they have all of the relevant data right at their fingertips. The event attendance that they didn’t used to keep track of is now an important part of their funding bids.

Since starting to use Makerble, they have been getting new funders and more funding from old funders, because they have confidence in their pitch and underlying numbers.