SafeNight: A mobile web hotel-finder and crowd-funding service for domestic violence agencies

Domestic violence (DV) agencies and their supporters have a responsibility to protect and serve women and children who are being abused. One of their primary areas of support is the provision of shelter for clients in crisis. Clearly, the women and children they serve need a safe place to stay, away from violence. But DV agencies in the state of California are also required by law1 to provide shelter in order to receive state funding.

When a woman calls a shelter, she is often in the middle of a volatile situation—she must be discreet, and she has very little time to speak to the agency, describe her needs, and find out if the shelter can locate a safe place for her to stay. At the same time, DV agencies typically have very low cash reserves, and when there is no available room for shelter, they often have no way to pay for emergency hotel rooms. All too frequently, they are left with no choice but to turn clients away in their most dire moment of need.

While common, this scenario illustrates challenging shortcomings in the current system of support for those experiencing domestic violence in California:

The shelter does not have resources to provide safe shelter when their own space is full, leaving clients vulnerable to significant potential risk.

Individual philanthropic donors may well be moved to target their support to meet this specific demand; however, there is no quick and seamless way to alert them of the need nor to process their just-in-time gift.

Further, both clients that are turned away and supporters that are not asked for funding represent huge lost opportunities to capture data that would strengthen California’s desperately under-resourced safety net. This data would not only help DV agencies to identify the needs of abused women and shape their services to meet demonstrated needs, it would also allow them to better advocate for private funding to underwrite these services.

TechSoup Global, an organization dedicated to building the capacity of social benefit organizations, has been working closely with DV agencies in California over the past 12 years: understanding their operational challenges, assessing their technology needs, and providing trainings and donated technology products to meet those needs. One outcome of this work is the identification of the need for a technology solution or service that will allow DV agencies to better serve their clients and remedy the problems described above. In collaboration with AidMatrix and through the generous support of Microsoft, Caravan Studios (a division of TechSoup Global) is now designing and developing a technology service, SafeNight, to meet that need. SafeNight will be piloted in San Diego County, with the plan to roll out to three additional counties in California over the course of the next 12 months and then to additional states.

SafeNight: Reducing Incidents of Domestic Violence

1 The Domestic Violence Center Act (1997) provides state funding to DV agencies as long as they “provide shelter; remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; provide access to temporary housing and food facilities,” among other provisions. According to the Nonprofit Finance Fund, state funding remains the primary source of funding (on average 85% of revenue) for the majority of DV agencies in California.

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SafeNight is a secure service (both mobile and web-based) that will enable authorized staff at registered DV agencies to find discounted hotel rooms and crowdsource funds to pay for them when shelter space is unavailable. SafeNight will provide DV agencies with a mechanism to quickly connect to supporters who have downloaded a mobile app and have requested to be notified if a client is in need of a bed and no space is available in any local shelter. The supporter would then make a payment to cover the cost of a hotel room.

Users can download the app to their smart phones. Through a registration process, the user associates themselves with their chosen DV agency or geography, and indicates the level at which they will be able to provide support and the frequency with which they wish to be asked for support (e.g., once a month, once every six months). The user provides their credit card information, so the financial transaction is seamless. Through partnerships with third-party online hotel-finding services, SafeNight will negotiate discounted rates, and will have real-time access to available space that meets the clients’ needs.

Furthermore, every query to the system is logged. Whether the DV staff member was able to find shelter for the client or not, the request and the result are captured. This is important because it allows DV agencies and their supporters to gain a clearer view of which services are most requested and when, when they are able to meet their clients’ needs and not, and how they can alter their services to improve their success rate.

Capturing Data to Better Serve Women and Children in NeedIn the near term, the SafeNight mobile web service will improve the ability of DV agencies to meet their clients’ most pressing need—the need for shelter. Because of the taboo surrounding domestic violence and the severe risk of retaliation by the abuser, the implications are extremely serious—sometimes even fatal—when a potential client is turned away from a DV agency. Aside from the very real threat of violence, DV survivors who cannot find shelter may become reluctant to seek assistance again and they may miss out on other needed supported services offered in conjunction with the shelter, such as legal assistance, mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, trauma assessment for children, or vocational services.

In the longer term, the SafeNight benefits the DV sector as a whole, as well as the broader state social safety net. By incorporating the ability to take donations from self-identified supporters, we are enabling real-time, micro-philanthropy that is critical to meeting clients’ needs at a time when public funds are dwindling and demand for services is on the rise. And by capturing this data, we are deepening and broadening the scope of our knowledge of the needs of abused women and children. We will be able to use this knowledge to analyze and improve the services that agencies provide, making sure that clients’ needs are met, and the agencies’ resources are used efficiently and effectively.

Ultimately, SafeNight gives visibility into the data of the women DV agencies serve. Without this data to illuminate their needs, we, as a community, are making policy and bestowing funding in the dark.

ContactFor more information about SafeNight, contact: Marnie Webb CEO, Caravan Studios mwebb@caravanstudios.org

Learn more about Caravan Studios: http://caravanstudios.tumblr.com

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