Our founding team had decades of combined experience in helping the public: across designing national charity services, front line NHS in mental health and general practice and local charity work. Across these different settings, we'd all seen the same challenges: people struggling to find the right help, and charities and public services under growing pressure to meet demand.
Many solutions already existed to tackle these problems, including directories and list - and whilst they can be useful, it was clear that a massive problem remained: millions of people each year still failed to find the right help, even though these resources existed. We believed there was a clear need for innovation: new strategies for building data on what support exist, and ways of helping people navigate and access support.
We set out to build something more than a directory: technology that can understand people's needs in their own words, guide them through the complexity of finding support, and help organisations manage enquiries, make referrals and understand what happens next. Just as importantly, we wanted to make these capabilities available where people already turn for help - whether that's a charity, a council, an employer, an advice service or a company supporting customers in vulnerable circumstances.
From the outset, we believed that a support network of this scale could only be built in partnership with experts across the sector - and with the people who rely on it.
We began early pilots 2020, working with the Trussell national food bank network, alongside Citizens Advice and local charities in the North of England. We continued this model of collaboration, working with specialist advice charities across the West Midlands, and Birmingham City Council.
Today, we work with national charities, local authorities and commercial organisations to bring Step's support network and digital tools into more of the places where people seek help.
See how Step works
Toby leads Step's technical vision and organisational strategy. His background in systems and service design includes work with national charities and the financial services sector, alongside experience volunteering in local communities.
Adam brings experience in front-line NHS mental health care to Step's work with health and social care partners. Their insights help shape our tools and approach to supporting people with mental and physical health needs.
Kit has led digital projects connecting people with alternative healthcare practitioners internationally. His background in linguistics and programming informs the natural language processing behind Step's data service.
There's no single way to keep the millions of data points about the charity sector we have up to date. We use a mix of human research, AI assisted research, web scraping, building local networks to gather infromation direclty from providers, and integrating feedback from people accessing help. We also continuosly undertake quality assurance sampling of our data to provide managed service level agreements on information accuracy to our larger partners.
We take data security exceptionally seriously - for a detailed overview of our security posture and approach to security and GDPR, you can read more in our security page.
Step is a UK limited company, built to deliver social impact through technology.
Creating a support network of this scale required significant upfront investment in data, technology and infrastructure, with no guarantee of success. Grant funding alone could not provide the level of investment we needed, so we chose a company structure that allowed us to raise funding and make use of relevant government investment incentives.
Our purpose has always been to improve access to support. We reinvest income into developing the service, improving the quality and reach of our network, and making our tools more useful to the organisations and people who rely on them.
We never charge the public to get help, and whever possible, we make Step's tools available to smaller non-profits for a free or heavily subsidzed rate. We are funded through licence and partnership agreements with larger organisations, including national charities, local authorities and commercial companies who support the public.