Transcript
Source: The Sunday Times

NEW FUNDING WILL HELP SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR SAVE MORE LIVES

It was another blustery day on Dublin’s Howth Head when volunteer rescue
climber Robin Blandford got the call to join his team in a search for a missing
person.

“We had some sketchy information, but I remember thinking if only we had better
data from previous missions, we might be able to identify trends in where and
how these incidents were happening and target our searches more effectively,”
says Robin.

It was a ‘eureka’ moment. Within three months, Robin had left a well-paid
technology role with Reuters and established Decisions for Heroes, an innovative
web application which records and analyses rescue operations so that teams
can spot patterns and trends in the incidents that they respond to, optimise their
response and, ultimately, save more lives.

This week, Decisions for Heroes has been announced as one of ten recipients of
the 2011 Arthur Guinness Fund, which will see some €650,000 invested in social
entrepreneurial initiatives around the country.

Decisions for Heroes combines cutting edge technology with Robin’s background
in digital media engineering and vast experience as a volunteer sea cliff rescue
climber and unit training officer with the Irish Coast Guard.

“I started out just using Google Earth and a very basic prototype for the software
and got it out to a few Irish rescue teams who really like it. Over time, it has
developed into an application with a very easy user interface that can be
accessed by a browser or an iphone,” says Robin.

Today, hundreds of Irish rescue teams are subscribing to Decisions for Heroes
software, including the Irish Coast Guard. It has also been used in places as far
flung as Haiti and Christchurch, New Zealand by rescue teams managing the
response to the devastating earthquakes that hit both countries.

While there are other types of rescue software available, they often fail to
integrate rescue mission information in a way which makes it meaningful for
teams, says Robin.

“Decisions for Heroes allows rescue teams to record weather conditions on-site,
create casualty profiles, offer intelligence on accident hotspots in a particular
locality, compare injury trends, and measure intervention frequencies. It can also
filter your data for information that will help you rapidly respond to an incident.”

Decisions for Heroes also makes the job of mission coordinators a whole lot
easier. Thanks to the software, they can track the hundreds of tasks being done
by their team at any given time; get an instant picture of a team’s operational
readiness; adapt training to match the team’s requirements, and ensure that
qualifications, licences and certificates are up to date.

“What rescuers really want is data that helps them make their operation faster
and more efficient, and it’s this, at the end of the day, that helps to save more
lives,” says Robin.

This unique form of social innovation is exactly why Decisions for Heroes was
chosen as one of ten Arthur Guinness Fund awardees in 2011, says Tanya
Clarke, Marketing Director, Diageo Ireland.

“Through the fund, we have encountered some amazing social entrepreneurs
who possess a business head and a social heart. In the face of a tough
economic environment, they are pushing ahead to drive positive social change in
the communities in which they operate.

“The aim of the Arthur Guinness Fund is to springboard them to the next level
and we have certainly seen the positive impact the fund is having on the projects
it is supporting, not alone through the financial investment but through the
business mentoring it provides,” says Tanya.

The Arthur Guinness Fund was established in 2009, a year which marked the
250th anniversary of the Guinness brand and sparked a global celebration of
Arthur Guinness, the brewing entrepreneur behind the Guinness brand and one
of the world’s original philanthropists.

The fund is an innovative investment vehicle designed to further Arthur
Guinness’s philanthropic spirit and legacy. It supports social entrepreneurs, both
in Ireland and around the world, in taking their initiatives to the next level and
making a real difference to the people around them.

Guinness made an initial investment of €2.5 million to the fund, a sum which
has since made a significant and positive transformational impact on local
communities across Ireland. In April 2010, it awarded €1 million to ten Irish social
entrepreneurs with each project receiving €100,000 in financial support, as well
as a package of practical support and mentoring over a two year period.

This year, Guinness is investing a further €650,000 and this week announced the
recipients of the 2011 Arthur Guinness Fund.

They include Hand on Heart Enterprises which creates dynamic jobs for people
with disabilities; Irish Men’s Sheds Association which helps to reduce the social
isolation of men, particularly those who are unemployed, and Fumbally Exchange
which helps sole traders, the unemployed, and down-sizing/restructured
businesses a space in which they can work, grow and create. In addition, H2
Learning, which provides an alternative learning opportunity for adults seeking to
up-skill in maths, will benefit from the fund; as will Turn2Me, an on-line interactive
support community for those with mental health problems.

Other recipients are U-Casadh, an organisation which provides opportunities
to actively engage ex-prisoners in learning, work and enterprise; Fundit, which
helps individuals to support the creative sector through crowd funding; West Cork
Rapid Response which save lives by mobilising local voluntary resources, and
Vivartes, an interactive, over-the-web platform that enables patients in care to
remain connected to their family and friends.

One of the most progressive aspects of the Arthur Guinness Fund is that it not
only provides financial support to the emerging social entrepreneurship sector
in Ireland; awardees also get access to practical support and expertise from the
Diageo network and the Social Entrepreneurs Ireland alumni network, including
access to their workshops and other events.

Investment by the Arthur Guinness Fund in the Decisions for Heroes will mean
Robin Blandford and his team can work to enhance their technology, and secure
big national contracts with rescue operations in other countries.

“We’ll be looking at how better to capture and analyse data, improving our
statistics and charts, and focusing on predictive analysis,” says Robin. “We’re
also planning to broaden our mobile applications, and launch a service which will
allow rescue teams on site to send real-time images and audio data of a rescue
situation back to their command post.

“We also want to have the ability to act as a central repository for data from
around the world which would be a critical service to offer when you consider that
coroners’ enquiries often don’t happen for a number of years after the accident.”

This week Decisions for Heroes will go some way towards that vision when it
launches an integrated online file storage for Irish rescue teams, allowing them
to collate images, documentation and other data relating to specific incidents. It
will also go live with software that allows rescue teams to ensure that equipment
inspections are up to date.

All in a day’s work for a local hero!

For more information on Decisions for Heroes, visit
www.decisionsforheroes.com. To learn more about the Arthur Guinness Fund, go
to www.guinness.com.