Services employed
Web
Shared Lives | Digital Hub
Shared Lives, by Manchester City Council, supports adults and young people who need extra support by matching them with trained, approved carers. Shared Lives offers personalised support rooted in real relationships: from full-time care to day support and respite. Our role was to create a digital space to help carers feel more connected. The objectives included building a safe, practical digital community hub for carers, and creating a place for carers to ask questions, share experience, find relevant support and build a stronger connection with the service. It also had to establish a foundation to allow the platform to scale across Greater Manchester
Insight and strategy
While the work can be incredibly rewarding, carers told the Shared Lives team that they would benefit from a peer support platform that would allow them to connect, ask questions and share advice. From a specific co-production session, we gathered insights from carers to find there was a clear need for a stronger sense of community and a simple way for carers to ask questions and share experiences.
Using this insight, we worked with Manchester City Council to create the Shared Lives Digital Hub: a fully custom progressive web app, built around carers’ needs, council governance and future regional rollout. It has been shaped through co-production, tested with the people who will actually use it and designed to keep improving after launch.
Our approach
Our approach was to create a fully custom progressive web app (PWA) rather than a generic out of the box forum or app-store-only product. It is installable on desktop and mobile as well as via all browsers, supports notification-centre alerts and is structured for public-sector delivery: standard carer users, borough-level council leads and super admins.The project is deliberately phased. Rather than trying to launch every potential feature at once, we built a scalable foundation shaped by workshops, wireframes, design reviews and co-production testing. The long-term ambition is a broader digital hub that can support carers, improve access to information, strengthen retention and create measurable social value across Shared Lives in Greater Manchester.
The innovation is not just the technology; it is the co-produced, phased model that turns carers’ lived experience into a sustainable digital hub for social care.
Implementation and delivery
Delivery has followed a user-centred process – from creating the project charter and specification, to developing wireframes and reviewing them in person with the Shared Lives team and carers. Following review, we applied the existing Shared Lives branding, then moved into design review and build.
Technically, the team chose a progressive web app to make the experience easy to install, as well as access via a browser, on both desktop and mobile without requiring an app-store release. The platform includes discussion forums, topic creation, notification-centre alerts and a three-tier permission model: carers as standard users, council leads with borough-level content management and super admins for Manchester City Council and Carbon Creative.The main challenge was balancing a wide long-term vision with a realistic first release. Carbon Creative solved this by creating a scalable, permissions-based foundation and launching with forum spaces for resources, support, events and volunteering, allowing real user behaviour to guide the next phase.
Results and impact
The result is a practical digital foundation for connection, peer support and long-term social impact. The Shared Lives Digital Hub applies technology to a deeply human challenge. So, rather than using an off-the-shelf community tool, we used real experiences to shape a tailored solution that will improve connection amongst carers in Greater Manchester.
We are now looking to start phase 2 in the near future, and the addition of new features will be shaped by the current users of the app.