The University of Essex is a diverse campus with many international students. When the earthquake hit Türkiye and Syria in February 2023 – their campus community, with close connections to those effected by the earthquakes, they wanted to come together to support the people affected by the earthquakes.
The initial request came from the University’s Turkish Society who reached out to Essex Food asking if donations could be made in their catering outlets. Donation boxes were considered but to provide a more seamless approach, the idea of using self-service tills was raised.
The plan
Essex Food knew they had to act quickly and wanted to make the donating process digital for an easy and intuitive customer experience. The team came up with the idea that they could very quickly amend the self-service kiosk mapping to add a donation button onto the till map screen in their Roost and Buffalo Joes outlets.
Hayley Nice, Essex Food Administrator, comments 'It was the same process as creating a till map and adding product buttons to a map layer but instead of products we created £1-£10 donation buttons. It didn’t take very long at all to set up and the data was easily extracted using a product sales summary report. We then made a credit card donation on the UNHCR website to pass on the money raised.'
The result
From February to the end of March, University of Essex are proud to have raised £751 for UNHCR, in fact they have been so successful that they are going to continue to the end of the summer term.
Elisa Aylott, Head of Catering and Events comments, “It has been great to work in collaboration with Uniware EPoS system to implement such a diverse request. Their flexible approach has enabled us to respond to the request in a quick and efficient way and it enabled our community to take part in helping those affected by the earthquakes.”
Paul Whitcombe, Account Manager, Uniware, comments ‘Uniware Cloud has a great amount of flexibility making it an easy tool to accommodate our clients individual needs and can quickly respond to changes.’
This was a new and unique way that University of Essex wanted to use the Uniware system, it has shown that not all EPoS systems are built the same and our clients love that they have a system with the agility to meet their individual needs.
For more information on how a Uniware solution can help you, please contact us today info@uniware.co.uk