Role: Student Service Designer (team of 5)

Partner/Client: The Big Issue

Industry: Social Impact - Homelessness

Project: The Big Impact

Year: 2022

Fostering community engagement and financial support for The Big Issue vendors through new digital means.

This 5 month project explored the ways of innovating & better articulating The Big Issue's 30 year street sales value exchange, aimed at both existing and new audiences.

The Big Issue’s early success lay in giving people experiencing homelessness a dignified way to earn through street sales. But with the decline of the high street, digital disruption, and shifting behaviours, vendors now face reduced visibility and opportunities. Post-COVID, the challenge has only grown as community interactions, and magazine sales, have declined.

The brief was to create a digital proposition that keeps vendors at the heart of the exchange while exploring new ways to involve communities and sustain support.

Our response was The Big Impact - a community-driven platform that creates valuable connections between vendors, supporters, and organisations. This is achieved through transparent, meaningful actions such as collaborative community funding for a vendor’s individual needs and goals, and a flexible resource pool from which organisations can support and recruit willing vendors for work opportunities.

Discover

Our research drew on multiple methods: interviews with staff, vendors, and customers; document reviews and secondary research into UK homelessness and The Big Issue’s history; and shadowing vendors in their daily routines. This holistic approach revealed a complex system of interactions and barriers. To make sense of it, we distilled our findings into three “mini-worlds”:

Information Distribution

  • Format: The print magazine cannot compete with the speed and accessibility of digital news, with its original younger audience now consuming content online.

  • Reward: Buying the magazine often feels less impactful than more direct acts of giving. Customers lack trust in where their money goes, leaving the transaction opaque.

  • Transparency: People want visible updates on the vendors they support, with progress tracking now expected in a digital-first world.

UK Language & Culture

  • Language: Stereotypes around “homelessness” obscure vendors’ individuality, creating emotional disconnect.

  • Migration: Non-English-speaking vendors face implicit bias, often going unseen or unheard, which limits their opportunities and aspirations.

TBI Company Culture

  • Enterprising: While TBI has diversified beyond the magazine, this risks losing focus on its core mission and vendors. Digital initiatives remain unsustainable and threaten the valued face-to-face connections.

  • Networks: Customer-vendor relationships are weak, with limited ways to engage. This lack of meaningful connection blurs TBI’s value proposition in a changing streetscape.

Define

How might we encourage and build strong digital connections through improved avenues of digital engagement to support TBIs vision?

We saw an opportunity to transparently engage and collaborate with stakeholders through cohesive community networks. As change comes from the community, strengthened relationships are needed to generate greater value and reach a wider audience.

If customers are given more agency and visibility over how their support creates impact, and TBI provides a digital space where vendors can share their needs, goals, and progress as individuals, then communities can be empowered to act locally while contributing to TBI’s 30-year legacy of social impact.

Design

The Big Impact is a community-driven platform to create real change by re-establishing valuable connections between stakeholders. It has three pillars of value:

  1. It is a transparent information hub

  2. It is a crowdfunding platform for a vendors individual needs and goals

  3. It is a portal for work opportunities

We see The Big Impact being successful where all stakeholders seek digital cohesion. Collectively, we can make a big impact.

Vendor

From former vendors, we learned that many long-serving sellers feel stuck and disheartened. Their main incentive is encouragement and support, which builds confidence and aspirations.

With 1,500 vendors individuals, each on a unique path, a standardised system of progress is impossible. Customers often assume success means leaving TBI, but every vendor’s journey is different. While people value happy endings, it’s hard to connect emotionally without seeing those achievements.

The Big Impact provides a platform for vendors and TBI to track progress through a flexible, qualitative system. Vendors can share goals - from learning English to supporting children, or even artistic pursuits - showing their community what success means to them.

Customer

Discussions with potential customers revealed that support is often driven not only by empathy but also by guilt. People want to know who they are helping, even if they don’t want to buy the magazine. Traceability is key to building trust and tackling stigma - offering optional, non-intrusive ways to see their impact. Customers need clear, alternative ways to give, supported by transparent networks that align with TBI’s values.

The Big Impact provides a digital channel for financial support while fostering emotional connection through real-time vendor progress tracking. By extending and deepening the customer-vendor interaction, it strengthens connections and channels data into meaningful social impact.

Partners

The platform also connects organisations with vendors for short- or long-term work opportunities, supporting TBI’s Big Issue Recruit initiative. The Big Impact bridges street selling and full-time employment, helping vendors build confidence at their own pace.

Impact

There is value in visibility, connection, and access to opportunity. Many consumers hold misconceptions about vendors, and by highlighting vendor individuality through measurable goals, customers gain clarity on how their acts of kindness directly translate into progress and impact.

The service delivers visibility for vendors, connection for customers, and capability for organisations.

The Big Impact seeks to enhance experiences for over 3,000 UK vendors by expanding TBI’s support services. By fostering community engagement through transparent community networks, it builds customer trust and positions The Big Issue as a beacon for social impact.