Havin’ a Laugh Digital Voucher Management System

Havin’ a Laugh provides life-enhancing activity vouchers to people navigating mental health recovery. The organisation identified that its existing voucher administration process relied heavily on a fragmented network of emails, paper records, spreadsheets, and individual staff knowledge. Information relating to requests, beneficiaries, approvals, voucher purchasing, provider engagement, and reporting was highly dispersed, causing duplicated administration and communication delays.
A particularly important operational requirement was maintaining the strict anonymity, dignity, and confidentiality of beneficiaries while still giving administrators enough information to track voucher allocations accurately. The agreed project focused on creating a highly coordinated, custom digital voucher management system to provide a structured workflow for managing requests from referral through distribution and feedback, while retaining human oversight for sensitive decisions.

7 participants attended the Design Thinking Workshop on 3rd June 2026 at Atlantic Technological University (ATU), Sligo (5 in person and 2 participating online). Participants represented those involved in administering, coordinating, delivering, and overseeing Havin’ a Laugh services.
The workshop explored the current voucher journey and administrative bottlenecks. Participants collectively agreed on the following challenge statement: “How might we use digital tools to manage and track voucher requests and allocations in an anonymous, simple and reliable way, while supporting administration staff and volunteers and ensuring fair and efficient delivery of services?” It quickly became clear that the charity did not just need a digitised spreadsheet; they needed a role-based workflow that preserved their compassionate, person-centred approach.

Deliverables
STRIDE deliverables included:
• Development of a custom Laravel/Filament centralised digital voucher management system.
• Secure role-based access controls and dashboards for authorised staff and volunteers.
• Anonymous beneficiary record management using unique identifiers to minimise PII storage.
• Human verification workflow checkpoints to securely identify potential duplicate beneficiary records.
• Digital management of voucher/referral requests, structured review pipelines, and tracking of voucher purchasing, allocation, and posting.
• Searchable administrative records, automated reporting, and comprehensive audit visibility.
• Beneficiary and referrer communication support.
• Digital handover and user guidance to support ongoing management independently.

The custom Laravel platform provides Havin’ a Laugh with a sophisticated, structured approach to administering voucher requests while safeguarding beneficiary anonymity. Instead of chasing information across emails and spreadsheets, authorised staff now utilise a central administrative workflow with clear status tracking and role-based dashboards.
The system uniquely balances digital automation with essential human checkpoints, ensuring that decisions about beneficiary eligibility, potential duplicate records, and exceptional circumstances are reviewed by a human rather than an algorithm. This reduces the administrative burden and ends the charity’s reliance on individual staff knowledge, ensuring support services and referrers experience fewer communication delays. Ultimately, this allows Havin’ a Laugh administrators and volunteers to spend less time managing paperwork and more time actively supporting people to access meaningful wellbeing opportunities in the community.