It has been quite a year for Alex Redston and Kieran Ball, founders of Prison Voicemail.
Last week the pair's venture won the Future50 One to Watch Award at the EDP Business Awards in recognition of its achievements, barely a year after it had launched.
But the founders themselves were not on hand to collect their award as they were attending a Pitch at the Palace event at the invitation of the Duke of York, where they also met the Queen.
Not bad for a business which began over a chance conversation at NorDev meeting – a gathering of developers in Norwich.
Prison Voicemail allows relatives of inmates to record messages which their loved ones can then dial in and listen to.
It helps tackle what is a big problem within prisons – the difficulty of accessing phones to call home, and it may also help tackle another recently highlighted issue, the problem of mobile phones being smuggled into cells, which a Channel 4 documentary warned last week had reached epidemic proportions.
The pair teamed up in 2015 and the business has rapidly evolved since then, now employing a team of five in offices just off Mountergate, in Norwich.
'I got chatting to Alex, who said he had this phone call technology and had built an app so that kids could call home if they didn't have any credit on their phones,' Mr Ball said. 'He was trying to find a particular use for it and we did some brainstorming and we came up with prisoners.
'They can only make calls from shared public phones, but phones are often switched off and for them to get hold of their family is often really difficult. The obvious answer was voicemail.'
Like any start-up, conducting market research was a crucial phase for identifying the potential of the service, and in this case the pair turned to a Facebook group for prisoner families.
'We got this overwhelming response saying they thought it would make a huge difference,' Mr Ball said.
'We decided that we have got to do this. It leads to calmer prisoners and helps them stay in touch with their families. Hopefully it will lead to a reduction in re-offending.
'With our service hopefully it provides a legitimate alternative to having an illegal mobile phone.'
They then turned to Twitter to make contact with a prison governor willing to help them try out the idea and found success at HMP Lincoln.
'We are now in 86 prisons nationwide,' Mr Ball said. 'It's been surprisingly fast considering it's the prison service. Our main goal is to get coverage in all prisons across England and Wales.
'We are about to launch an iPhone and Android app which means that families will have a much better user experience – it will be more like WhatsApp in its infrastructure.
'We would really like to make the core service as good as it can be. Beyond that we are working on a number of complementary services which will help prisoners communicate with their families.'
Winning the One-to-Watch was a welcome accolade, which Mr Ball believes will help spread the word about the business which has been set up as a social venture because of the way it combines a business idea with a wider social benefit – something close to the heart of the founders.
'It's good to raise awareness of the issues facing prisoners and their families,' he said. 'We want to let people know that if you are starting a business, you don't necessarily have to start by looking at the problems facing you and your friends. It's possible to go into a completely new field and make a really big impact, especially if it's something that nobody is really looking at.
'Being recognised in the One to Watch Award and enabling two of our people to go and pick up the award was really great for us, both for the exposure it gives us and the team.'
The award came a year after the business was launched, but neither was able to attend as they had been invited by the Duke of York to take part in a Pitch at the Palace event at St James's House.
Mr Ball said: 'We applied to that and got through to the final. For the first time the Queen announced she was going to attend and we got to meet her. That was quite a special moment.
'The Duke measures his success on how many connections you get from one of these events. Since then we have been in touch with all kinds of people from businesses to those working with the Prison Service.
'As we learn more about the Prison Service, we have identified other things which we could work on. Now we are planning to raise more investment so that we can grow faster.
'We are a social venture – we are structured like a normal limited company, but we have a social message.
'We make our decisions based partly on what will help us generate revenues but also on our social message. It has a double bottom line.'
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