Community Shop
Turning Member Engagement Into Measurable Social Impact for Community Shop
Platform rollout underway across Community Shop’s ever-expanding estate of hubs
2 connected systems: A mobile member app and a staff management app working together
1 source of data: Verified attendance, wellbeing, and engagement information brought together in one platform
From Manual Processes to Meaningful Data
Community Shop, the UK’s first social supermarket, supports tens of thousands of families across the UK through dignified access to affordable quality food and personal development programmes. To better understand the difference its services make, the organisation needed a consistent way to capture member engagement, wellbeing, and outcomes.
Together, Nimble Approach and Community Shop created a mobile app for members alongside a staff management system for scheduling activities, managing check-ins, and capturing data. The platform replaces manual attendance reporting, digitises wellbeing assessments, and makes hub activities easier to discover. With rollout across Community Shop’s ever-expanding estate of hubs underway – with 17 as of Autumn 2026 – they now have a single source of verified attendance, wellbeing, and engagement data, creating a stronger foundation for impact reporting, operational planning, and continued service development.
Community Shop’s Challenge
Building a Clearer View of Member Impact
Community Shop needed to strengthen how it understood member engagement and demonstrate the positive impact of its services over time. The organisation had many stories that showed the difference its programmes made, but needed a more consistent way to translate those experiences into measurable evidence.
Attendance at Community Hubs and Kitchens was recorded through manual headcounts, notes, and spreadsheets, creating administrative work and limiting confidence in the resulting data. A paper-based wellbeing assessment generated valuable conversations with members, but made it harder to capture and analyse trends or track progress over time.
There was also an opportunity to make activities easier for members to discover. Timetables were printed in hubs, while private Facebook groups provided another way to find sessions. Community Shop identified an engaging digital member journey as an opportunity to increase awareness and participation, while creating the data infrastructure needed to understand and demonstrate impact.
Nimble’s Solution
Creating a Connected Digital Member Journey
Working to an ambitious timeframe and from a standing start, Nimble established the full technical foundation for the solution – from AWS accounts, infrastructure, and deployment pipelines through to the Android and Apple developer environments. We then designed and delivered two connected systems: a mobile app for members and a staff management system, supported by a dedicated AWS infrastructure platform. Together, these provide Community Shop with a centralised way to manage activities, facilitate check-ins, and capture structured member data.
We spent time at the Tong Street hub in Bradford to understand members’ needs and behaviours. Research showed that members were already comfortable using digital loyalty apps, informing the decision to introduce QR code check-ins. These replace manual attendance reporting with accurate, verified data on participation.
The platform also introduces a digital 20-question wellbeing assessment covering economic, physical, mental, and social wellbeing. Members can complete it independently or with staff, receive immediate feedback, and track their progress over time, while Community Shop can use the resulting structured data for impact analysis.
In addition, in-app hub timetables make activities easier to discover — a key feature requested by members — while the staff system provides a central place to schedule activities, publish updates, and manage attendance.
Strengthening Impact Evidence and Operational Insight
The new platform gives Community Shop a more reliable and connected view of how members engage with its services and the progress they make. Digital check-ins provide verified attendance data, replacing manual reporting and reducing the administrative work involved in maintaining existing trackers.
For staff, the centralised management system creates a more efficient workflow for planning and scheduling activities, managing attendance, and communicating timetable changes. For members, in-app timetables provide a simpler way to discover activities and access the support available through their hub.
The digital wellbeing assessment creates a richer source of structured information, enabling members to receive immediate feedback and see their progress over time while giving Community Shop data to support impact analysis.
With rollout across Community Shop’s ever-expanding estate of hubs underway, the platform is creating a single source of attendance, wellbeing, and engagement data. This strengthens impact reporting and operational planning, supports evidence-based decision-making, and lays the foundations for more personalised member support.
”The platform is transforming how we measure our impact, giving us a consistent, data-driven way to demonstrate the difference we're making in people's lives. Throughout the project, Nimble has been a fantastic partner, bringing expertise, flexibility and a genuinely collaborative approach. Together, we've created a solution that puts members at the heart of service development and helps us deliver even greater impact for the communities we serve.
Joseph ChowHead of Community Wellbeing & Impact at Community Shop
The Technology Stack
- AWS: Primarily serverless (API Gateway, Cloudwatch, Cognito, DynamoDB, Lambda, S3, etc.)
- TypeScript throughout
- Frontend is a static site – uses React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Storybook
- API uses the ExpressJS framework and runs in NodeJS on Lambda
- Mobile is React Native and built by the Expo SDK
- Infrastructure is managed by Terraform
- CI/CD Pipelines are GitHub Actions
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Speak to one of our projects team to see how Nimble could help your organisation.
