Making the work visible: How the City of Doncaster Council is bringing its Family Hub software up to the level of its service.
For years, Doncaster has been committed to investing in family hubs and children’s services. Over time they have developed a distinctive approach built around families and local communities. Their Family Hubs are relationship led and collaborative, with practitioners and partners working together across different services, settings and needs.
But beneath their sophisticated service model sat a very different kind of infrastructure.
The council was still relying on a legacy software system dating back to 1997. It had been designed primarily to record activity and attendance, and it had accumulated a substantial amount of data over the years.
The problem was not a lack of data. It was whether the data could be trusted, easily shared, connected and used to answer the questions the service increasingly needed to ask.
The system relied heavily on paper-based processes for registrations, contacts and event attendance. Staff then had to transfer information into the system by recording aspects of the same interaction in multiple places to share and capture contacts, themes, signposting or different family members.
This created duplication, additional work and inconsistencies in the data quality. Information became fragmented across different records, making it harder to see the full picture of a family's involvement with family hub services.
In practice, practitioners were having to work around the software rather than simply recording their work as part of delivering it.
When attendance isn't the whole story
The legacy software could tell the council who attended, when they did and for which activity. But this only tells a small part of the story. Attendance does not explain why a family came, what need was identified, what support was given, whether multiple services were involved or what happened after.
It also makes different types of engagement difficult to compare. One attendance might represent a brief piece of signposting another might be part of months of intensive support. A person may attend repeatedly, while parents and children may appear separately in the data. The attendance figures demonstrated activity without demonstrating engagement, progress or impact.
Behind every attendance figure is a family, a network of relationships, needs, conversations and interactions with different services and professionals.
A child might receive support from several services, while a parent is receiving support elsewhere. For the family these are connected. Within the legacy software these were separate people, records and interactions. The council knew that all these activities happened, but not easily see they belong to one family journey.
The family disappeared inside the data.
Doncaster's practitioners work in an integrated, family centred way. Their software did not. This was more than an administrative inconvenience; when the data does not reflect the work being done, it becomes harder to evidence and understand what is working, where needs are changing and what difference hub services are making to families' lives.
Doncaster Council had a fundamental gap between having data and being able to use it. CinnamonHubs was developed to close the gap
The question was how to create an information system that reflected the way Doncaster's Family Hubs actually work, connecting the family, the interaction, the need, the support provided and what happens next, while creating more reliable and usable data.
When Doncaster approached us to design their new system, they did not arrive with a complete specification for what the finished system needed to do. The development, therefore, took an agile and collaborative approach.
As the council saw what the new platform could do it became possible to challenge assumptions shaped by the old system and rethink how information should be captured.
Changing the workflow
One of the most significant changes we have implemented with CinnamonHubs is point of delivery recording.
Instead of recording an interaction on paper or in a separate spreadsheet and relying on subsequent data entry, staff will be able to capture information directly within CinnamonHubs.
That changes what can happen to the information as it's created:
Family and child relationships maintained within linked records.
Contacts can be associated with multiple themes or types of signposting
Activities can be connected to relevant people, families and hubs.
Assessments, referrals, actions and outcomes form part of the same wider record.
This means the council is no longer limited to recording that an event happened it can see what happened around it.
Building the family record
Representing family relationships has been one of the most important and complex aspects of the design.
Doncaster's Family Hub service model is family centred, so the system needed to reflect the way its services are delivered.
Rather than treating each person as an isolated record, CinnamonHubs connects parents, carers and children within linked family records, allowing interactions across different services to be understood as part of the same family journey.
Better Information
The objective was to create an application that reflected how Doncaster’s hub services work, with an information foundation that makes the service easier to operate and understand. The following five objectives shaped the design:
Less administration: reducing paper, manual entry and duplicate recording.
Better data quality: Improving consistency, completeness and accuracy at the point of capture.
Family level visibility: connecting people, relationships, contacts and support.
Simpler reporting: making information easier to access and use.
Better evaluation: creating data than can support a deeper understanding of activity, engagement and outcomes.
CinnamonHubs supports these objectives by bringing previously disconnected parts of the workflow into one application.
What this looks like in practice:
Multi-hub location management, supports management of multiple Family Hub locations, spoke venues and outreach settings.
Linked Family Records, connects parents, carers, and children within a single record.
NHS Number Validation, supports NHS Number look up where applicable to enable safe record matching.
Point-of-delivery recording, information can be recorded directly within the workflow with built in validations, so data is complete and accurate at the point of capture.
Structured reasons for contact, provide a consistent way to record why families are accessing services and connected themes and signposting allow multiple aspects of the same interaction to be recorded together.
Digital health assessments and check-ins, deliver configurable digital questionnaires and structured assessments using CinnamonAssess.
Action and follow up tracking, coordinate and track referrals, actions, signposting and notes across integrated teams.
Evidence reach and outcomes, live dashboards and flexible reporting capabilities allow teams to explore data, combine different criteria and turn the information they need into summaries and visual insights.
Role-based multi-agency access, secure, governed role-based access controls to support use by multiple service partners.
These capabilities move Doncaster from a system recording individual transactions towards a more connected picture of the work taking place around families. CinnamonHubs is due to go live with Doncaster January 2027. The initial implementation is a foundation not a fixed end point with Cinnamon able to support further requirements such as communications, appointment and workshop bookings, referrals, questionnaires and feedback as the service requires.
The next stage is to learn from implementation and see what becomes possible for Doncaster. The challenge Doncaster faced is not unique. If your family hub is also working across services while relying on systems built around individual transactions, we’d be interested to hear about your experience.
