As we launch our partnership with parking technology provider YourParkingSpace, we spoke to founder and CEO, Harrison Woods, and CIO, Charles Cridland, about their support and what it means to the team.
Can you tell us a bit about YourParkingSpace? What is it and how does it work?
YourParkingSpace is the UK’s fastest growing parking technology provider, operating the UK’s leading peer-to-peer consumer marketplace alongside its suite of B2B parking solutions digitalising parking assets and transforming them into connected mobility hubs.
The proposition is straightforward - drivers can find and book hourly, daily or monthly parking instantly UK-wide - and space owners, from individual driveway owners through to property companies and parking operators, can utilise our service to generate the maximum value from their parking spaces.
We process thousands of in-advance and on-demand parking reservations daily across the UK, generating £42.5million for our clients to date. Our 65,000 space providers range from individual driveway owners through to household names such as Premier Inn, Tesco and Morrisons.
Over the past year we’ve been placed 86th in the Tech Track 100, the UK’s fastest growing technology companies, and 546th in the FT1000 annual list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.
Can you tell us more about this partnership with Mental Health Innovations - what will it look like and what will it mean for YourParkingSpace?
Firstly, it’s a great service to be able to highlight to our internal team. Not everyone has an outlet or a person they feel they can speak to so being able to anonymously speak to someone through Shout 85258 is something that will be valuable for many of our team members at different times.
Secondly, each day we park tens of thousands of cars, there’s huge potential to raise awareness of the service amongst our customer base via both online channels and through installing banners, posters and messaging within many of our commercial car parks.
Finally, Shout is the type of clever, innovative service we want to be supporting. Hopefully we can do our bit to help the service expand via various fundraising initiatives and raise awareness of the service to help more people.
As the founders of a tech company, what was it about the technology aspect of Mental Health Innovations that appealed to you personally?
Our customers want to be able to book parking instantly and they don’t want to have to speak to us to do it. They want an instant hassle-free service and, on occasions when customers do want to speak to us, we know that it’s the instant digital channels which are the most popular - specifically WhatsApp and Live Chat.
Mental Health Innovations’ Shout service really resonates with us. It’s an innovative instant-response technological solution to a problem - the type of solution that we can see has huge demand, based on our experience in a completely different sector.
Why have you chosen to focus on supporting a mental health charity?
The past year has been a hugely challenging year for so many people. We’ve unfortunately seen this first hand in our business when we lost a hugely valued team member. No one saw it coming; it was a massive shock to all of us and really brought home the fact that mental health issues can affect anyone.
It really gets you thinking that perhaps a simple comment or outlet to reach out to may have made a difference. Shout is that outlet for so many people and so we’d like to support the service and try to do our part to prevent people from feeling like they have nowhere or no one to turn to.
How will this partnership complement your other services?
We’re a young team providing a tech solution to a community of drivers and space owners. Shout as a service in terms of how it’s delivered really does resonate with our team and we feel it will also resonate with our customers and our client base of commercial property owners. We can utilise both our online communication channels and our physical car parks to raise awareness of the service, help our users and provide value over and above simply a parking service.
