Transforming Crisis and Emergency Accommodation Management Across Victoria
Client | McAuley Community Services for Women
Partners | Homes Victoria, Department of Families, Fairness and Housing
Across Victoria, services must rapidly secure safe accommodation for people in crisis. Women and children escaping violence. People experiencing homelessness. Young people leaving foster care. Families displaced by floods or fires.
McAuley had already created an important innovation.
The Motel Mapping Database, a grassroots tool that allowed services to see available motel accommodation across the state. It worked and proved that shared visibility could dramatically improve how crisis placements were coordinated.
But the system had reached its limits. It was built on unsupported technology, the user experience was basic, and it was never designed to scale across the broader service and government ecosystem.
Unicorn Studio Co was engaged to design the next-generation platform.
This was never a Booking.com problem. Crisis accommodation is not tourism. Placements must consider safety risks, confidential refuge locations, family composition, accessibility needs, program eligibility and sensitive client data.
We designed a purpose-built platform that evolves the original model into something far more powerful.
The platform combines Google Maps and location intelligence with a secure, scalable Microsoft cloud architecture. Services can see accommodation options in real time, quickly assess suitability, and coordinate placements far more effectively.
The system also helps prevent incompatible cohorts from being placed together. For example, ensuring, wherever possible, that women and children escaping violence are not placed in the same accommodation as clients with complex alcohol or drug dependency needs.
The result is a scalable crisis accommodation platform designed for the realities of social services, giving organisations better visibility of supply, safer placements, and stronger coordination across the system.
Unicorn Studio Co designed the strategy, system architecture and platform intelligence needed to make crisis accommodation coordination safer, smarter and far more effective across Victoria.
Unicorn Studio Co transformed a practical workaround into an intelligent system designed for the real complexity of crisis accommodation by bringing together strategy & governance, imagination & design, technology and human insight.