An Post, Ireland’s national postal service exists to improve the quality of life for people in Ireland, expressed through its brand platform, “For Your World”. To do this responsibly, it takes a wide eye view of the challenges Irish people face and identifies where it can have impact.

One such challenge is Ireland’s homelessness crisis. In the decade since the financial crisis, Ireland has had a lack of investment in housing. Today, Ireland is a first world country with a third world problem with 10,125 people homeless. The societal and cultural repercussions of homelessness are immense, de-humanising and long lasting and unique to this audience.

As part of An Post’s 'For Your World' campaign launching in April 2019, it wanted a solution to address this issue in such a way that brings An Post’s brand purpose to life.

The cruel irony of homelessness is that to get help, you need an address.

As a brand committed to improving the quality of life for all of the people of Ireland, An Post sought to find a way to provide homeless people with an address. While we cannot fix the issue of adequate housing, we believed that we could improve access to essential services and create an infrastructure that stood to break the cycle of homelessness and address a national issue. This was a credible brand activation for An Post as only a postal service could deliver this solution.

With an address, we are giving people the means to access essential national services that to date, have been unnecessarily limited to those with a fixed address, breaking the cycle of homelessness and helping people re-connect with society by improving access to:

Health services

Housing

Education

Potential employment

We interviewed experts who work with the homeless community to identify the real needs of an address service and how we service all levels of homelessness across this 10,000 person community.

We ran a workshop to see what was feasible and tested our resulting blueprint amongst members of the homeless community to be as representative as possible.

We identified this initiative needed to be:

• Flexible – serve multiple locations due to nomadic lifestyles

• Free – incur no cost to the user.

• Human – feel like a real address and not a P.O Box for the homeless

• Easy to access – two-step process with simple language and minimal data commitment

A secondary consideration was also creating a blueprint that could be easily adopted by other postal services around the world to provide this solution in other countries facing a similar issue.

Address Point was designed to fully reflect the needs of this unique audience and their nomadic nature.

Address Point is free, accessible via the internet and is a simple two step journey to sign up. An address is generated which can be saved as a photo or written down manually. It borrows the post office’s physical address and includes a unique identifier that notifies staff to hold the post at the post office for collection. If one moves to a different part of the country, a new address can be generated for their new residence.

It launched nationally through homeless services using printed collateral in emergency accommodation, communicating the service. It also featured in An Post’s post offices where the community collect their social welfare payment weekly. Finally, it was heavily promoted through the community’s social workers who aided sign ups as part of their regular catch ups with clients.

Since April 2019, 1/3 of Ireland’s adult homeless community have signed up to Address Point. Address Point is used daily, accessed across the country, confirming the reality that Ireland’s homelessness is a national issue and one that greatly needed this initiative. At the current rate of sign ups, An Post predict that within six months it will be serving 66% of the community.

Address Point was endorsed by every national homeless service, calling it a practical and pragmatic solution that directly addresses the community’s needs.

Since launch, An Post has been consulting with a number of postal networks around the world, sharing this blueprint solution and helping them provide a similar service in their countries.

The launch generated national and international press, generating 220 million media impressions and featured on every national broadcast show on the day of launch, including Ireland’s prime time news slot at 6pm.