Side hustles — YelloHalo, Broadband with the power to save lives.

Design for Social Good

Side hustles — YelloHalo, Broadband with the power to save lives.

We are consistently in awe with what our design community achieves in their spare time! Creatives have a lot of heart and DA love’s design for social good projects so we were keen to hear more about Graeme Blake’s new side hustle YelloHalo, which aspires to donate $1m in its first year to ambulance services.
Graeme is CEO of DA partner Blutui and co-founder of PAN agency in Hamilton. When Graeme’s daughter Pixie was just a few days old, Graeme and his wife saw their daughter go limp and stop breathing. “It was one of the most panic-stricken moments of my life,” he said, “I remember thinking that they were absolute heroes.”

Keen to give back to the frontline ambulance workers who saved Pixie’s life Graeme created YelloHalo which offers nationwide broadband service and a means to support the ambulance workers who save lives in our communities every day. “The demands of frontline work are incredible. Our ambos deserve the opportunity to focus on the job rather than worry about their career, their family or their own wellbeing,”
Blutui and PAN have raised money in the past, for charity organisations but Graeme was determined to design a solution to provide stable, ongoing funding rather than something one-off or once a year donation. Graeme’s goal is to return $1 million to more than 1200 frontline ambos in year one.
Blutui had worked with wholesale fibre provisioning business Devoli on the design and development of their website. This collaboration gave Graeme insight to how the broadband industry operated, and lead to a partnership in the YelloHalo charitable venture. Through network automation Devoli had removed a lot of supply costs, “We’ve got a fixed price agreement with them – there’ll be marketing costs, that sort of thing, but within the business there are no wages.” Graeme says “From what we understand it’s a world first. It’s probably a little bit unusual in business that you want to give away your profits – we’ve got other revenue streams that support us individually.”
YelloHalo is available through most of Aotearoa, and offers a full range of internet services including high-speed fibre plans, and ADSL and VDSL where fibre is not available. “We’ve found a better way to offer broadband. From just $89, you can get unlimited broadband and the profits that would otherwise go offshore or to shareholders, go back into our communities.”
Purchasing your broadband from YelloHalo makes a real difference to the lives and careers of front line ambulance officers and paramedics in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And we admire the projects kaupapa and the founder’s heart!
To achieve Graeme’s goal of giving back $1 million to frontline ambulance workers in the first 12 months he needs to grow the YelloHalo network to at least 20,000 homes across New Zealand. The more Kiwis that sign up, the greater impact this project will have on communities all over New Zealand.