Volunteer Management | Not for Profit Case Study

Case Study.

How better communication led to better volunteer management for one legal advocacy organisation

Overview

Operating with the core belief that every person deserves equitable and equal treatment, this legal advocacy organisation works hard to support members of its community. In order to do this, they provide specialised services that aim to eradicate the inequalities and unfair treatment faced within a particular community.

Comprised of both paid staff and volunteers, the work of their volunteers is integral. Not only do their volunteers liaise directly with the community to provide advice, but they also support the paid staff in their work.

Better communication is better for everyone

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increase in donations to Best Buddies with Whispir SMS

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text message open rates for potential donors

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increase in year-to-year revenue equaling $4.68M

The Challenges

Inefficient volunteer management

With such a large network of volunteers on deck, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the legal advocacy organisation to mobilise shifts and support their volunteers. In particular, shift management was cumbersome and time-intensive. They were constantly contending with challenges – including changing schedules and volunteers simply dropping off or not responding. They needed a simple way to manage shifts and engage their volunteers, that wouldn’t be too difficult or time-consuming for their current team to handle.

The Solutions

Whispir is a leading multi-channel communications platform designed to help not-for-profits widen their impact and reach, no technical skills needed. Our solution for this legal advocacy organisation included:

Automated and easy-to-build workflows

A key capability of the Whispir platform is the ability to quickly build communication workflows. In other words, you can create a string of messages that impact one another; if someone responds with ‘XX’, they’ll automatically receive ‘XYZ’ response, and so on.

For this legal advocacy organisation, they were able to quickly and easily build workflows that ensured the right messages were going to the right people at the right time. With our platform’s drag-and-drop design, it was incredibly simple to put together.

Streamlined shift management

Part of the automated workflows that this legal advocacy organisation built were around shift management. For example, when a shift became available, a message could automatically be sent out to relevant volunteers to ask who could take it.

When someone responded to say they could accept the shift, the Whispir platform could automatically confirm their message with a response, and notify the relevant staff member. This both cut down on how much manual effort team members had to put in to organise shifts, and also provided a more engaging experience for volunteers.

Simple reporting tools

Whispir’s real-time reporting makes it easy to see when messages have been delivered, read, and actioned. If people don’t respond, it’s also possible to automate follow-up messages.

With volunteers sometimes dropping off or becoming unresponsive, our reporting tools provided a great way to re-engage people or, after a certain period of time, see who needs to be removed from the database.