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How three charities are using tech to revolutionise their communications
23 Jun 2020by Aidan Paterson
We examine how three organisations have partnered with Twilio.org to create more effective communication strategies
Every charity has a message. Communication is the process of spreading that message.
Communication is at the heart of all charitable endeavour. Whether you’re working to raise awareness and funds, connect to hard-to-reach service users or mobilise your volunteers, good communication is essential.
Twilio.org connect social impact organisations, passionate software developers, and the full power of the Twilio platform to ignite positive change both a local and a global scale. They provide technical, financial, and strategic support to help organisations reach their community using the same technology that private sector disruptors like Netflix and Airbnb use to serve their customers.
This technology allows charities and nonprofit organisations to enhance the delivery of their communications - allowing for more efficient and effective service delivery.
Here are three examples of how charities have worked with Twilio to develop their communications strategies:
The American Red Cross uses tech to cut down emergency response time
The American Red Cross is one of the most prominent NGOs in the world. Whilst few charities will have access to their resources, the challenges they face will be familiar to many nonprofit organisations.
The American Red Cross of Chicago & Northern Illinois (ARCCNI) responds to three or four disasters a day, which adds up to around 1,200 per year. The organisation routinely provides emergency shelter, food, and clothing to victims of house fires and other emergencies in addition to services such as mental health support.
When you’re responding to a disaster, every second counts. Volunteers need to mobilise quickly, and unnecessary phone calls create confusion and delay response time.
After reviewing its crisis coordination procedures, ARCCNI decided it needed a way to streamline its emergency dispatch process. Automation offered a way to improve the speed and efficiency of their response.
“We were tired of monolithic systems that weren’t really flexible. They were hard to use, clunky, and volunteers didn’t want to use them.”
Jim McGowan, Director of Planning and Situational Awareness - American Red Cross of Chicago and Northern Illinois
Previously, when a disaster struck, a volunteer dispatcher had to run through a call sheet of potential responders, contacting them one at a time. The dispatcher had to place separate calls to confirm the volunteer’s availability, confirm that they had arrived, and record the volunteer’s departure from the scene. This process cost valuable time needed for other critical communications.
Using Twilio Programmable SMS, the organisation built a new system that makes it easy for volunteers to learn about emergencies and check-in with dispatchers via text. With over 3,000 messages sent to active volunteers every month, ARCCNI were able to cut their response times by 50%.
Dispatchers can now use the Twilio-powered alert system, to send en masse text message to the volunteers, providing them with pertinent details about the incident. This prevents the redundancy of making identical phone calls or sending individual messages.
It also opened up opportunities for new volunteers. Under the old system, new volunteers might be passed over in favour of an experienced volunteer. Now with broadcast messaging, everyone has an equal opportunity to volunteer.
“Volunteers really like it. They can schedule themselves, do what they need to do, and communicate effortlessly with our dispatchers,”
Jim McGowan, Director of Planning and Situational Awareness - American Red Cross of Chicago and Northern Illinois
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Age UK’s telephone befriending service helps fight loneliness among older people
Older people, particularly those over the age of 75, are at an increased risk of loneliness. This can have a serious effect on physical and mental health.
More than 2 million people in England over the age of 75 live alone, and more than 200, 000 say they go for over a month without speaking to a friend, neighbour or family member.
Nearly 1.2 million older people in the UK say they’re chronically lonely. Roughly 3.9 million say that TV is their main form of company.
There are a number of reasons why older people become socially-isolated, such as difficulty with mobility, no longer being the hub of their family, leaving the workplace, the deaths of spouses and friends, or through disability or illness.
Age UK launched its Call in Time service in 2005, with the aim of reducing loneliness amongst the elderly. The programme connects service users with likeminded people, who share similar interests for a weekly 30-minute phone call.
In the last 17 years, Call in Time has helped thousands of people. But the service’s manual call system was labour intensive and couldn’t scale to reach the number of people Age UK wanted to help. It plateaued at 3,500 calls per month—a small portion of the public health crisis caused by loneliness in this country. Age UK wanted a new technology infrastructure to vet volunteers faster and make thousands of additional calls every week, without increasing the staff’s workload.
“We needed something big to be able to help those millions of people,”
Richard Holland, Solutions Architect - Age UK
Age UK used Twilio’s Programmable Voice and Programmable SMS to build a scalable system, delivering thousands of additional calls every week.
Age UK’s previous system vetted volunteers manually. They needed to create an app to automate this process. The app works like an online dating platform, matching volunteers and older people, known as Call in Time members, based on common interests, like a shared hometown or musical genre.
“Our platform handles the scheduling of calls, checks when calls are meant to happen and fires out events and triggers. These go out to Twilio to say ‘initiate this call’. First, the volunteer is called; they pick up, receive a recorded message, press 1 and are placed in a conference call. The process is repeated with the Call in Time member. The call is recorded by Twilio for safeguarding and once the call is over, it is marked as complete in our system.”
Richard Holland, Solutions Architect - Age UK
The system’s serverless architecture allowed Age UK greater scalability. Before migrating to the cloud, the organisations had to rent servers big enough to handle their largest call spikes, even if the spike only lasted a half-hour once a week. We covered this issue in our discussion with Comic Relief.
That extra capacity can add substantial cost. With the Twilio and AWS Lambda serverless architecture Age UK employed, the system scales on-demand, while saving Age UK money.
Be My Eyes delivers sight to people with visual impairments
253 million people around the world have a visual impairment that affects their daily activities. Be My Eyes works to use technology to bring sight to blind and low vision people everywhere.
“Relying on friends and family for everyday tasks can be taxing on relationships. These dependencies prevent people with visual impairments from achieving true independence in their lives.”
Alexander Hauerslev Jensen, Chief Commercial Officer - Be My Eyes
Be My Eyes is a mobile app that connects sighted volunteers with blind and low vision users over video chat. By pointing their camera towards an object, service users can connect with a volunteer who can describe the situation.
An immediate and dramatic growth in userbase led to video lag. Up until this point, Be My Eyes had sourced video connectivity from multiple providers but determined that Twilio offered faster connections with higher quality.
“Twilio was the best option. It allowed us to create a super stable connection.” Be My Eyes decided to move all of their traffic to Twilio.
Alexander Hauerslev Jensen, Chief Commercial Officer - Be My Eyes
Since migrating to Twilio, Be My Eyes has reduced connection times by more than 50 per cent. These time savings are essential to the user experience.
“Every second we can shave off wait times means more trust, more engagement, and a stronger bond in our community. A 50% reduction in connection time can mean a world of difference for the user.”
Alexander Hauerslev Jensen, Chief Commercial Officer - Be My Eyes
Be My Eyes now supports connections between more than 3 million volunteers and 200,000 blind and low vision users. Volunteers are available globally, spanning 150 countries and 185 languages, all with 24-hour access.
Be My Eyes also allows companies to provide free support to blind and low vision users through the new Specialised Help feature in the app. The growing partner list already includes the customer service teams at Google, Microsoft and P&G, who leverage the Be My Eyes technology to enable live video support for their products.
Through their partnership with Twilio.org, all three of these organisations were able to establish more effective channels of communication - leading to better and more efficient service delivery.
A focus on clear, concise and practical communications is one of the core tenets of charity digital leadership. By fostering these improved methods of communicating, charity leaders can ensure that their organisations are better equipped to deliver their vital services to those that need them.
Twilio.org will be leading a ‘How to get socially closer but physically further post-COVID-19’ session at #BeMoreDigital Leadership Day. This session will further examine how charities can take the lessons in digital communications learned over these last three months and use them to build a communications strategy for the future that retains a compassionate and human touch.
You can learn more about their work and the communications solutions they deliver to social impact organisations at Twilio.org
Sign up for#BeMoreDigital Leadership Day
Sign up for #BeMoreDigital Leadership Day to learn more about Twilio.org
Aidan Paterson
Aidan Paterson
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