Samaritans

Volunteering

Samaritans is a charity aimed at providing emotional support to anyone in emotional distress, struggling to cope, or at risk of suicide throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland, often through their telephone helpline.

Volunteers also do outreach work, for example, at festivals, prisons, hospitals and schools.

The Challenge

Volunteers are the lifeblood of the organisation at Samaritans. 33,387 volunteering enquiries were made in 2015 alone.

Samaritans wanted to build a Volunteer CRM solution, to manage their entire Volunteer recruitment and retention process. Previously, their IT systems were disparate and processes not ideal, leading to a weakened service to volunteers.

Project Aims

The main aims centred around the acquisition and retention of volunteers:

  • Increase understanding of potential volunteers, their interest and levels of engagement
  • Increase staff morale and be able to support the branch volunteers better
  • Reduce attrition & increase retention and recruitment of volunteers
  • Improve the volunteer application experience, ensuring that more move from ‘interest’ to the ‘application’ stage, and ultimately an increased pool of trained volunteers

The Solution

  • Streamlined the website journey that takes the data directly into to Salesforce
  • Creation of a ‘Branch management’ tool to help manage volunteers, built on the Salesforce Community Cloud. All potential volunteer information now in one place
  • Ability for branch volunteers to perform action based on their specific roles and branch
  • Ability to manage the recruitment journey on Salesforce –  includes submission of relevant application data, set up and manage interviews and for volunteers to book on training courses
  • Automation such as emails and SMS reminders automatically sent from Salesforce to reduce missed appointments
  • On-going communication with applicants to keep them involved at all stages and sending internal and external reminders for the actions that needs to be taken

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